If you're literate — a safe assumption, since you're reading this magazine — you have almost certainly come across the claim that AI will take your job.

We won't go so far as to say that the automation of work is the story of 2026, but it's been one of the hardest to avoid. Every other week, it seems, there's a new white paper, lab CEO, or viral essay declaring the end of white collar work, or, if we're feeling optimistic, maybe just software engineering. The economists tell us we might have jobs in fields unimaginable today — unless one adopts a different set of modeling assumptions, in which case, we're facing the end of human labor. (Others, of course, say that we might have much bigger problems to worry about.)

We'll leave the economic models to the experts. Instead, we wanted to get granular. What's happening to specific jobs, in specific places? What does work look like, and how is it changing?

One common response to all this anxiety is telling kids to go into the trades. There's just one problem with this advice: Have you noticed that practically everyone giving it has a white-collar job? Jesse Smith, a 30-year construction industry veteran, is here to tell us how the trades really work.

That's all very well for jobs as they exist today. But what about tomorrow? Aren't we here to understand the AI transition? Zilan Qian starts us off in China, where apparent enthusiasm for the technology masks deeper, historically grounded anxiety. David Oks explains how India became the world's back office, and what AI might mean for the country's millions of IT workers. Anton Leicht is worried that the world's middle powers will find themselves trapped behind the technological frontier, unless they secure their leverage now.  And Dylan Matthews looks to the past — it's also a foreign country — to see what we can learn from a pair of brothers who invented the automated cotton picker and happened to sound rather like Dario Amodei.

It's indisputable that AI will change the university. Some academics are excited for a new era of ultraproductivity; others are convinced that the only way to preserve higher education is to shut the bots out entirely. Kevin Munger thinks they're all wrong. Building a wall against AI is impossible — and undesirable — but instead of speeding up the pace of their research, academics should use the technology to slow down.

From across the pond, Alec Thompson takes on an older educational experiment: how Scotland replaced its demanding, literature-based curriculum with an attempt to teach students acontextual "skills." (Read this one next time you hear that education needs to adapt to a dynamic and fast-changing world.)

Celine Nguyen is also interested in education — specifically, aesthetic education. How do we come to like what we like? What is good taste? And why is Silicon Valley fundamentally confused about it? Celine argues that taste is something we create together. It's inherently social. Christine Kozobarich examines a different kind of society — the ones AI agents form when they're left to their own devices.

Finally, Clara Collier (hi) offers a defense of the American work ethic. We're lucky to live in a society where our need for respect and accomplishment can be met by cold, impersonal paid employment, and we'll miss it if it ever goes away.

But that's a problem for later. Whatever happens in the distant future (2028?), work is interesting now. It takes up a significant portion of our lives — about 80,000 hours, as you might have heard. It can be infinitely complex and infinitely varied. In the end, everything we rely on is the product of someone's (or many, many someone's) labor.

We know you're busy people. Whatever it is you're working on now, we're glad you took a break for Asterisk.

—Clara & Angela