In a Future Driven by Artificial Intelligence, “Career Adjacency” Offers Humans Agency

“However trendy this new semantic shift, the word is more relevant than ever: “Career adjacency” is now the future of human work.”

The word “adjacent” is enjoying a popularity spike. It has transcended its literal meaning of “next to” (“the parking lot is adjacent to a hair salon”), morphing seemingly overnight into something figurative and, at times, positively buzzy—as in “wellness-adjacent” products and “tech-adjacent” companies. However trendy this new semantic shift, the word is more relevant than ever: “Career adjacency” is now the future of human work. The shift also offers reassurance to those who envision a bleak future in which artificial intelligence (AI) has eliminated virtually all jobs outside the tech industry.

It is true that technology continues to evolve, assuming many roles that were once performed by people. But a 2020 Massachusetts Institute of Technology report concluded that the fear of AI leading to “mass unemployment” is likely unfounded: “Like all previous labor-saving technologies…AI will enable new industries to emerge, creating more new jobs than are lost to the technology.” The report even envisions a workforce in which people and computers work together “as ‘superminds’—to do both cognitive and physical tasks that could not be done before.”

Enter career adjacency, which often comes to the fore when some form of human work seems ripe for extinction. Take banking as an example. Even with the proliferation of automated teller machines (ATMs), bank tellers still exist. They exist because ATMs cannot replace the work done by beings who possess the skills for human work. Today’s tellers still accept deposits and cash checks, but they are free to do much more because of ATMs. People troubleshoot and problem-solve, as well as provide information through personal interaction with customers. Automated tellers cannot perform these functions in the same efficient, interpersonal, empathic way.