You’re describing task reallocation, but the bigger second-order effect is where the firm can now source the remaining human judgment.

AI reduces the penalty for weak domain context. Once the work is packaged like that, the “thinking part” becomes far easier to offshore because:

- Training time drops as you’re not teaching the whole craft, you’re teaching exception-handling around an AI-driven pipeline.

- Quality becomes more auditable because outputs can be checked with automated review layers.

- Communication overhead shrinks with fewer back-and-forth cycles when AI pre-fills and structures the work.

- Labor arbitrage expands and the limiting factor stops being “can we find someone locally who knows our messy process” and becomes “who is cheapest who can supervise and resolve exceptions.”

So yeah, the jobs mostly remain and some people become more valuable. But the clearing price for that labor moves toward the global minimum faster than it used to.

The impact won’t show up as “no jobs,” it is already showing up as stagnant or declining Western salaries, thinner career ladders, and more of the value captured by the firms that own the workflows rather than the people doing the work.

Isn't that what a well run company does when creating a process? Bureaucracy and process, reduces the penalty of weak domain context and in fact is designed to obviate that need. It "diffuses" the domain knowledge to a set of specifications, documents, and processes. AI may be able to accelerate it, or subsume that bureaucracy. But since when has the limiting factor been "finding someone locally who knows the process?" Once you document a process, the power of computing means you can outsource any of that you want no? Again, AI may subsume, all the back office or bureaucratic office work. Perhaps it will totally restructure the way humans organize labor, run companies, and coordinate. But that system will have to select for a different set of skills than "filling out n forms quickly and accurately." The wage stagnation etc etc. predates AI and might be due to other structural factors.

"it is already showing up as stagnant or declining Western salaries"

Real median salary, and real median wages are both rising for the last couple years. Maybe they would have risen faster if there was no AI, but I don't think you can say there has been a discernible impact yet.

> AI reduces the penalty for weak domain context

This is why (personal experience) I am seeing a lot of FullStack jobs compared to specialized Backend, FE, Ops roles. AI does 90% of the job of a senior engineer (What the CEOs believe) and the companies now want someone that can do the full "100" and not just supply the missing "10". So that remaining 90 is now coming from an amalgamation of other responsibilities.