A New Year's letter to a young person

Summary

I am often approached by students and other young people for advice about their careers. In the past, my answers were often based on a piece of advice I myself got from Bengt Holmstrom: “when in doubt, choose the job where you will learn more.” In the last few years, there is a new variable to consider: the likelihood that artificial intelligence will automate all or large pieces of the job you do. Given that, what should a student choose today? The answers below are motivated by a book on artificial intelligence and the organization of work on which I am currently working with Jin Li and Yanhui Wu.One way of thinking about this is that all knowledge work varies along one important spectrum: messiness. On one end, there is one defined task to execute, say helping clients fill their taxes. You get the expenses and payslips on email, you use some rules to put them on a form, you obtain a response. Over time, you become better at this task, and get a higher salary. On the other end of the spectrum, there is a wide bundle of complex tasks. Running a factory, or a family, involves many different tasks that are very hard to specify in advance.The risk of the single-task job is that artificial intelligence excels at single tasks. Humans are still often in the loop, since the rate of errors in many fields is still too high to allow for unsupervised artificial intelligence. But the rate of errors is rapidly decreasing.You may bet that fields vary in their tolerance for errors. Certain simple tasks, like content moderation, involve a high tolerance for risk: tech companies are comfortable with ‘shooting first, asking questions later’. But many others, from diagnostics to corporate communications, involve extreme risk-aversion on the part of the customer.As long as a human is still needed to check the outputs, some value accrues to them. If AI drafts a contract that a lawyer reviews, signs, and takes responsibility for, the lawyer remains the supplier of legal services.But the...