What Can AI Do: Exploring the Capabilities of Artificial Intelligence

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This page covers topics related to philosophy of artificial intelligence.

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• what can AI do
• what can artificial intelligence do
• what can artificial intelligence do today
• how artificial intelligence can help us
• how can AI help

Title Tag: The Future of Work with AI: Redefining Jobs & Purpose

Meta Description: Explore the future of work with AI through the lens of The Great Unbundling. Learn about AI's impact on job displacement and creation, and how to build a future-proof career.

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The Future of Work: Navigating Job Displacement and Redefining Purpose in the Age of AI

Is artificial intelligence coming for your job? This question dominates conversations about the future, but it might be the wrong one to ask. According to a Goldman Sachs report, generative AI alone could impact the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs. The real, more profound question isn't just if jobs will be replaced, but how the very concept of a "job" is being fundamentally reshaped. We are in the midst of what author J.Y. Sterling calls "The Great Unbundling"—a systematic decoupling of human capabilities that is changing the economic value of a human being.

This article moves beyond the simplistic "jobs lost vs. jobs gained" debate. We will analyze the future of work with AI through the powerful framework of The Great Unbundling. For the AI-Curious Professional, we'll demystify how roles are changing. For the Philosophical Inquirer, we'll explore the deep societal shifts at play. And for the Aspiring AI Ethicist, we'll provide substantiated data on the transformation of the workforce. Understanding this unbundling is the first step toward navigating the disruption and finding a new, distinctly human purpose in our professional lives.

The Great Unbundling of the Modern Job

For centuries, a job has been a bundle of tasks and capabilities. A graphic designer, for example, bundled creativity, understanding of marketing principles, client communication (emotional intelligence), and the physical dexterity to use design software. The core argument of J.Y. Sterling's The Great Unbundling is that AI is a force that isolates these capabilities, masters them individually, and offers them at a scale and cost that a single human cannot compete with.

How AI Deconstructs Professional Roles

Consider these examples of unbundling in action:

• Analytical Intelligence: AI models can now analyze immense datasets, write code, and draft legal documents, tasks that were once the exclusive domain of highly-trained analysts, programmers, and paralegals. A 2025 report from the World Economic Forum (WEF) notes that AI and big data are the top skills that employers see growing in importance.
• Creative Skills: Generative AI can produce marketing copy, create stunning visuals, and compose music. This doesn't eliminate the need for creativity, but it unbundles the initial ideation and draft-creation process from the strategic and curatorial aspects of creative work.
• Administrative Tasks: A significant portion of many white-collar jobs involves scheduling, data entry, and report generation. AI is rapidly automating these functions, freeing up human workers but also chipping away at the traditional "job bundle." The impact is significant, with one study noting that office and administrative support roles have a 46% exposure to AI automation.

This unbundling doesn't necessarily mean instant unemployment for everyone. However, it fundamentally alters the value proposition. If a company can access top-tier analytical power from an AI for a fraction of the cost of a human analyst, the human's value must shift from performing the analysis to asking the right questions and interpreting the AI's output in a strategic context.

Confronting the Numbers: AI and Job Displacement

The statistics surrounding the AI impact on employment can seem contradictory, forecasting both significant displacement and massive job creation. Viewing these numbers through the unbundling framework helps clarify the picture. The displacement is happening at the task level, which aggregates into changes at the job level.

Key Statistics on Workforce Transformation:

• Broad Impact: As mentioned, Goldman Sachs projects that generative AI could automate tasks equivalent to 300 million full-time jobs globally. This doesn't mean 300 million people will be jobless, but that their current job bundles will be significantly altered.
• Sector-Specific Exposure: The WEF's Future of Jobs Report 2025 forecasts that 86% of businesses will be transformed by AI and other information processing technologies by 2030.
• The Net Effect: The same WEF report predicts that while 92 million roles may be displaced, 170 million new jobs could be created by 2030, resulting in a net increase. The crucial point is that the new roles will require different bundles of skills.

The jobs most susceptible to displacement are those with a high proportion of unbundlable, routine tasks. This includes roles in data entry, basic customer service, and certain types of analysis and content creation.

The Other Side of the Coin: AI Job Creation and the Demand for New Skills

While AI unbundles old jobs, it simultaneously creates a demand for new ones. These emerging roles are often focused on building, managing, and interacting with AI systems, or they emphasize the uniquely human capabilities that AI cannot replicate.

Emerging Roles in the AI Economy:

1. AI Specialists and Developers: The most direct form of AI job creation. These are the individuals who build, train, and maintain the AI models.
2. AI Trainers and Ethicists: As AI becomes more integrated into society, there's a growing need for people to teach AI systems and ensure they operate in a fair, unbiased, and ethical manner.
3. Prompt Engineers: A new role that involves crafting the right questions and commands to elicit the most valuable responses from generative AI. This is a perfect example of a new skill bundling human intuition with an understanding of AI logic.
4. Human-Machine Interaction Designers: Professionals who focus on creating seamless and productive collaborations between human workers and AI tools.

The common thread among these new roles is that they work with AI, leveraging its power rather than competing against it. They represent an early form of what J.Y. Sterling calls "The Great Re-bundling."

The Great Re-bundling: A Strategy for Future-Proof Careers

If The Great Unbundling is the inevitable technological and economic trend, The Great Re-bundling is our conscious human response. It is the deliberate act of creating new, valuable combinations of skills that are resistant to automation. This is the blueprint for creating future-proof careers.

Strategies for Individual Re-bundling:

• Cultivate Deep Empathy and Emotional Intelligence: While AI can simulate empathy, it cannot genuinely feel it. Roles that require deep human connection—therapists, senior care providers, executive coaches, and conflict mediators—are highly defensible.
• Master Strategic, Cross-Disciplinary Thinking: AI is a powerful tool for execution, but it relies on human direction for strategy. The ability to connect disparate ideas, understand complex systems, and set a strategic vision is a uniquely human capability.
• Develop Physical and Dexterous Skills: Skilled trades like electricians, plumbers, and carpenters require a combination of fine motor skills, spatial reasoning, and on-the-fly problem-solving in unpredictable physical environments that are currently beyond the scope of robotics.
• Embrace Lifelong Learning and Adaptability: The most critical re-bundling strategy is to commit to continuous learning. The WEF estimates that 39% of core skills will change by 2030. Your ability to learn new skills and re-bundle your capabilities on an ongoing basis will be your greatest asset.

For organizations, re-bundling involves redesigning workflows. Instead of replacing employees with AI, forward-thinking companies are using AI to augment their workforce, automating tedious tasks to free up employees for more strategic, creative, and collaborative work.

Redefining Purpose Beyond the Traditional Job

The Great Unbundling is more than an economic shift; it's a philosophical one. For generations, our sense of purpose and identity has been intrinsically linked to our jobs. As AI unbundles the tasks that once defined our professional lives, we are forced to ask a deeper question: What is our purpose when our economic value is no longer tied to our bundled capabilities?

This challenge opens the door to a future where purpose is defined not just by what we do for a living, but by our creativity, our communities, our curiosity, and our capacity for human connection. The future of work with AI is not a dystopian narrative of human obsolescence, but an invitation to focus on what makes us irreplaceable.

To delve deeper into the societal and philosophical implications of this transformation and the potential for new social contracts like Universal Basic Income, explore the concepts laid out in J.Y. Sterling's [Link to 'The Great Unbundling' book page].

Your Next Steps

The future of work is not something that happens to us; it is something we can actively shape.

1. Assess Your Current Skill Bundle: Identify the core capabilities in your current role. Which are susceptible to automation? Which are uniquely human?
2. Start Your Re-bundling Journey: Intentionally cultivate skills in areas like complex problem-solving, emotional intelligence, and strategic thinking. Explore how you can learn to work with AI tools to augment your abilities.
3. Engage with the Conversation: The future of work requires a societal dialogue. subscribe to our newsletter for ongoing analysis and join the conversation about how we can build a future that is both technologically advanced and profoundly human.