Reimagining the future of work

What if AI doesn’t replace us, but helps place us where we truly belong? We’ve spent decades failing to understand, match, and grow human potential.

There’s a long-running debate about the future of work. One side warns that AI will eliminate millions of jobs, especially entry-level white-collar roles. The other argues that new roles will emerge, as they have in past technological revolutions .. creative destruction in action.

But the debate isn’t theoretical anymore. It’s happening now. In May 2025, Business Insider cut 21% of its workforce, citing its strategic shift toward Enterprise ChatGPT. Shopify and Duolingo now require managers to prove that AI can’t perform a task before making a hire. Job postings for roles prone to automation have declined 19% in three years.

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, warns that AI could eliminate up to 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within five years, increasing unemployment by 10% to 20%. And that prediction likely stems not from alarmism, but from internal projections.

Plenty of articles ask: What happens after AI kills your job? Some even wonder if AI might finally liberate us from pointless work. Everyone’s talking about jobs disappearing. But that’s only half the story. The deeper problem? Talent has been poorly distributed. Misunderstood, misplaced, underutilised.

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The Real Crisis Isn’t Just Job Loss. It’s Talent Misplacement.

Let me tell you why this matters. I have a two-year-old daughter, and I care deeply about the future she’ll inherit. My own journey? It was a mess. Full of well-meaning advice, generic career tips, and people projecting what worked for them onto me.

Like most people, I spent years and a lot of energy trying to figure out where I could add value.

I was a law clerk. Then a barista. I tutored in college. I sold designer clothes at a mall to make rent. My education path was no better: law, policy, economics, behavioral science. I took every career quiz you can name: Myers-Briggs, StrengthsFinder. I kept asking: “Is there a place for someone like me? A space to contribute? To be useful?”

Each role raised more questions. Too rigid. Too shallow. Too chaotic. I was told I was "strategic," "adaptive," "creative." I failed more than I succeeded. I launched a startup. It failed. Eventually, I decided to double down on one aspect of myself: fast-moving, high-output execution. That version got hired by Uber, Airbnb, and Spotify. I built a career around it. I thrived.

But it was only a sliver of who I am.

The rest? The thinker, the writer … was left behind. Not because it lacked value. But because I didn’t know where it belonged.

And that’s not just my story. It’s systemic.

We live in a world full of misplaced people. Told to optimize their LinkedIn profiles instead of understanding where they truly belong. This isn’t a talent gap. It’s a vision gap. We don’t lack tools. We lack imagination.

Imagination to ask: what are these tools for? How do we use them to elevate the human condition, not just streamline it?

There is no shortage of smart, capable people doing what anthropologist David Graeber called “bullshit jobs.” Some work at top tech companies. I’ve met them. They’re not building, they’re buffering. Keeping systems running, not questioning them. Bright minds reduced to maintaining noise, simply because they’ve never been given clarity on where their talents truly belong.

The advice to “do what you love” sounds empowering, but it also oversimplifies a complex issue. Passion isn't enough when systems don’t see you clearly or support your growth. Most people don’t need motivation, they need structure.

We expect young people to choose a path at 18, based on little more than a quiz or a vague idea of success. We hand them rigid credentials, vague job descriptions, and a labor market shaped by imperfect information.

The result? 42% of college graduates are underemployed in their first job. And many never recover. We're using 20th-century tools to navigate a 21st-century world.

For most of history, work wasn’t a choice, it was inheritance. In pre-industrial societies, your role was largely determined by birth. If your family farmed, you farmed. If your father made shoes, so did you. Talent wasn’t discovered, it was assumed. Social mobility was rare. Work was tied to survival, not self-expression or potential.

Then came the Industrial Revolution. Specialization became the norm. Factory systems and bureaucracies flourished. The goal wasn’t to surface individual strengths, it was to standardize human labor. Frederick Taylor’s “scientific management” became the management gospel in the early 20th century: break work into repeatable units, and slot people into them like interchangeable parts. Workers were resources, not minds.

In the 20th century, as economies evolved, credentialism took over. You were defined not by what you could do, but by what degrees you had. Sociologist Randall Collins argued that credentials became a gatekeeping system, meaning, signalling social status more than capability. Employers used them as a shortcut for evaluating talent, even though they often overlooked ability, context, or growth potential.

Today, we live in a knowledge economy where human potential is supposed to be our most valuable resource. But the hiring systems we use are still built on outdated proxies: resumes, GPAs, LinkedIn buzzwords, job descriptions written post-facto. Studies show that the vast majority of hiring decisions are based on “pattern-matching” with employers choosing people who remind them of themselves or fit a familiar mold.

And so we end up with a global misallocation of talent, one that has only deepened post-COVID and been accelerated tenfold by AI. The latter hasn’t just disrupted roles, it’s triggered a paralysis in hiring itself. After the pandemic’s over-hiring frenzy, tech companies are now overcorrecting.

Scared to overextend, unsure what they truly need, many are frozen. Roles are posted without clarity. Recruiters operate through backchannels. Everyone is hedging, waiting for the market or the machines to decide what happens next.

I’ve sat in meetings with founders who genuinely can’t answer basic questions: “Why do you need this role? What kind of person are you looking for?” The response is often vague “Maybe someone to figure this out.” That’s not a hiring strategy. That’s a symptom of deep systemic confusion.

This used to be HR’s domain. But with layoffs, the task has shifted to founders and team leads, most of whom have never been trained to hire well. They post job descriptions after the fact, not based on vision but on burnout. The language is generic. The requirements, borrowed. Instead of identifying the real gaps, in skill, in structure, in spirit … they default to buzzwords that sound safe in a boardroom.

I’ve seen this firsthand. Lately, recruiters tell me nearly every marketing role is labeled “growth.” But when you dig, the need is often totally different. Some teams need a storyteller to bring coherence to their brand. Others need a product marketer to translate features into something a human can care about. But “growth” is easier to pitch. It sounds measurable. It signals urgency. So it wins.

The result? Companies don’t fail to find talent, they fail to recognize it. And it’s costing them. According to a 2022 McKinsey report, 40% of employers say they can’t find the talent they need even though that talent exists. It’s just not wearing the costume they expect.

This is a deeper crisis than I ever imagined witnessing in my lifetime. And it demands more from us .. not just concern, but courage. We can’t sit back and hope for the best. We have to act. We need to push AI further .. not to replace us, but to deepen our understanding of who we are and where we thrive.

So what could a better system for work and talent placement actually look like?

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A New System for Talent Discovery and Placement

AI is beginning to see us in new ways, not just by what we say, but by how we think, how we move, how we respond under pressure. Where our attention drifts. How we make meaning. Not in the “here’s your next ad” kind of way, but in the “this is how your mind might work” kind of way.

It won’t always be right. It doesn’t need to be. The goal isn’t to hand us perfect answers, but to ask better questions so we can shape the future together and elevate how we think, choose, and grow.

If trained wisely, it can identify patterns we don’t yet have words for. It could show us how we think. What environments we might thrive in. Where we bring the most value. Not to dictate who we are, but to reflect what we could become.

Here are some concrete examples:

1. Cognitive Fingerprinting: A tool that sees how you solve problems, navigate ambiguity, and make decisions. Not based on GPA or job titles, but on actual cognitive traits. A high school student with lateral thinking could be directed toward systems design, not penalized for grades.

2. Language as Signal: Someone who speaks in metaphor might be better suited to narrative strategy than accounting. A service rep who manages conflict intuitively might be surfaced for people leadership.

3. Simulation Over Interviews: Instead of asking ‘Tell me about a time…’, we place candidates in real-world scenarios to reveal how they actually think, mapping where they’re in their current career journey while highlighting the environments and systems where they’re most likely to thrive.

4. Early Talent Discovery: A kid who reimagines video games could be guided toward design or neuropsychology. A quiet observer could be placed in ethnography, not sidelined for being “shy”.

This isn’t just a philosophical idea. It’s already happening. Take Knack, for example, an AI-driven platform that uses mobile games to measure traits like attention, adaptability, and creative problem-solving. In one case in South Africa, it helped identify young people from underserved communities with hidden leadership potential. Not based on degrees. Not based on polished résumés. But based on their strengths. These candidates were placed into job pathways they would’ve never accessed through traditional systems.

This isn’t just about redistributing opportunity. It’s about reimagining how we see human potential and talent. Of course, designing systems to place talent requires care and serious ethical consideration. You can’t outsource identity. No model should define a person’s worth.

But let’s be honest: AI is uniquely suited to help us make sense of complexity. It can reveal latent traits and overlooked patterns. It can create space for reflection, questioning, and growth. This must be done with transparency, humility, and human judgment. But if used wisely, we could design systems that match people to roles based on how they actually work, not just what they’ve done before. Or surface distinct ways of solving problems like abstract thinking, lateral reasoning, or empathy … that don’t show up on résumés.

What I really want is this: a future where, instead of asking my child “What do you want to be?”, I can ask, “Where do you thrive?” A future that doesn’t just automate work or displace people, but uses technology to elevate human potential. That future won’t build itself. It will take intention, imagination, and real work to get us there. But the time is now.