Sources: jobs

A guest-post on Noah’s substack, mainly about jobs in the age of AI and speculating that the job of secretary may have a revival as an important human role in the AI future. What most struck me was the description of the origins of the secretarial job that is far different from our typical, gendered, vaguely dismissive assumptions suggesting a trivial task based in low-skill servitude. Robbins starts by reminding us (of something I didn’t know in the first place, to make the point) of the original meaning of secretary: “The ‘secretary’ literally means ‘person entrusted with secrets,’ from the medieval Latin secretarius, the trusted officer who writes the letters and keeps the records.”

Robbins’ brief history of the job’s descent toward its current status is surprising and refreshing.