The New Jobs That AI Might Create, w/ Robert Capps (NYT Magazine Contributor)

Jul 24, 2025

Robert Capps, a tech and culture expert and former Editorial Director of Wired, dives into the exciting possibilities AI brings to the job market. He discusses three emerging fields: Trust, where ethics and auditing gain prominence; Integrators, who merge tech with business; and Taste, emphasizing human judgment in creativity. Capps highlights concerns about inequality and the ethical implications of AI, including the urgent need for regulations on AI weapons. His optimistic take encourages a future where human skills remain invaluable.

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INSIGHT

Three Buckets of AI Jobs

New AI-related jobs cluster into trust, integrators, and taste categories.
These roles address ethics, workflow integration, and human judgment aspects of AI use.

ANECDOTE

AI Drafting Journalism Experiment

Rob Capps attempted to write his article using ChatGPT, producing a plausible draft with errors and hallucinated quotes.
The exercise revealed both AI's potential and its current limits in serious journalism.

INSIGHT

AI Writing Is Glossy But Thin

AI outputs can sound persuasive but lack grounded logic and make peculiar errors.
Deep editing often causes AI-generated content to unravel, exposing its structural weakness.

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Is Kant the new code? If AI can write, code, and even plan, which human skills suddenly become scarce—and valuable?

In this conversation with Robert Capps (former Editorial Director of Wired, contributor to The New York Times Magazine), we dive into his widely shared NYT Mag feature, “AI Might Take Your Job. Here Are 22 New Ones It Could Give You.” We unpack the three big buckets of new work he sees emerging—Trust, Integrators, and Taste—and explore why philosophy majors, auditors, and “AI translators” may be the surprise winners. We also get frank about hallucinations, over-extrapolation, inequality, lethal autonomous weapons, and why Rob still comes out more optimistic.

In this episode of AI-Curious, we:

Break down Rob’s three buckets of future AI jobs: Trust (auditors, ethicists, legal guarantors), Integrators (the translators who know both your business and the models), and Taste (the Rick Rubin-esque role of vision, judgment, and curation).
Talk about why Ethan Mollick refuses to let AI write his first drafts—and why that matters for your own thinking.
Examine how “the tools will be commodities, not the people,” and what that means for founders, creators, journalists, and scrappy upstarts.
Get into the very real risk of inequality and policy paralysis—and why UBI isn’t a satisfying answer.
Preview Rob’s documentary on AI weapons and the fight to keep humans in the loop.

Takeaways

Trust work explodes. Expect a cottage industry of auditors, ethicists, and “legal guarantors” to ensure AI output is accurate, defensible, and compliant.
Integrators win inside companies. The most valuable people will be those who can translate between business reality and fast-moving model ecosystems.
Taste is leverage. Vision, taste, and editorial judgment—knowing what good looks like—become the human moat.
Beware first-draft capture. Letting AI write your first draft can quietly dominate your thinking (Mollick’s rule is worth adopting).
Inequality is the real threat. Most experts Rob spoke with fear a rapid widening of inequality more than mass permanent joblessness.
Tools, not people, become commodities. When everyone has Goldman-tier tools, expect disruption from the bottom, not reinforcement of the top.

Rob’s NYT Magazine piece: “AI Might Take Your Job. Here Are 22 New Ones It Could Give You.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/17/magazine/ai-new-jobs.html