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What will be left for us to work on?

Arvind Narayanan · 13 Jul 2026

Read the piece on normaltech.ai ↗

3 korrents from this piece ↓

Arvind Narayanan did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

  1. Our reading

    An AI agent can only have two of three properties at once: being general-purpose, being deployed in high-stakes settings, and being fully automated.

    Their wordsFor the time being, you can have only two out of these three properties in agents: general-purpose (a language model based agent that can be instructed to do different tasks rather than purpose-built for a task like traditional software); deployed in high-stakes scenarios, and automated.

  2. Our reading

    Knowledge workers are becoming operators of AI systems, similar to how a crane or forklift operator controls a machine doing the physical work.

    Their wordsI think it is already the case in software engineering, and will increasingly be the case in many professions, that we can think of knowledge workers as similar to a crane operator or a forklift operator.

  3. Our reading

    AI systems are much better at tasks whose correctness can be verified than at tasks whose correctness cannot be checked.

    Mental modelVerifiability

    Their wordsAI is still in a state where it is much better at verifiable tasks than non-verifiable tasks.

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