Every Job Is Two Jobs
At some point this morning, a nurse cleaned and dressed a wound. It is delicate work. The judgment lives in her fingertips, in the look of skin, in a patient who flinches or doesn’t. None of it repeats. An hour earlier, at a station down the hall, the same nurse wrote up a patient’s health-education plan: structured, documented, screen-shaped work. The kind software has learned to do startlingly well.
The essay follows one line — the machine frontier — through that single shift, then across all 480 occupations, then fifteen years forward, where the forecasts fork instead of narrowing.