The marketing manager who prompts AI all day. Employed? Technically. Necessary? Debatable. The data analyst whose entire workflow is Claude interpreting spreadsheets. Real job? On paper. Without AI? Vanished.
Turn off the tools and the job disappears. Turn them on and suddenly you're essential. The job exists in superposition—real when observed by HR, fictional when examined closely.
The Necessary Fiction
Companies know but can't admit it. They need the headcount for legitimacy, the human wrapper for liability, the meat interface, the necessary human interface between AI and bureaucracy. So they maintain elaborate fictions: jobs that are really just human API endpoints for AI systems.
The "content strategist" who runs ChatGPT. The "financial analyst" who prompts for reports. The "creative director" who curates Midjourney outputs. They're not lying about having jobs. The jobs just exist in a quantum state—real until measured.
The superposition collapses when someone asks what you actually do. "I manage AI workflows" means "I exist because someone needs to click the button." But that's still a job, right? Until it isn't.
Schrödinger's employees are simultaneously essential and eliminated, productive and performative. Their jobs exist right up until someone opens the box.