What Happens to White-collar Jobs When AI Is Superhuman?

Bill Gates says white-collar skills stop being scarce once AI is superhuman, so work such as telesales, telesupport, and help in an accounting department goes away. The systems do the work radically cheaper, faster, and more accurately. Jobs are an input to the economy and a large part of human welfare. They bring purpose, income, a need to show up, relationships with colleagues, and a way to get something done.

There is no mountaintop of cognition AI does not reach. In mathematics, models that are still trivial beside stronger ones are already publishing papers, and what is happening there will happen in other fields. The older view was that AI would finish only the easy tasks, while humans alone would model biology or physics or prove the Navier-Stokes equations. Work with an economic result can be checked, because people buy good products and skip bad ones. A poem may stay outside the check, because reinforcement learning needs an objective outcome.