What Exactly Are These New AI Jobs, Anyway? | Shimmy Says Ep. 40

AI isn't just changing jobs, it's creating entirely new ones from building habitats on distant worlds to designing art at the speed of imagination, to crafting living materials, guiding drones through uncharted terrain. Hey everyone, happy New Year. We're a little late getting started this week.

I've been busy in the studio here on some of the other sets at Techstrong Studios. But, um, happy New Year. I'm glad you're here for our very first Shimmy says of the year.

And for this year, uh, for this week to kick off the year, I wanted to talk about something that's probably near and dear to you, as it is to all of us, including myself, I guess, and that is what exactly are all these new AI jobs that we're talking about anyway, you know, if I had a nickel for every time I've heard someone say, AI is going to take away jobs, AI could cost you your jobs, I'd be well on my way to buying my own AI factory or data center. Ah, who am I kidding? These things are a trillion dollars, billions of dollars, but at least maybe I'd have a good down payment.

Um, but you know what I've found, and you've probably seen this too, everyone who says, well, AI's gonna cost a lot of jobs. It's immediately followed by, but don't worry, it's gonna create a lot of jobs too. And, you know, for a long time, I, I think that was just the mantra.

When someone tells you their relative died, you tell 'em that, Hey, you have my condolences. But no one really thinks about what exactly are all these new jobs AI's gonna create? And when I started asking people, what do you think these new AI jobs are gonna be?

I didn't get a lot of answers. I'll tell you the truth. I got a lot of thumbing.

So I figured, let me go to the source. Let me ask ai, what are some of these new AI jobs that it's going to create? And you know what?

It, it kicked back. It, it spit back some decent, some decent things. Um, and then of course, you know, I, I've also read a lot of things from the so-called AI architects.

Uh, you know, the people who are running the Sam Altman's, the Elon Musk, the Googles, the Perplexities, the Anthropic people. Where do they think these AI jobs are? And, you know, an interesting thing, a lot of them talked about space, and we're gonna come back and talk about jobs in space a little bit.

But before we jump into this whole thing, I wanted to just clear some BS out of the way. A lot of people say, oh, I can tell you what some of these jobs are, and they give you these buzzwords or kind of shiny stuff that we've used before. And, and we're polishing off things like, I'm gonna be an AI evangelist, I'm gonna be a prompt engineer, and I'm gonna be a prompt a cybersecurity prompt engineer.

Come on that, that's, we're all gonna be prompt engineers, that's for sure, right? And we're all gonna be coworkers and managers of our digital alter egos and our digital agents. But I mean, what are the real new jobs?

What are the careers? You know, I remember when the internet first started coming out and I first started, I, I'm trying to think when it was, it was probably 1997, maybe late 96, and I heard the term web designer. Now, I will tell you that most of my friends at the time, whether they were lawyers or doctors or construction workers, firemen, policemen, if I told them, you, your children were gonna be a web designer, they would've looked at me like, I'm crazy.

Like, do I think they're growing up to be a spider? Is this something outta Charlotte's Web? But no web designer became a job.

Internet engineers, right? People who, who really, you know, were behind the, the internet became a thing. UX designers, UI designers and everything else.

So that's the one of the biggest lessons I learned through this exercise is for everything AI spits out to me about the new kinds of jobs that it's going to spawn. Um, it really doesn't know. None of us know yet what these new jobs will be, but you know, there will be some old jobs with new labels, but I, I don't think that's really where it's at.

Here's something else when I'm really kind of afraid of, is in the, in the rush to make sure this isn't so disruptive. We make busy work jobs. You know, back in the depression, I, I wasn't alive then, though.

I'm old. I'm not that old. Um, back in the Depression, they had things like the Tennessee Valley Authority where they gave people shovels and sent them out into the Tennessee Valley, for instance, to dig ditches and make dams and build roads.

And the, the roads were a good thing. And the dams of course, were a good thing. But a lot of the jobs were just like on the dole.

Government created jobs where people can go at least put in an honest day work and make an honest wage, even if the work product coming out of it was not very productive or useful to society. What was useful is people actually working and earning a living. And we may see some of that in this, in this cycle.

We may see some busy jobs, if you will, if you want to call it that. But let's be honest, no one wants to just have a busy job, busy job, just for the sake of being busy. No one wants to raise their hand and say, I wanna have a career of babysitting the AI or babysitting a machine.

So, you know, and that's the kind of stuff that AI was originally spitting out. And I asked her, what are these new jobs? So I asked it, and, and this is a good lesson.

Never take the first AI response. Always ask you for more. Quantify it, qualify it, it reiterate it.

And so I started asking it what else it would be? What, what's the real jobs? What are, what are our, give me, you know, three distinct kind of careers?

And if we can make my teleprompter a little bigger here, I can't see it, um, you know, be more precise. What are the, tell me first, what are the jobs that are gonna disappear, right? And then what are the, what are the jobs it's going to make?

What are the jobs it's going to change if we can go forward? Um, you know, I, and I'm looking for jobs that honestly didn't even exist before ai. Um, now I know a lot of us have anxiety about this, but I think knowing that there are real jobs that are gonna be created here is gonna make all the difference in the world.

So I wanna start with tech jobs. 'cause look, most of you watching this are all techies. Um, so let's start with developers.

Look, 60%, I saw a number this week. 60% of code being generated, today's being coded by ai. So yeah, there's some panic in there among developers.

And yes, AI can generate code and increasingly it's good code. Speaking to my friends in security, we've kind of crossed the Rubicon where the code being generated by AI continues to have less and less vulnerabilities where it's ad or below the level of vulnerabilities that human generated code is at right now. And if that's the case, what does that mean for security as well?

At some level, humans are worse, are generating worse code quality than, than AI is. So does that mean developer roles disappear? Absolutely not.

I think we're, we're shifting from developers being code writers to system composers. And that word composer is a great word. I'm gonna come back to it.

We're, we're moving from people who produce syntax to people who design, orchestrate, and govern complex systems that now include autonomous components. And dare I say, digital coworkers, same thing's happening in DevOps and platform engineering ops in general. Cloud AI doesn't eliminate the need for reliability engineers, performance tuning, cost control, observability.

If anything, it raises the stakes and makes it more important than ever. Someone not the AI has to decide how the AI workloads are deployed when, how monitored throttled rolled back when things go sideways. 'cause they are gonna go sideways.

There's gotta be a human there. And by the way, that's not babysitting work. It's not junior work.

It's judgment work, right? A lesson we learned in cloud security, we could move stuff to the cloud and say, the cloud provider's gonna do so with the security for us, that doesn't re release us, release us of the responsibility when stuff hits the fan in a cyber incident. Well, the same thing happens when we allow AI to get involved in our cybersecurity.

The resp, the buck still stops here in terms of responsibilities. AI systems do not execute. Decis instruct instructions.

They make decisions that fundamentally change the threat model. We're no longer just protecting endpoints and networks. We're securing these agentic systems, model pipelines, training, data design, logic, et cetera.

This gives rise to roles focused on ai, threat modeling, model abuse, poisoning, de detection, keeping the human in the loop oversight. Not to mention governance, as always, audibility policy enforcement. So look, there's plenty of cyber jobs that are gonna exist here in this ai.

Here's the paradox for this one though, guys, industry doesn't want to admit this, but as machines become more autonomous, human accountability increases, not decreases. It's counterintuitive, but it's true. Someone owns the outcome.

Someone's neck is on the line for what the AI does. That responsibility doesn't vanish just because a model made the call any more than it vanished because the cloud provider was doing it. That responsibility becomes the job.

Let me move away from tech though and talk about something else. You may haven't thought about blue collar work. Hey, in the age of robotics, physical ai, I don't care what you want to call it, a lot of these blue collar jobs are going away, and they're not the traditional blue collar jobs.

I, I'm talking, you may be thinking of, yes, the UPS worker history, the, the, the truck driver toast, train engineers, conductors, toast. But what about the surgeon? Are these AI robots going to do surgery better than people?

They already are in some cases. The idea behind it though, is when I say toast, they're not necessarily eliminated. They're augmented AI and robots.

And by the way, CES was this week in, in, um, Vegas, if you saw some of the demos of the next gen robots out there, it's scary stuff. You gotta go check it out. The things these robots are doing is just scary, but they're already, these robots are already working in our warehouses, our factories, our hospitals, construction sites and utilities.

But they're not just replacing humans in mass. What instead is emerging is a hybrid human machine collaboration. And that right there represents the future.

So if you're a worker in these fields, right? Remember these robots, they need to be trained. They need to be maintained.

They need to be calibrated and supervised. AI systems operating in the physical world are notoriously bad at edge cases. And edge cases pop up all the time.

The reality is they probably are gonna get better at it. They need us. This creates demands for skilled RO roles, robotics technicians, AI existed tradespeople, AI enhanced tradespeople, safety supervisors, field workers, augmented with diagnostics and predictive tools on what's going to happen next with our rows ro, we're robots.

This is not the elimination of blue collar, excuse me, blue collar work. It is an upgrade that blends physical skill with digital fluency and makes for a, a, uh, integrated workforce of humans working alongside robots. Also, we're gonna have new frontiers, and this came out from the ai, uh, uh, architects, if you will.

But some of the most interesting job creations aren't gonna come from replacing existing industry. It's enabling entirely nuance. And the, as I said, the a AI architects came up with really pointed to this and it's space.

You know, we've been talking about space, the final frontier since I was a little boy watching Star Trek in 1968. The, but the fact of the matter is, we have played with space. We've got, I don't know, 10,000 satellites up there, but we're not really working space.

We're not mining asteroids. We don't have permanent, uh, stations, bases on the moon or Mars or anywhere else. But in the age of AI with autonomous machines, mining, remote construction and industrialization and hostile or hard to reach environments is gonna be a real thing, right?

And it's going to create an awful lot of jobs. These hard to reach environments aren't gonna be impossible to reach with AI and robotics. And that's gonna spawn, you know, something outta Star Wars or Star Trek, a whole new ecosystems of work.

So we don't, I can't, as I sit here today, I can't tell you exactly what those space jobs are gonna be, but there's a good chance that, um, there's going to, your kids are gonna be working in space. And that's not unusual, by the way, that we don't know what they are today because we never do at the beginning of a new frontier. But if history's taught us anything, it tells us that when reach expands, industries follow and so does work.

So sit tight on that. Another thing, another area I want to talk about is the creative arts. You know, I have a, a one of my fellows who work in our, uh, AV team here, Brian showed me something he's been working on last week.

Brian's a Grammy award-winning sound engineer, and he's a musician, but he showed me his music and characters, singers, digital singers and music videos he's created. This is music. He composed using ai.

And I, I gotta tell you, it was crazy good music. It was a, you know, and he had this, it looked like a real person, except she had some sort of hologram on her cheek or whatever. But she was singing this song that Brian composed in ai and it was this whole music video in space and everything around it.

And it was really beautiful. And, and Brian showed me what other people like him, what other artists are doing. And it made me realize that yeah, AI does great videos.

You probably saw the Sora video that led this off, you know, but in the hands, excuse me, in the hands of a creative person, this gets real creative guys. I cannot wait to see what people can do when their imaginations run wild. And instead of relying upon maybe their own hand to eye coordination or their own ability to compose music, we're using AI to do these things.

I think it is gonna ignite creativity. So for things like arts and music and creative kind of, of, of, of film, well, it's obviously not film, it's video and stuff like that. I think AI's gonna set the world off fire here.

We're gonna see so much coming at us, right? It takes the blank page. Humans still have to bring taste, intent, and context.

But between the, the collaboration between them is amazing. So this isn't replacement, it's leveraging it. What makes jobs worth doing though?

And that really is the crux of it, guys. We could, you know, you want to go get a job that pays your bills and puts food on the table. Look, humans have been doing that for a really long time.

It's few of us who, as I always say, if you do something you love, you never work a day in your life. Very few of us actually get the opportunity to do something that we really find rewarding, exciting, and we would do truth be told, even if we weren't getting paid. Um, but with ai, we, each and every one of us has the ability to pick some sort of job, some sort of doing something, doing something, some responsibility to master, to create the best ai era.

Jobs are not gonna push humans out of the loop. They'll move us to where we are most valuable, where we're most happy, and where it's most rewarding, setting boundaries, making decisions, but nevertheless owning outcomes. That is fulfilling work.

And it's work machines are not particularly good at, but humans excel at. So what's the real question we should be asking? Yeah, AI's gonna eliminate some jobs.

I'm not gonna sugarcoat that for you. Some of them probably needed to go anyway, quite frankly, right? But the more uncomfortable truth is this, the future of work is not about competing with machines.

It's about whether we're willing to move up the value chain and work hand in hand, arm in arm, brain to brain with these machines. Machines because these jobs are coming. They just won't look like the ones we used to, but they'll be there.

And that's not something to fear. That right there, my friends, is opportunity knocking. This is shimmy and I'm out for the week.