AI Is Coming for Your Favorite Menial Tasks

When machines start picking off all the easy work for themselves, many white-collar jobs are going to get a lot harder. About five years ago, I was the vice president of data for Kickstarter. People would come to the crowdfunding platform with wild ideas—before I got hired there, I used Kickstarter to raise funds for a translation of Moby-Dick into emoji—and company staff got to decide which projects could solicit money from the public. For those working on the Kickstarter projects team, being able to see an obviously worthy idea, and approve it five seconds later, was a total blast. In the early days, it felt like everyone at the company was competing to see what kind of fun and interesting projects we could recruit to our platform.