One in four Australian workers fear AI will take their job. According to recent research from Talent, that number rises to nearly 40% when you ask about broader anxiety around AI’s impact on their role.

The fear is real. And I don’t think dismissing it helps anyone.

But I do think we’re asking the wrong question.

Marc Andreessen recently made an observation that reframed things for me: “The job is not actually the atomic unit of what happens in the workplace. The atomic unit of what happens in the workplace is the task.”

A job is a bundle of tasks. Some of those tasks are the reason you took the job. Most of them aren’t.

Enter Jevons Paradox — and the enlightenment of monks.

There’s an economic concept that keeps proving itself across centuries. In 1865, economist William Stanley Jevons noticed something counterintuitive: when steam engines became more efficient at burning coal, coal consumption didn’t fall. It exploded. Efficiency made coal useful in more situations, so we used more of it.

The pattern repeats. LED lighting uses a fraction of the energy of incandescent bulbs — and global light consumption has increased fivefold. Bandwidth got cheaper, so we stream 4K video instead of downloading text. Efficiency doesn’t reduce demand. It unlocks it.

AI is about to do the same thing to cognitive work. Every business leader is asking how AI will make their organisation more efficient. Almost none are asking what happens when efficiency becomes universal — when everyone has the same advantage.

When everyone can do the same tasks at the same speed, speed stops being the differentiator. What matters is what you do with the time you get back.

Medieval monks understood this — even if they didn’t have Jevons to explain it.

They joined monasteries to pursue enlightenment — to study, contemplate, and create. Instead, many spent decades hunched over desks copying manuscripts by hand. Page after page. Year after year. Intelligent, devoted people doing transcription work. Not because copying was their calling, but because someone had to do it.

Then Gutenberg showed up with his printing press.

The printing press didn’t kill monks. It killed the copying task. And suddenly, monks could actually be monks — interpreting texts, creating illuminated works, teaching, thinking. Doing the work they’d signed up for in the first place.

Some monks resented Gutenberg. They’d built their identity around being master copyists. The task had become the job.

This pattern isn’t ancient history. It’s Monday morning.

My first agency job was as a media assistant in Sydney around the Olympics. End of day meant faxing order confirmations to TV sales teams. Reconciling booking schedules. Chasing make-goods. The grunt work that made advertising actually appear on screens.

I wanted to spend my time learning how media works. Instead, I spent most of my time on tasks that left no room to think about how media works.

Then at the start of the first dot-com boom, I moved to one of Australia’s first digital agencies. Different job, same pattern. Before anyone could think strategically, we had to export data from half a dozen ad platforms. Dump it into Excel. Format it for analysis. Label creative variants, media formats, messaging approaches, visual styles. Build pivot tables. Turn those into presentations. Days — sometimes weeks — of grunt work before a single insight emerged.

The data crunching was necessary. It was also the bottleneck. The quality of our analysis depended on how much time we had left after the formatting was done. Usually, not enough.

We were copying monks.

The fear people have about AI isn’t irrational. Research from Jobs and Skills Australia estimates that 55% of workplace tasks could be augmented by AI, with another 15% potentially fully automated.

That’s an enormous shift.

But here’s the thing the statistics don’t capture: most people aren’t afraid of losing tasks. They’re afraid of losing identity. When you’ve spent years becoming excellent at something — even something tedious — the prospect of that skill becoming worthless feels like a judgment on you.

The monks who resented the printing press weren’t stupid. They’d invested decades in a craft. Of course they felt threatened.

But the monks who thrived after Gutenberg weren’t the ones who kept copying by hand. They were the ones who asked: Now that the copying is handled, what can I finally do?

I think there’s a path through this — a kind of progression toward more meaningful work.

1. Illumination — Eliminating the drudgery

This is the printing press moment. AI handles the data entry, the reconciliation, the formatting, the overnight report compilation. The tedious copying disappears.

This stage is already happening. According to the Australian HR Institute, 41% of organisations report that AI has actually increased entry-level roles, as automation of grunt work creates capacity for more human-intensive tasks.

The goal isn’t to resist this. It’s to actively identify which of your tasks are “copying” — and let them go first.

2. Interpretation — Getting better at what matters

Once you’re not exhausted from grunt work, you can actually think. Better analysis. Sharper briefs. More time understanding real problems instead of processing paperwork.

But let’s be honest: most people aren’t here yet. They’re waiting for IT to approve Microsoft Copilot. They’re stuck in organisations where “AI strategy” means a policy document, not actual tools in people’s hands. The gap between what’s possible and what’s permitted is vast.

The question worth asking — when you do get the tools — isn’t “will AI take my job?” It’s “what could I be doing with the hours I’m currently spending on tasks a machine could handle?”

3. Enlightenment — Solving bigger problems

This is the destination: graduating to work you couldn’t reach before. Strategy that spans years, not quarters. Problems that require judgment, creativity, and making sense of complexity.

When AI collapses the cost of failure, the only real risk is being under-ambitious.

The path is now open to more people than ever before.

The real risk isn’t AI. As Professor David Tuffley from Griffith University put it, “the real risk may lie with workers who don’t adapt to using AI.”

The monks who thrived weren’t the ones who clung to their quills. They were the ones who finally had time to think — and used it.

So if you’re one of the 40% of Australians feeling anxious about AI’s impact on your work, I’d offer this:

Don’t ask whether your job will survive. Ask which of your tasks are copying — and what you’d do if those hours came back to you.

The answer to that question is probably closer to the work you actually wanted to do in the first place.

Sources