The joke
Every stand at the careers fair is a robot, and the only queue is for the job that involves lying under a sink. The child has noticed something the organisers haven't.
The irony
For years we told young people to get away from the tools and towards a desk. Now the pieces of work AI is getting good at are mostly desk work: reading, drafting, classifying, researching, checking. Work that needs hands, a van and a visit to someone's kitchen looks rather different. Nobody planned that careers advice.
So what?
The flagship paper points to research that maps exposure to AI task by task, not job by job. That's the honest way to look at a career too. Not "is this job safe?" but "which pieces of it could software do, and which need a person?" The case against matters here more than anywhere: if beginners never do the small tasks, where do the next experts come from?
What would you tell a 15-year-old to learn now? Tell us in the comments, or respond to the paper.
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