Will my job survive?

Are we asking the wrong question about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and what it means for work?

That is a Maya question — a question about form, title, structure. And like all Maya, it mistakes the vessel for the thing inside it.

When colleagues and friends ask me about AI and work — will this role survive, is that skill still worth learning — I keep finding myself reaching for three concepts I grew up with. My father studied a wide range of philosophical traditions, Indian and otherwise, and these ideas were part of the household air. I am not a scholar of any of them. But I was exposed to them early enough that they became part of how I think.

Sthir — steady, stable, grounded. What holds when everything around it shifts.

Maya — illusion. Not "fake" exactly, but the form that looks solid from the inside while being entirely contingent on conditions. The thing that dissolves when the light changes.

Karma — action. Not fate, not destiny. What you actually do — the deed itself, performed with attention and responsibility.

Sthir, Maya, and Karma are Sanskrit-origin concepts found across Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain philosophical traditions. Each tradition gives them different weight and nuance. Maya in Vedantic Hinduism is cosmic illusion — the veil over ultimate reality. In Buddhism it is closer to magical display or constructed appearance. In Jainism it refers to deceit, one of the four passions. Karma carries different mechanics in each — moral causation in Hinduism, intentional action in Buddhism, physical particles binding to the soul in Jainism.

I am not using these terms doctrinally. The way I use them here is personal and practical — shaped by a household where philosophy was dinner table conversation, not religious instruction. If you are a scholar of any of these traditions, you will find my usage loose. That is intentional.

Sthir — What Actually Endures

The consensus is clear about the scale of what is changing. AI will affect more than half of all jobs. It can already perform a significant share of tasks across most occupations.

None of that tells you what is stable.

Task lists change. Job titles dissolve. Workflows get automated. But some things persist across every technological disruption in human history. The ability to make a judgment call under genuine uncertainty — where the data is contradictory and someone has to decide anyway, and bear the consequence. The ability to hold trust, earned over years of shared vulnerability and repeated delivery, not synthesised from a pattern. The ability to read what a situation actually requires, not what the brief says it requires. The ability to see what is missing from the room.

These are not soft skills. They are the hardest skills. They are what remains when everything that can be automated has been.

Those are Sthir. They require presence and consequence. You cannot delegate accountability to a machine.

The question is not "is my role AI-proof?" It is: which parts of what I do are genuinely Sthir — and am I investing there?

Maya — What Will Dissolve

Job titles are Maya. Most of them were invented in the last fifty years to describe work that was itself a product of a particular technological moment. The "knowledge worker" was a response to the information economy. The "analyst" was a response to the data economy. The "prompt engineer" barely survived two.

Typesetter. Switchboard operator. Webmaster. Social media guru. Growth hacker. Prompt engineer. Each one felt permanent to the people who held it. Each one was a product of a specific technological moment — and dissolved when that moment passed. The role was real. The work was real. The title was Maya.

Process is Maya. The way a task gets done — the steps, the tools, the handoffs — has always been contingent on what technology made efficient. AI makes entirely different things efficient. The process changes. That is not loss. That is just change.

Role definitions are Maya. The boundaries we draw around who does what are social constructs that shift with every major technological inflection. AI is an inflection.

This is uncomfortable because Maya feels real from the inside. Your job title feels like your identity. Your process feels like your expertise. Your org chart feels like the natural order of things.

The people struggling most with AI right now are often people with deep expertise in a specific process. They have confused mastery of the process with mastery of the domain. The process is Maya. The expertise — the judgment that built and refined that process over years — often is not.

Karma — What You Actually Do

This is the one that matters most, and it is the least discussed.

Karma is what you do — the deed itself, performed with full attention and full responsibility, without attachment to the outcome.

In the context of AI and work, this reframes everything.

The question is not: will AI take my job? That is an outcome question, and you do not control outcomes.

The question is: what is the work I can do right now, with full attention and full responsibility, that shapes what comes next?

Karma compounds. People who are genuinely learning how AI changes their domain — not learning tools, but learning what becomes possible — are building something that accumulates. Every genuine engagement with the technology produces understanding. Understanding produces judgment. Judgment is Sthir.

Karma is specific. "Learning AI" is not Karma. Writing one clear brief that an AI agent can act on — and reviewing the output with the same rigour you would apply to work from a junior colleague — that is Karma. The specific deed matters. The vague intention does not.

Avoidance is also Karma. The person who is ignoring AI, waiting for someone else to figure it out first, betting that their role is safe — that is also a deed with consequence. The consequence is just slower to arrive.

The Steady Seat

The AI transition is not a binary. It is not "your role survives or it doesn't." That framing is Maya.

The more useful question is: what does my Karma look like? What do I actually do — not what my title says, not what my job description lists — that has genuine consequence? That requires my presence and judgment? That compounds into something durable?

That is what endures. Not roles. Not titles. Not processes. The work you do when you are paying full attention, with full responsibility, that could not have happened without you being there.

The steady seat. Not rigid — steady. Not permanent — grounded. The posture that holds when everything around it is moving.

The views in this article are my own.