The Non-AI AI Jobs

Want to get a job in the Bay Area? The fastest-growing listings are for operations engineers, applied scientists, senior machine-learning engineers, principal cloud architects, forward-deployed engineers, and the like, according to Laura Ullrich, the director of economic research in North America at the Indeed Hiring Lab.

“A year ago, people were very concerned about these types of jobs not coming to fruition,” she told me.

Today, “it’s all AI.

It’s all AI jobs.” Or not quite all .

Demand for estheticians, Pilates instructors, massage therapists, therapist therapists, and interior designers is also surging.

And in a way, those are AI jobs too.

It makes sense that someone earning seven figures a year at Anthropic would want a skilled person to untie the knots in their back and another to untie the knots in their psyche.

Or that someone working a 72-hour-a-week, “ 996 ” schedule at Nvidia would not have time to shop for lamps for their Mission-style mansion on their own.

Extraordinary wealth wants extraordinary luxuries.

If history is any guide, what is happening in San Francisco and Santa Clara will happen in Indianapolis, Baton Rouge, and elsewhere too.

AI will destroy jobs.

AI will create jobs.

And AI will create wealth that will create jobs—an obscure and overlooked aspect of how technological change shapes the labor market, and one that, in the long term, might be the most transformative. [ Annie Lowrey: Time to consider becoming a bricklayer ] AI and other general-purpose technologies—powerful and adaptable inventions, such as the printing press and the internet, rather than narrowly applicable (if cool!) innovations like the walkie-talkie and the IV—have first-order, second-order, and third-order effects on employment.

ChatGPT and Claude Code, for example, are eradicating jobs for interpreters and call-center employees, and generating jobs for electricians constructing data centers and machine-learning experts constructing algorithms.