The Pareto Principle Is How AI Actually Takes Jobs

Are you afraid of losing your job? That question might sound silly at first, but over the past several years, the specter of losing one’s job has risen to horror-movie jump-scare proportions. It’s not just you. Everyone who has a job is deathly afraid of losing it. I hear this daily, in comments on my articles, in my consulting work, on social media, even among friends. No one is immune. Why? Well, there are a lot of reasons, but one reason might be the constant drone from big tech and the press, both of which have spent a lot of the past four years telling us that AI is coming to take our jobs and, with this new strain of zombie mutant AI, no one is immune. Is that true? Well, I’ve spent a lot of time working with AI, and I’ve also spent 15 years telling people why AI shouldn’t be coming for their jobs. I think I can connect the dots here. And they’re sobering. But someone has to tell you the truth. When AI Strikes, It’s Slow, Then Quick The first fact I can give you is that, despite the current conventional wisdom, AI has and will continue to put blue-collar jobs at risk far more frequently than white-collar or knowledge-worker jobs. The increased threat to blue-collar jobs is for a couple of reasons. But it mostly has to do with the Pareto principle that exists within automation, and automation is still the bulk of what AI is being used for in this cycle – whether that’s automating content, automating conversations, or more broadly, automating sets of tasks that just follow basic instructions. That last one, that’s what’s led to the onslaught of machines taking blue-collar jobs as far back as the 1980s. It’s still happening today, it’s just being overshadowed by all this new white-collar carnage. While maybe not as easy and inexpensive to get started with as today’s AI, replacing physical tasks with machines ultimately offers far more coverage and better results than knowledge tasks. The more repetitive the task and the less knowledge required to execute it, like spot welding, the more that job is suited for automation. As computer processing has become more powerful, the robots can now make choices, and even appear to understand the nuances in more complex tasks, like arc welding. Or driving. Keep that in mind. Because the second fact I can give you is that when AI comes for your job, it happens slowly with lots of warning, then real fast without warning. Self-Driving Tech Is Happening Fast Right now, the AI-job-taking threat that’s easiest to spot is that of taxi driver. And Uber and Lyft are not immune. Self-driving tech has been around since the 1950s, and experimental forms of passenger cars were being developed in the 1970s. At that point, with self-driving vehicles screaming down the Autobahn in the 1980s, the writing was on the wall for driving as a profession, no? Well, it’s 2026, so why didn’t it happen? Well, it did. It just started very slowly. I just got back from lovely Tempe, Arizona, which is kind of the epicenter of self-driving cars and those little delivery robots — and Starship, please, please, please send me one, I promise to take care of it and feed it and walk it every day. Waymo self-driving cars are, no exaggeration, everywhere. By my third day in Tempe, a Waymo brushed past me as I was getting out of my car and I didn’t think twice about it. And later, an empty one cut me off trying to change lanes, which happened a dozen more times that day with cars driven by humans. I know. Nice anecdote, bro. But it’s not just me. Waymo ridership is skyrocketing, especially over the past two years and significantly over the past few months. My daughter and her friends take them exclusively now. No one talks about their uniqueness or their ubiquitousness. They’re cheaper to run, they can all run 24/7, and they will eventually become safer than human drivers if they aren’t already, which is already debatable. Uber and Lyft are not immune. Despite all the advancements those companies brought to the taxi experience, from lowering the costs to cashless payments to accurate(ish) timing, as the human-driver side of the equation went from cheap rideshare side-gig to expensive full-time taxi driver job — an evolution those companies always knew was a risk but could never mitigate — the wheels were already in motion to eliminate that cost from the system. So when driverless comes, it’s coming for everyone. And it’ll come without warning, because we’ve already been warned. For 40 years. What Are the AI-Job-Taking Warning Signs? Again, the conventional wisdom here is to ask yourself how valuable you are to the company. But I think that metric is more of a requirement, less of an indicator. If what you do could be replaced, by a human or otherwise, that’s another issue. So we need to start with the baseline that everyone reading this is valuable to their company. Because the real metric is the company, and in a greater sense, it’s what that company does. Apologies to Cory Doctorow, but whether AI will replace your job has a lot to do with your company’s place in what I call the Enshitification Scale. Not to make a thing out of it, but we see this in every aspect of our lives, as both consumers and business people. The scale goes, in order of AI-dethroning threat: I Love This Product They Used to Be Awesome They’re the Lesser of All Evils They’re the Only Safe Bet I Hate Them And it’s actually more about the use case — what the company does — than the company itself. The thing is, you don’t have to get all the way to the bottom of the scale for AI or tech to start taking jobs. When the emotion about the product, love or hate, switches from the product itself to the use case, then it’s time for the asteroid to come in and take out all the dinosaurs. Policy Just Delays the Inevitable And when that time comes, no amount of entrenchment will make an incumbent industry or sector safe. That entrenchment usually starts with external protection, first policies, then unions, then laws. What these end up doing, in too many cases, is prevent the natural evolution of the use case and the growth of the person executing it, stunting that growth until neither can be saved, and the knowledge that actually lifts the person above the AI job taker is made irrelevant. Like I said, it happened when laws were passed to designate Uber and Lyft drivers as employees and not contractors. You’re seeing it in fast food right now. Minimum wage goes up, then in come the self-service order kiosks. I remember when we were all complaining about the lack of customer service at a McDonald’s. Now we’re all pissed off if the machine is busted and we have to talk to someone to get our Big Mac when we could have just punched it into an app. Think about it. It was actually the company’s decision to remove the knowledge behind customer service from the employees delivering customer service that turned those “McJobs” into a series of button-punching tasks. So what about those button-punching white-collar McJobs? Well … Evolve or Die? When it comes to knowledge and skills, “evolve or die” — as much as I hate that phrase — is hard to argue with. But here’s the thing. That evolve-or-die situation is not happening in tech, not as fast as they’d have you think. Techies are surprisingly fast to evolve, and one of the reasons these layoffs are so painful is because most techies haven’t had a problem adopting these new AI technologies. The problem is leadership and management has always seen AI as a replacement out of the box, regardless of the company’s place on the Enshitification Scale, and so, everybody is doing layoffs because AI gives them a way out. Hell, if it’s AI’s fault, then that might just “fix the glitch” and make the company great again. It won’t. The Enshitification Scale rarely, if ever, moves in reverse. So the warning signs are there if you take a look around you. Is your tech company still a tech company? Or is it a task factory? Are you being protected? Or are you adding value? If you can answer those questions, the warning signs should be easy to spot, and you should think about getting out before things happen quickly. If this resonated, please join my email list, a rebel alliance of professionals from all walks of life who want a unique take on tech, business, and the future of both. EXPERT OPINION BY JOE PROCOPIO, FOUNDER, JOEPROCOPIO.COM @JPROCO