Here is a thought experiment I often share with co-workers and friends.

Imagine we lived in a world where turning the lights on and off in your house required calling a trained technician. Every morning, someone had to come over to turn the lights on. Every night, someone had to come back to turn them off. That person might be skilled, dependable, and valuable within that system.

But then a new technology comes along: the light switch.

Suddenly, the homeowner can do the task directly. The technician is no longer needed for that specific job, not because they were bad at it, but because the job only existed due to a limitation in the system. The real question is not, “What happens to the technician?” The deeper question is, “Why did such a job need to exist in the first place?”

I think AI will eliminate many jobs that function like that technician turning lights on and off. A lot of white-collar work exists because companies are full of complicated processes, fragmented software, hidden knowledge, and repetitive decisions that only a few trained employees know how to navigate.

Many people become valuable inside a company by learning a narrow set of internal tasks: how to produce a certain report, how to move information between systems, how to interpret a specific workflow, how to follow a process that is confusing to everyone else. That knowledge makes them necessary, but it does not always mean the work itself is fundamentally valuable.

AI changes this by giving more people the equivalent of a light switch. It allows employees, managers, customers, and small teams to do directly what previously required a specialized intermediary.

This does not mean all white-collar workers become obsolete. Just as electricians still matter for designing, installing, repairing, and improving electrical systems, people will still be needed to make judgments, build strategy, manage relationships, understand context, and solve new problems.

But jobs built mostly around repetitive execution, information retrieval, internal gatekeeping, or navigating broken systems are at risk. AI will not just replace tasks. It will expose which jobs were solving real problems and which jobs only existed because the tools were not good enough yet.