Post-AGI jobs may be in care economy: 920K new teachers to cut class sizes 20%
paulnovosad · x · 2026-08-28
Economist Paul Novosad shares a long-form essay, "When Intelligence Is Abundant, Attention Is What We Need."
The essay argues that the bulk of new jobs in a post-AGI economy may not be AI engineers but the care economy: nurses, doctors, childcare workers, physical therapists, teachers and home health aides. When intelligence becomes abundant and cheap, attention and human care become the scarce resource.
Envisioned scenarios include kindergarten class sizes of 6, affordable regular therapy, physicians with time for thorough diagnostics, and parents able to care for infants directly.
The numbers are concrete: cutting average class sizes by just 20% would require 920,000 additional teachers at current enrollment; giving the bottom-quartile K–12 students 90 hours of high-touch tutoring per year would take 400,000 tutors—showing how marginal gains in care intensity translate into employment at major-industry scale.
More from AGI Musings
- Why Consumer AI Assistants Failed and Workplace Agents Might Succeed — Appropriate-Path-461 · 2026-08-28
- Does building internal tools decrease shared fluency of industry-standard tools? — adamho · 2026-08-28
- AI agents overwhelm "rights-bearing" liberal institutions — anselm · 2026-08-28
- Lemire: after coding, agents will extend to running experiments and learning — lemire · 2026-08-28
- A paper credited to "GPT-5.6 Luna" argues science must stay open to novel machine consciousness — Soft-Fondant-6157 · 2026-08-28
- UBI polls poorly while 56,000 Americans back redistributive AI policies — deanwball · 2026-08-28