AGI won't eliminate all jobs because many roles contain a "Human Premium"—value tied to human involvement that AI cannot replicate. This includes inherent demands for relationship, embodied presence, trust, legal accountability, translation of complex needs, and encouragement for behavior change, ensuring durable roles for people.
AI's job-creation potential stems from its ability to unlock demand in six ways: price, access, complexity, continuity, personalization, and relational value. This moves beyond the simple narrative of cost reduction, providing a framework for identifying new markets and services that AI will make viable.
A key "human premium" job category will be the human "translator" who converts a client's messy desires into effective AI-mediated work. This role adds economic value by saving the client from needing to master complex AI tools, creating a profitable margin on top of cheap, underlying AI output.
Future AI-driven jobs won't just be technical roles like "prompt engineer." They will be broad service archetypes that emerge from new AI-enabled paradigms. These include "Navigators" guiding users through complex systems and "Continuous Support Workers" providing human oversight for AI-monitored services like healthcare.
Beyond making current services cheaper (the "Affordability Unlock"), AI enables a "Possibility Unlock" by making new service models operationally feasible at scale. This creates net-new demand for services, like continuous preventative healthcare, that couldn't exist before, fostering entirely new markets and job ecosystems.
The core question isn't whether AI is capable of a task, but whether an AI-only solution meets the market's demand for trust, accountability, and relationship. This reframes the debate from a technical capability issue to a service design problem, highlighting where human involvement remains essential and valuable.