Anthropic’s Economics team just put three possible futures on the table for how AI might reshape jobs, wages, and growth in the US by about 2030. The pie gets bigger in every version. Who gets the pie, and who has to change occupations, is the real question.

We read that map the way we read every macro story about work: as a picture of what might happen to tasks, titles, and pay. The person still has to answer a different question. Who am I, and what life do I want to live, if the work around me shifts?

That is where phae™ sits. A guide, built for people. phae illuminates. You decide.

What Anthropic actually modeled

The piece is based on the technical report Economic Scenarios for Transformative AI (Korinek et al., 2026). The economy is treated as bundles of tasks. For any task, AI can help a person do it better, automate it, leave it alone, or help create new work that did not exist before. A nurse still bathes a patient. She might draft discharge notes with AI, or check an AI triage suggestion. The job changes as the bundle changes.

They highlight three scenarios.

• Modest. Impact in the range of the internet. Real gains, gradual, hard to see as a break in the macro data. GDP a bit higher. Unemployment and reallocation stay inside familiar ranges.

• Substantial. By 2030, AI is capable of about half of knowledge work, much of it autonomously, but it is not used for all of that work. The economy grows at about twice its normal rate. Wages for knowledge workers stay essentially flat. Other workers see gains. More people have to change occupations. The typical answers from Anthropic’s survey of more than 10,000 Americans land near this scenario. GDP is about 10% higher by 2030 than it would be without AI, and overall unemployment rises to around 5%.

• Extreme. AI is more productive than people at the vast majority of knowledge-work tasks, does nearly all of them on its own, and creates almost no new knowledge tasks for people. That path likely needs recursively self-improving systems and fast adoption. Annual GDP growth around 15%. Society is far richer. Knowledge unemployment rises past typical recession levels. Wages for knowledge workers fall by more than 10% by 2030. Labor’s share of GDP drops hard. Capital takes more of the larger pie. Around 10% of survey respondents land near this view.

If your work lives in a screen, four things stand out across the scenarios. The economy grows in every one. The more transformative the path, the harder it becomes to move from one occupation to another. Average wages can rise while the gains land somewhere other than knowledge work. And the pie gets bigger, yet more of it can flow to capital even when some paychecks go up.

Anthropic is careful to say none of this is destiny. The scenarios are a way to see where different capability and adoption paths could lead, and their stated aim is visibility, so the benefits can be shared more widely.

What that feels like in a person

Reports like this talk about knowledge workers and reallocation. Inside a life, it feels quieter than that. Maybe your title still exists, but the work inside it keeps changing. Or the title is gone, and every application seems to disappear down a long hallway with no door at the end.

When that happens, the usual advice is to apply faster. It rarely helps. You can send out a hundred versions of the same resume and end up no clearer on what still fits. Volume is not direction, and a polished application is not a picture of who you are.

For a lot of people still working, Substantial is the likely story. The work changes under you, wages in knowledge roles stay flat, and more switching is ahead. Extreme makes the between-jobs stretch urgent. Either way, the gap is the same. Before you can figure out what to do next, you need a clear picture of who you are and the life you want to live.

We already wrote the market version of that gap in The Path Broke Before the Search Got Harder and the on-ramp version in Why the Career On-Ramp Is Closing in 2026.

Where phae sits

We built phae for exactly that gap. Not to help you apply faster, but to walk with you through the stretch before an offer, and the stretch after a role stops holding.

The loop is simple on purpose, and it starts with you.

DNA. This is a deep picture of you: your strengths, your values, how you want to live, what drains you, what you keep coming back to. It maps the person, not the last job description.

Options. From there, you see a few pathways that actually sound like you, including how that work is changing. These are pathways you can try on, not a list of openings.

Narrative. This turns all of that into the story of who you are and where you might go, in language you can stand behind when someone asks you a real question.

Action Plan, Snapshot, Talk. Finally, you choose your next steps, share a Snapshot so an advisor, a mentor, or someone in your network can see you clearly, and talk it all through with the guide.

Two doors matter most for the Anthropic map.

Staying Ahead is for people who still have a job while the work underneath the title keeps shifting. In the Substantial scenario, that becomes the common case: capability rising, wages in knowledge work staying flat, more switching ahead. The work here is to see yourself clearly before the market decides for you.

The Day After is for people who have been displaced or are between roles. The Extreme scenario makes that urgent: unemployment up in knowledge work, wages down for that group, and a long road to land in a different occupation. The starting work is the same. Who are you, what still travels, what life do you want to live. Then a few honest pathways, instead of a blast of applications pretending to be a plan.

phae does not list jobs, and it does not promise a seat, a title, or a paycheck. It will not tell you which Anthropic scenario is going to win. What it does is stay with the person who has to live inside whichever one arrives.

The human stake

If the pie grows and more of it flows to capital, then policy and sharing matter. That is Anthropic's stated concern, and it is bigger than any one guide. Ours sits closer to the ground. However the economy shifts, a person still has to choose their next honest step, and no feed can make that choice for them.

When the tasks inside a job change, a title tells you less and less about the person holding it. When unemployment rises in knowledge work, applying faster tells you less and less about fit. What becomes scarce is a clear picture of yourself, a few pathways that sound like you, and a way to keep moving while the economy sorts itself out.

That is the stake. The map is useful. The next move still starts with who you are.

From who you are to work that fits.