The Future of Jobs in the Age of AI: 5 Schools of Thought

The question isn’t whether AI will change work. It already is. The real question, the one that keeps CEOs up at night, policymakers scrambling, and workers anxious, is how much and how fast.

After dozens of conversations with executives, policymakers, and technologists, I’ve identified five distinct schools of thought on where AI takes us.

Each has credible advocates, compelling logic, and very different implications for how you should prepare.

Let me walk you through them.

1/ The Techno-Optimists: More Jobs

Marc Andreessen, co-founder of VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, represents this camp perfectly. The argument is historical: every major technological revolution, the printing press, the steam engine, electricity, the internet, triggered predictions of mass unemployment. And every single time, those predictions were wrong. Technology didn’t destroy work; it created entirely new categories of work that nobody could have imagined beforehand.

The techno-optimists see AI as the latest chapter in the same story. Yes, some jobs will disappear. But the productivity gains, new industries, and entirely novel human needs that emerge will create more employment than what’s lost. They believe in abundance.

It’s a comforting narrative. It also has 200 years of economic history on its side. The question is whether this time truly is different.

2/ The Augmentation School: Different Jobs

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, champions this view. AI isn’t a replacement for human workers, it’s ‘a bicycle for the mind’. The future isn’t humans or machines; it’s humans with machines.

In this school of thought, AI doesn’t eliminate your job, it redesigns it. The accountant doesn’t disappear; they stop doing data entry and start doing strategic advisory. The marketer doesn’t get fired; they stop writing first drafts and start curating, editing, and directing AI-generated output. The radiologist doesn’t lose their role; they gain a second pair of (very fast, very accurate) eyes.

Work gets redesigned, not destroyed. The jobs of 2030 will look different from the jobs of 2020, but there will still be plenty of them. The key skill becomes knowing how to work with AI effectively.

3/ The Inequality School: Unequal Jobs

This is the K-shaped perspective, and it might be the most uncomfortable one to sit with. The core argument: AI doesn’t wipe out work entirely, but it hollows out the bottom and the middle. High-skill roles win big, a top-tier developer augmented by AI becomes 10x more productive. But routine and low- to mid-skill roles erode rapidly.

The visual is a K-shape: 20% of job skills become exponentially more valuable (the upward arm), while 80% of job skills plummet toward zero (the downward arm).

There’s no mass unemployment in the headline numbers, but beneath the surface, inequality explodes. A small group of AI-augmented knowledge workers captures most of the value, while a much larger group scrambles for what’s left.

No mass unemployment, but deeply unequal outcomes.

4/ The Disruption School: Lagging Jobs

Yuval Noah Harari, the historian and writer, brings a temporal lens to the debate. His concern isn’t that new jobs won’t emerge, they probably will. His concern is timing. AI moves faster than education systems, faster than labor markets, and far faster than policy.

Even if the future eventually creates enough new roles, millions of workers won’t be able to transition fast enough. The call center worker can’t retrain as an AI ethics specialist in six months. The gap between job destruction and job creation could last a decade or more, and during that gap, we might see what Harari provocatively calls a “useless class”, not because these people lack value, but because the economy temporarily has no place for their skills.

The disruption school doesn’t necessarily disagree with the optimists on the destination. They disagree on the journey, and they think the journey will be brutal.

5/ The Job-Pessimists: No Jobs

Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize-winning “Godfather of AI,” represents the starkest view. He has suggested that 2026 could be the year the jobless boom begins. In his assessment, AI will replace most jobs, not create them. The economic incentive is clear: to generate returns on the hundreds of billions being invested in AI, companies will have to replace human labor at scale.

As Hinton puts it bluntly: “your job is their product”.

This isn’t a fringe view from someone unfamiliar with the technology. This comes from one of the people who built the technology. And his warning carries extra weight precisely because he understands, better than almost anyone, what these systems are capable of becoming.

So Which Is It?

Probably a combination. The future of work won’t be captured by any single school of thought. Different sectors, different geographies, and different skill levels will experience different realities, potentially all five simultaneously.

A software engineer in San Francisco might live in the augmentation school. A data entry clerk in Manila might experience the disruption school. A factory worker in Germany might see the inequality school play out in real time. And an AI researcher at a top lab might be building the techno-optimist future while worrying about the pessimist one.

What matters isn’t picking the “right” school, it’s understanding that all five forces are in play, and positioning yourself, your team, and your organization accordingly.

The one thing all five schools agree on? Standing still is not an option.

What’s your view? Which scenario do you think is most likely? I’d love to hear your perspective.

Dado Van Peteghem — dadovanpeteghem.com