Messy jobs: The future of work and education

When people hear that AI can write, code, and diagnose, they often jump to a dire conclusion: if machines can think, human labor is doomed. Yet this gloomy belief misreads the basic economics of work.

In this seminar, Yanhui Wu draws on his co-authored book with Jin Li, Messy Jobs: The Work That AI Cannot Reach, to show that the economy is a web of messy jobs, derived from human needs, organizational frictions, institutional rules, and social expectations that no technology, however powerful, can optimize from the outside. The messiness of jobs is the irreducible tangle of judgment, context, relationships, and improvisation that constitutes most real work. This is the core of the future of work and education.