Paul Graham, founder of Startup Incubator Y Combinator, said identifying and leaning your passion is the best way to secure your job in the age of AI.
“It may be a mistake to ask what occupations AI is safest to film,” Graham wrote in an X post Tuesday.
“What AI is good at (in its current form) is not a particularly specific job, but a specific way of working. That's great at scutwork, and that's what you should avoid,” he continued.
Graham said programming jobs are not safe from AI “at the bottom edge,” adding “these jobs have already disappeared.” Meanwhile, top programmers who are “sufficient to start their own company” can still order the best salary, he writes.
“So I think the best general advice to protect yourself from AI is to do something so well that you're working beyond the level of scutwork,” Graham said.
Representatives from Y Combinator Graham did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.
Graham said you have to have passion to become a superstar in your chosen field.
“It's hard to do something really well if you're not deeply interested in it,” he added.
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Graham is not the only person to acknowledge the disruptive potential of AI in the job market. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told podcaster Joe Rogan in an interview in January that he expects AI to be able to write code like a mid-level engineer later this year.
Then in May, humanity CEO Dario Amody told AXIOS in an interview that AI could wipe out 50% of entry-level office jobs over the next five years.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York released its labor market report in February. This states that computer science graduates face unemployment rates of 6.1%. This was higher than other majors, including 4.6% history and 3% biology.
Other business leaders, including “Shark Tank” star Mark Cuban and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, have criticised Amodei's predictions.
Cuba expressed disagreement with Amody in a Bruski post, claiming that “new companies with new jobs will come from AI and increase total employment.”
Huang told reporters at the Vivedch 2025 conference in Paris in June that AI could also create new opportunities, but some jobs could disappear.
“Do you think AI will change jobs? It changes everyone. It changed mine,” Huang said.
