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Paul Welty, PhD AI, WORK, AND STAYING HUMAN

· found · technology

The threat of AI to white-collar jobs

The threat of AI to white-collar jobs

Explore how AI threatens high-wage white-collar jobs, challenging talent and market dynamics in today's workforce landscape.

“My colleague Aki Ito wrote about how AI will ultimately harm the most talented people in white collar jobs, because it will make it harder for them justify sky-high wages.” —What History Says About AI’s Threat to Jobs and White-Collar Work

The agent-shaped org chart

Every real org has the same topology: principal, role-holder, specialists. Staff AI maps onto it, node for node, and the cost collapse shows up in the deliverables that were always just human-handoff overhead.

AI as staff, not software

Two frames for what AI is doing to work. The tool frame makes tools smarter. The staff frame makes roles unnecessary. Those aren't the same product, the same company, or the same industry.

Knowledge work was never work

Knowledge work was always coordination between humans who couldn't share state directly. The artifacts were never the work. They were the overhead — and AI just made the overhead optional.

The work of being available now

A book on AI, judgment, and staying human at work.

The practice of work in progress

Practical essays on how work actually gets done.

Nobody takes you aside anymore

Print taught a generation of designers when to stop. The constraints that did the teaching are gone, and nobody has priced what they were worth.

How I made Tailscale and NordVPN coexist: the Linux exit node pattern

A practical pattern for running Tailscale and NordVPN together, plus the larger question it exposed: private networks need explicit exit profiles, not one vague VPN toggle.

The 2 a.m. press check

Twenty-five years ago I stood under color-true lamps at 2 a.m., loupe in hand, waiting on the 50th spread. This month an open-source compiler handed me the thing Pantone only ever promised.

The impact of AI on white-collar jobs

Explore how AI transforms white-collar jobs, highlighting the balance between automation and the enduring value of skilled human work.

The entrepreneurial revolution facilitated by AI

Discover how AI is transforming entrepreneurship by empowering founders with personalized support, leading to a new era of innovation and opportunity.

Maximizing generative AI potential

Unlock the full potential of generative AI by customizing models tailored to your business needs, enhancing efficiency and security.