For those who are new to my substack, welcome. I wanted to share an update with you! I recently said goodbye to Microsoft. I am grateful for everyone I met and everything I learned aboard tech’s biggest cruise ships both Google and Microsoft But AI is calling, and it’s time to jump on a speedboat. Life is short. I choose to live it spontaneously. Here’s to following the heart ♥️ Follow along for the next chapter…
Onto this topic: No Job is Safe in 2030
Rory has worked at the container port for thirty years. He had the same job title the whole time: longshoreman. He shows up at six, pulls on his gloves, and works a twelve-hour shift moving steel boxes off ships.
Here is what he actually does in those twelve hours.
He climbs onto the stacks and lashes containers down by hand, because no machine has figured out how to do that on a wet, tilting deck in a crosswind. He runs a gantry crane, but these days the crane suggests the path of each lift and Rory just confirms it, so a four-minute lift takes two minutes. He used to check every box against the manifest with a clipboard. The terminal’s cameras do that now. Rory hasn’t touched a manifest in years. And since last spring he has a new duty he never asked for: watching a screen of driverless carriers and stepping in when one of them freezes at a junction.
So look at what happened to Rory. Nobody fired him. His job is still there. But one piece of it got taken away completely, one piece got faster, one piece got added, and one piece is exactly what it was in 1996.
If you had asked in 2010 whether “longshoreman” was a safe job, you would have been asking the wrong question. The thing that got automated was never the job. It was the tasks that make up the job.
Hold on this argument that I make with Rory and think of the world we are in right now with AI. But before that…if you are on to building a career in AI, I am running a 5 weeks Agentic AI bootcamp that starts next week.
Agentic AI Bootcamp + Certification, starts Sept 16 – Build a production agent end to end with me and my team. Code EARLYBIRD for 30% off.
Questions? contact@cloudgirl.dev. Want to speak with me 1:1 about the courses or anything else, you can set up 15 mins with me here
What Anthropic actually did
In September 2026, Anthropic published a model of the US economy in 2030. They built it with Anton Korinek and Chad Jones, two of the most cited economists on growth and automation, and they were careful to call it a Version 1.0 and “a stark simplification of a complex reality.” It is not a prediction. It is a piece of arithmetic that takes one idea seriously and follows it all the way to the end.
The idea is Rory’s shift. Every job in the economy is a bundle of tasks. Every task happens millions of times a day across the country. Add up every instance of every task done by people and by the software and machines they work with, and you get the US economy, a little over thirty trillion dollars a year. So the question “what does AI do to the economy” is really the question “what does AI do to each task,” summed up.
“what does AI do to the economy” is really the question “what does AI do to each task,”
And AI can only do four things to a task.
