AI Took the Job You Pretended Was Important
Turns out, most white-collar work is mindless rubbish.
There’s a particular cruelty our parents have fed us. Use your mind not your hands. That’s where the money is. Good grades, university; then doctor, consultant, Investment banker.
But what we didn’t realise was that these thinking jobs were nothing special. They were unthinking. The mental equivalent of walking on a treadmill.
AI isn’t just threatening these jobs, but it has unveiled their lie.
Welcome to the collapse of the prestige professions.
Take a look at the graduate job market today.
The FT recently reported that entry-level positions in elite fields—tech, law, journalism—now barely hover above minimum wage.
Real wages in the UK have been stagnating for a while. But our perception of the ‘good’ job lags. Is it just your parent’s opinion? Yet even the prestige labour market is unable to absorb the cascade of graduates. Even consulting – the great graduate daycare – is shrinking.
Where are all the entry level gigs?
It can’t just be AI. There are economic clouds.
But what AI has at least revealed is just our brainless many of these ‘knowledge’ jobs are. Easily replaced.
Much of ‘white collar’ work might be no more than manual work for the mind. Reading emails. Processing data. Reviewing statements. It's repetitive pattern recognition. It’s not that easy, but it’s not genius. What is required is moderate intelligence plus what the Portuguese call an “iron-ass” — the ability to remains seated until the task is complete.1
The late David Graeber identified in the modern economy a cluster of “bullshit jobs”: work so pointless that the employee cannot even justify its existence despite needing to pretend otherwise at work.
There are “Flunkies” who serve to ingratiate their superiors' feelings (receptionists, assistants, door attendants). Or “box tickers,” who create the appearance of useful work through the filling of forms, dashboards, and compliance.
I don’t fully agree.
Not only is it based on the testimonies of clearly disgruntled employees, it’s also written by an academic unable to imagine someone accepting a job that isn’t their weird, narrow passion.
But one thing remains to me; the value of many service jobs are at best unclear.
And I don’t think it’s accidental– it's paternalism.
Many jobs are created just to employ people. They don’t bring obvious economic value. But since people believe in stable employment, however meaningless, this was good for moral hygiene.
It’s not just Victorian stiffness. It’s dangerous being radically rich among the poor. The more you have, the more you are expected to share. If you fail, you are toppled. It’s a mechanism embedded in our tribal bodies.
A successful business owner embedded in a town knows to generously contribute. Taxes and assistants. Otherwise, who knows what might happen?
I also sense people demand it. They don’t like handouts that much. It’s charity, really. And while you might be grateful, it comes with an instinct of shame. And people treat it differently. Have you ever noticed that people freely spend what is freely given to them? That 10 pounds earned in sweat and effort weighs more than paper. That freebie is thrown away in seconds.
The result is that businesses will employ not just for profit. They look to employ the community. It helps keep the peace. For the owners and the employees.
But this creates a bias for holding people. Not for hiring them.
Businesses are much more prone to hoarding labour. Even if they’re losing money, a business might still want to keep their employees. In ‘retrenching’, there is extra pay, risk of litigation, and an emotional cost. Because firing someone makes them feel bad.
When you’re losing money, how do you then reduce headcount?
Invert the problem: make it harder to hire.
Instead of getting rid of the people you already know, you just don’t hire those you don’t. And who are most vulnerable to this? Young graduates. They are untested, without experience, and unknown.
It is the consequence of a simple bias: it is harder to fire than it is to hire.
‘White-collar’ jobs are best defined by separation from ‘blue collars’— the clothing worn by the manual workers. The term “White collar” came to us from an American writer, Upton Sinclair, to refer to the rise of clerical, administrative, and management workers during the 1930s.
We still associate their work with education and cerebral talent, but they’re also deeply status anxious.
Sinclair:
“It is a fact with which every union workingman is familiar, that his most bitter despisers are the petty underlings of the business world, the poor office-clerks, who are often the worst exploited of proletarians, but who, because they are allowed to wear a white collar, and to work in the office with the boss, regard themselves as members of the capitalist class.”
AI isn’t just a shattering technological change, it has also toppled the thinly veiled status of these white collar jobs.
It turns out most ‘intellectual’ work is mindless.
They are repetitive, rule-based tasks that don’t demand high-level intelligence. It might take a while to learn, but when a heartless machine can do it in a second, how special is it?
What it confirms is that most of it is pattern recognition, following rules— it’s replicable.
You notice this most distinctly in the ‘glamour’ jobs.
Climb high enough and the illusions get thin. That billion-dollar deal is you squinting at a comma on page 436 while Dua Lipa screams salvation through headphones. And when you take away the money, what are you left with?
Academics are no better. Half are parrots with tenure, stacking footnotes like kindling and praying nobody lights a match.
What if I dress a fisherman in a suit? Feed him grain salad in a marble office, and suddenly he’s an business leader.
AI will most certainly do to the service industry, what machines have done to manual labour.
It won’t decimate it. Just redefine it.
Whole new categories of work. The fastest growing jobs in the UK for 2025 were AI related. Meanwhile, territories of intellectual work will now come at a higher premium. Creativity, expertise, taste, and abstraction, will become an even more precious resource:
In an age where AI can generate anything, the question is no longer "can it be made?" but "is it worth making?" The frontier isn’t volume—it’s discernment. And in that shift, taste has become a survival skill.
This goes for art, but for expertise too. You might get AI to complete work for you, but you will need the expertise to verify it.
It’s not hard to imagine how this looks. Everyone becomes a manager. A principal engineer of prompts. You’ll assign tasks to the machines—your little LLM underlings—and then you’ll sit there checking their work. Because your name’s at the bottom of the email.
And if it’s wrong, it’s not the model that gets blamed. It’s you. The still that matters it’s just doing– it’s knowing what’s right.
Judgment. Verification. Discernment.
That’s the new craft.
The trouble then comes with crafting expertise.
It takes thousands of hours of dull work. And only then, bored to the bone, do you start to shape something finer. You play with it. Create. You get on top.
This is what makes me weary when relying on LLMs for things I don’t really know. How do you judge thing you’ve never done? Review a contract you’ve never drafted?
While AI offers unimaginable education, it puts all the emphasis on the little skills that can only really be learnt on the job: Tacit learning. The important things we don’t realise, even the master can’t word it. But we copy it, subconsciously.
This is what worries me for young people now. The entry jobs—the foot-in-the-door job—are vanishing. Replaced by machines that never get tired, never whine.
But those little jobs teach.
There’s that story of a news anchor in Melbourne. He started in production, a complete green with the wild dream of telling the news. He wore a full suit every day, just in case. One day, the anchor was sick, and so was his back-up. But this young man was ready.
Is this possible if businesses freeze entry-level hiring, eliminating the ground floor? Who will ever reach the top?
We jump. Always have. We find a way. Fetch the coffee. Shake the hand. Fix the damn printer. Whatever is left that the machine hasn’t taken.
Maybe that’s today's little lesson. The value of a job is not always what it does, but what it enables. The crummy office job could be your ticket to the anchor chair.
You walk in blind. No mum, no promise. Just reach up. Grab the ladder. Hold on.
The Germans call this Sitzfleisch (sit-flesh, literally).