The Turing Trap is turning into a Talent Trap: The wrong AI strategy could strand millions of skilled workers

The new fear around AI isn’t just that machines will do more work. It’s that companies will start thinking about workers as a fixed supply to be sorted, rather than people who can grow into better jobs.

That’s the warning in Fortune’s latest commentary, which builds on Eric Brynjolfsson’s 2022 idea of the “Turing Trap”: treating AI as a human imitation contest instead of a tool that extends what people can do. The piece argues the nastier version is the “Talent Trap,” where employers assume skill lives mostly in degrees and schools, while everyone else is just labor waiting to be slotted into process.

The author pushes back with a different picture of how work actually moves. In the U.S., about 10 million workers a year move from one job to a higher-paid one using skills they picked up on the job, and that pool is five times bigger than the number of new college graduates. Half of those upwardly mobile workers are STARs — Skilled Through Alternative Routes — and many pass through a relatively small set of gateway jobs.

Those gateway jobs matter because they are the bridge. Around 75 occupations account for 62% of the job-to-job changes that lead to higher pay. Customer service representatives, for instance, often move into sales or dispatching by carrying over the same core abilities: listening well, reading people, staying calm, and keeping the conversation moving when things get tense.

The uncomfortable part is that Opportunity@Work and Brookings found roughly half the chances to move out of gateway jobs and into higher-paid work are highly exposed to AI. That means the same technology that can automate parts of customer support or admin work could also become a tool for building skills, if companies choose that route instead of simply cutting jobs. The article points to Walmart’s plan to keep headcount steady even as every job changes, and says its stock rose twice as fast as the S&P index in the following six months.

The broader argument is simple: if AI is used to replace working learners, the damage spreads far beyond the people in those roles. If it is used to redesign work around human judgment and tacit knowledge, companies get a bigger talent pipeline, not a smaller one. The source calls that shift “Amplified Intention,” which is a neater label than a lot of corporate AI plans deserve.