What if the career advice we have followed for 200 years is now the most dangerous thing a worker can do?

Since Adam Smith, the answer to professional security has been the same: specialise. Go deeper. Master your domain. Every economist, every career counsellor, every corporate training programme has repeated this advice.

In her forthcoming book, The Invisible Cliff, economist and forensic specialist Drishti Kohli argues that in the AI era, this is precisely how workers get replaced.

Kohli’s Specialisation Inflection Theory introduces a deceptively simple idea: every worker – regardless of industry or seniority, reaches a career moment where continued deepening of expertise accelerates their displacement rather than protecting against it. She calls this the specialisation inflection point. And she argues the most alarming thing about it is not that it exists, but that markets are structurally designed to hide it.

Employers hold technology roadmaps that workers never see. Wages stay stable right up until displacement. And the optimal window to act – to invest in broader skills – falls in mid-career, years before most workers feel any urgency to move. By the time the warning arrives, the window has already closed.

This is not a book about the fear of AI. It is an economic argument built on welfare economics, rational actor theory, and three measurable variables, for why workers cannot self-correct for displacement even when they try to. And why that makes government intervention not a political choice, but a structural necessity.

The Invisible Cliff arrives at a moment when millions of knowledge workers in finance, compliance, law, and policy are watching AI absorb the tasks their careers were built around and are still being told, by every system around them, to go deeper.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Drishti Kohli is a compliance and risk specialist at a prestigious firm, New Delhi. She holds an MA in Public Policy & Governance and a BA (Hons) in Economics from Amity University. Her research has been published across international journals and she serves as a Peer Reviewer for Elsevier’s Journal of Asian Economics. The Specialisation Inflection Theory spans three academic papers currently under review. The Invisible Cliff is her first book, now available on Amazon and Flipkart.