Job Apocalypse? Not Yet. AI is Creating Brand New Occupations

The AI industry, for all the anxiety about mass unemployment, is quietly minting entirely new job categories that require distinctly human skills — empathy, judgment, and the ability to calm down a passenger trapped inside a broken-down robotaxi. Data annotators are no longer just low-paid gig workers tagging images. Experts in finance, law, and medicine now train advanced AI models, earning $90 an hour on average through platforms like Mercor, a startup recently valued at…