There’s an old joke about two surgeons who meet and discuss their work. Something along the lines of:

Surgeon one: “Oh you’re a surgeon? I am too! What do you specialise in?”

Surgeon two: “Reconstructive”

Surgeon one: “Me too! Which body part?”

Surgeon two: “Hand”

Surgeon one: “Me too! Left hand or right?”

The joke here is that workers (like surgeons and engineers) tend to specialise into increasingly specific roles—in this case to the absurd of focussing on left hand vs right hand.

This is true of most complicated work. As the tools and type of work becomes more complicated, the people who do that work tend to differentiate into hyper specialised roles.

A lot of conversation around the future of work (in the context of AI) tends to claim the opposite: In the future, we’re all going to be our own AI-boosted designers, coders, analysis, and marketers.

This would be a deviation from historical trends.