cyan collared workers

The future of work isn't white-collar or blue-collar. It's the colour you get when you mix them.

For a hundred years we've sorted workers into two buckets. White-collar for the desk and the brain. Blue-collar for the workshop and the hand. AI is about to ruin both categories — and the worker who replaces them sits somewhere in between. Call them cyan-collared.

Pure information work is the obvious casualty. If your day is entirely typing into screens and shuffling knowledge between systems, you should be nervous. Not because AI is brilliant — it isn't, as anyone who's actually used it in anger can tell you — but because enough of that work is repetitive and pattern-matched that a halfway-decent operator with a halfway-decent model can flatten a whole department's worth of throughput. You don't need AGI for that. You just need autocomplete with a longer memory.

Pure hands-on work isn't safe either, though it'll take longer. The cheap and predictable end of physical labour will be eaten by robots, eventually. And in the meantime, the people who do it for a living will be outcompeted by something more flexible: a generalist with an AI in their pocket who can pick up almost any task on a Tuesday and a different one on a Wednesday.

That generalist is the cyan-collared worker. Augmented in the head. Guided in the hand. Both at once.

Consider what this actually looks like. A person who has never opened a car bonnet in their life can now point a phone at an engine, describe the symptoms, and be talked through diagnosing a misfire in real time. They won't do it as well as a 30-year mechanic. But they'll do it well enough — and they'll be able to do thirty other things almost as well, too. Replumbing the bathroom. Wiring a smart switch. Treating a sick chicken. Drafting a contract. The plateau of "good enough at almost anything" gets a lot higher than it used to be, very fast.

The reason this combination is so strong is that AI on its own can't actually do anything in the physical world. It can think, suggest, recall, summarise — but it has no hands. It depends on a body to materialise its conclusions. And conversely, an untrained hand without information can't change a brake disc or wire a socket safely. Put the two together and you've got something that neither side is on its own.

We've imagined this for decades, mostly through film. KITT in Knight Rider. McCoy's tricorder in Star Trek. JARVIS in Iron Man. The fiction always cast the human as the hero and the AI as the sidekick — but the truer reading is that the partnership is the unit. Stark without JARVIS is a guy with too much money and a workshop. McCoy without his tricorder is a country doctor.

For most workers the question isn't going to be whether AI replaces them. It's whether they become cyan-collared before the people next to them do.