Work in the Age of Cognition
Navigating the labor transition with augmentation, mobility, and a fair share of the gains.
Listen
Work in the Age of Cognition
A ~13-minute audio interview about the report with Dr. Krzysztof Pietroszek, President of FAIR Labs. Produced with www.allais.com.
Summary
Jobs are not vanishing. They are recomposing. The fight is over the speed — and the share. Advanced AI does not delete occupations wholesale; it pulls apart the bundles of tasks we call jobs and re-bundles them around new tools. That recomposition can be the best labor story in a century or the cruelest in living memory — with the same technology, the same endpoint, the same total change. What differs is the speed of the change and who holds power while it happens. Those are choices, and this report is about making them well.
The eighth volume of the Frontier Series examines what advanced AI actually does to work: not the disappearance of jobs but their recomposition, task by task, at a speed no previous technology transition has matched. Its central claim is that the transition rate — not the destination — is the policy variable that separates a humane adjustment from a brutal one. The report maps exposure and complementarity across task families, designs the mobility infrastructure a fast transition requires, and argues for worker voice and a fair share of the dividend.
How to cite this report
Work in the Age of Cognition: Navigating the labor transition with augmentation, mobility, and a fair share of the gains. FAIR Labs Frontier Series, Vol. 08. Fair Artificial Intelligence Research Labs, 2026. Available at https://fairlabs.ai/research/frontier-vol08-work-in-the-age-of-cognition
FAIR Labs (Fair Artificial Intelligence Research Labs) is a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) research institute in Washington, DC. Its reports may be reproduced with attribution for non-commercial purposes. For interviews, briefings or data requests, use the contact form.