Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has repeatedly warned that artificial intelligence is about to dramatically reshape which jobs society values most, and the reversal will surprise almost everyone who grew up in the knowledge-economy era.
For the past thirty years, the highest-paying and most “prestigious” careers have almost all been digital: software engineering, law, consulting, finance, graphic design, copywriting, data analysis, marketing, and dozens of similar fields. These jobs required expensive university degrees, high IQ, strong analytical skills, and the ability to sit in front of a screen for ten hours a day. They were seen as the future.
According to Altman, that future is already over.
Today’s large language models and image generators can already perform 70-90 % of the typical tasks in many of these roles, often faster and cheaper than even a skilled human professional. A mid-level programmer who earns $150,000 a year can now be outperformed on many routine coding tasks by an AI agent that costs a company a few dollars a month.
The same is happening with lawyers drafting contracts, designers creating logos and layouts, writers producing marketing copy, and analysts generating reports.
The core reason is simple: purely cognitive, screen-based work is the easiest category for AI to automate. It deals with symbols, patterns, and information, exactly what transformers were built to manipulate at scale.
There is no need for legs, arms, fine motor control, or real-time interaction with unpredictable physical environments.
By contrast, jobs that require a human body in the real world remain extremely hard to automate. Plumbers, electricians, HVAC technicians, nurses, surgeons, carpenters, welders, gardeners, delivery drivers, warehouse workers, and childcare providers all operate in the physical world where gravity, weather, corrosion, human emotions, and unexpected obstacles still rule.
Even the most advanced robots today struggle with tasks that a skilled tradesperson considers routine.
The result is an ironic inversion of status and pay that few people saw coming twenty years ago:
- Professions that once required elite university degrees and were celebrated as the pinnacle of modern work are becoming commoditized;
- Blue-collar and service jobs that many middle-class parents urged their children to avoid are becoming relatively more valuable and, in many cases, better paid than entry-level “knowledge” jobs.
Real-world examples are already visible. In San Francisco and other tech hubs, experienced electricians and plumbers routinely earn $200,000–$350,000 a year, often more than newly graduated software engineers who now compete with AI tools. In Germany, where vocational training never lost prestige, master craftsmen (Meister) in trades frequently out-earn mid-level office workers.
In the United States, the shortage of skilled tradespeople has driven median wages for electricians above $60,000 and for plumbers above $59,000, figures that have risen faster than average software-developer salaries when adjusted for AI-driven productivity gains at tech companies.
The shift goes deeper than money. Altman and others point out that AI is stripping away the sense of intellectual challenge and uniqueness that many knowledge workers derived from their careers. When a machine can write a decent legal memo or debug code in seconds, the psychological reward of “being smart” on a computer diminishes.
At the same time, people are rediscovering the deep satisfaction that comes from physical work: seeing a leaky pipe fixed, a house properly wired, a garden blooming, a patient comforted. These outcomes cannot be faked by a language model, and they provide a form of meaning that pure screen work often lacked.
This reversal is forcing a broader cultural rethink. Parents who once pushed their children toward computer-science degrees are now quietly researching apprenticeship programs.
High-school guidance counselors report rising interest in trade schools.
Real-estate markets in many countries show young professionals trading downtown apartments for houses with workshops and garages, spaces where they can build furniture, restore cars, or grow food, activities that feel more “real” in an age when digital output feels increasingly weightless.
None of this means that all digital professions will disappear. There will always be demand for the very best engineers, designers, and strategists who can direct and improve the AI systems themselves, just as the invention of calculators did not end the need for mathematicians; it simply raised the bar. But the middle tier of routine cognitive work, the comfortable layer that supported millions of upper-middle-class lifestyles, is shrinking fast.
Also read:
- The AI Reckoning: From Startup Mirage to Corporate Cataclysm
- The Unsung Architects of America's AI Ascendancy: China's Enduring Talent Pipeline
- The Great American Job Freeze: Why Nobody’s Jumping Anymore
In Altman’s view, we are heading toward a world where the ability to work effectively with your hands, to solve unpredictable physical problems, and to deliver tangible results in the real world will carry a significant economic and social premium. The prestige hierarchy of the 20th-century knowledge economy is being turned upside down, and the jobs that many once looked down on may soon be among the most respected, best compensated, and psychologically rewarding of the AI age.
