
Job apocalypse? Not yet. AI is creating brand new occupations
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. A mock job advertisement that has done the rounds recently calls for a “killswitch engineer" for OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT. The description requires the successful applicant to stand by servers all day and unplug them “if this thing turns on us".
Useful skills include the ability to “throw a bucket of water on the servers, too. Just in case." Despite widespread fears of job losses owing to the rise of artificial-intelligence (AI) agents, it is not all gallows humour. The technology is already creating new roles—to train agents, embed them in organisations and ensure that they behave.
Many of these new jobs, moreover, require uniquely human skills. Start with data annotators. No longer are they merely low-paid gig workers tediously tagging images.
As AI models have become more advanced, experts in subjects such as finance, law and medicine have increasingly been enlisted to help train them. Mercor, a startup that has built a platform to hire boffins to help build bots, was recently valued at $10bn. Brendan Foody, its chief executive, says they earn $90 an hour on average.
Once bots are trained, teams of so-called forward-deployed engineers (FDEs) are needed to embed them into organisations. Palantir, a software giant that pioneered the concept, imbues them with derring-do. “In the beginning, it was just us.
Two engineers dropped into a military base near Kandahar, handed minimal-but-clear marching orders from Palo Alto: ‘Go there and win,’" starts a typical blogpost by a former Palantir FDE. In practice, their jobs are a blend of developer, consultant and salesman. They work on-site to customise AI tools for a client and get them up and running.
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