Predicting this matter is the easiest way to get proven wrong.

But over the years, I’ve developed a habit—thinking seriously every six months about “what is happening in the next two to five years.”
Not to predict accurately, but to calibrate my decision-making model.
Below are some judgments based on current trends, not necessarily correct, but all carefully considered by me.
Career structure: from “substitution” to “assist and elevate,” then to “symbiosis”
The narrative of “AI replacing human jobs” has been shouted for two years. But if you look over five years, what’s more likely to happen isn’t “large-scale replacement,” but a thorough restructuring of occupational skill sets.
Specifically, in five years, there will be three obvious layers:
The bottom layer: jobs completely replaced by AI. This layer is smaller than many imagine. What will truly disappear are those “decision-density extremely low” jobs—purely templated copywriting, data entry that doesn’t require judgment, customer service responses with fixed procedures. These jobs essentially didn’t need “humans” in the first place; it’s just that there were no cheaper solutions before.
The middle layer—and also the largest: human-AI collaboration becomes the default working mode. Programmers no longer write every line of code by hand but are responsible for designing architecture, reviewing AI-generated code, and handling edge cases that AI can’t manage. Designers no longer draw from scratch but define visual strategies, filter, and train AI outputs. Lawyers use AI for case retrieval and initial drafts of legal documents, focusing on strategy formulation and courtroom debate.
The top layer: purely human judgment-intensive work. Corporate strategic decision-making, cross-departmental