If by some miracle/disaster AI automated away a non-trivial percent of your profession over the next decade or so, what career would you switch into to take you through retirement?
Top picks:<p>Game development -- AI will eventually be guidable to write code, but it likely won't have "imagination" in the next decade (and I am not worried about my finances after that)<p>Beer making -- Similarly, AI likely won't understand taste for quite some time<p>Woodworking -- When everything is mass produced by automation, I suspect people will want unique, custom, hand-made things more.<p>Edit: Fix format, clarify statement on next decade :-)
I would work as a counselor for neurotic AIs.<p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/685736-modern-elevators-are-strange-and-complex-entities-the-ancient-electric" rel="nofollow">https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/685736-modern-elevators-are...</a>
Are we assuming there'll still be a big group of people with non-eaten professions and money to buy stuff?
Or that all the world's wealth is concentrated with 3 guys, so I have to find a career that serves them?
Level up. Use AI to build more sophisticated services/tools. It's not like we have solved world hunger or climate challenges.<p>We have a fancy new tool. Let's play!
I’d become a Yoga Instructor. I was certified as of a few years ago so I’d takes some classes again to renew my cert.<p>Lotsa folks attend yoga classes for the personal connection. Not just the spirituality or fitness. That personal connection can’t be replicated by AI so I think it’s a good choice if AI starts coming for my programming job.
It's kind of amazing that we've created a world where it's plausible a lot of our jobs could become automated and this is <i>a bad thing</i>. We really fucked up lol.<p>Anyway I don't have any other economically valuable skills and I'm not willing to go back to cooking. I'd try to join a monastery if any would have me. If not I'll just be homeless again until the people who still have jobs finally work up the courage to execute those without.
The career I’m already moving towards – technical leadership. Swap programmers with AI and the really fun part of designing and building software systems remains the same.<p>Honestly the work is very similar. Much of what I do these days is conveying ideas to fuzzy intelligences, getting their feedback and suggestions, iterating, and making sure the final product is coherent, does what it says, and fits the longer term vision.<p>Turns out you can get a lot more done by keeping 5 people on track than you can by banging code on a keyboard.
If every job of IT-Security is obsolete (including exploit dev, reverse engineering, pentesting) I would prefer a job in drug discovery preferably as a bioinformatician. I can't believe AI is able to find cures against every kind of cancer (even if I wish).
Security researcher, probably. Once AI takes over any significant part of the software development field, I anticipate a lot of demand for audit, partly because the AI can't be held accountable for security breaches in any meaningful way.
I’d become a burner technician for boilers. You have to be technically minded so there are some barriers to entry, and it’s basically critical infrastructure so there’s some security. They also get paid well.
I'm in automation so when I'm out of a job, everyone is. That said, automation doesn't really eat professions - automation does tasks. Very few professions are composed of a wide variety of tasks. For example while we might at first glance think of truck driving as merely guiding a vehicle, in reality a truck driver does much more like loading and unloading cargo, handling paperwork at pickup and destination, checking for issues that would require maintenance, sitting with the vehicle so neither it nor the cargo are tampered with, etc. Automating a particular task may remove a bottleneck that allows individuals in the profession to be more productive, and thus the same amount of total work could be done in theory by a smaller labor force, but in nearly all cases it makes more sense to have the same size labor force do more work: it always takes a smaller percentage increase in sales to make as much money as a cost reduction could save, and costs can only be cut so far while there is no hard limit on growth.<p>Much more likely than automation taking over a profession is that automation changes the nature of a profession. For example with truck driving while there's much more to it than driving the truck, the ability to actually drive the truck has always been critical and thus things like the possession of a valid CDL limit the number of people who can enter the profession and keep wages pretty high. You automate trucks and you're still going to need lots of people to do logistics, but those people may not need a CDL and thus wages might be more similar to delivery van drivers. Other professions might see a less crisp change, for example I would expect as AI becomes better at technical things like diagnostics, bedside manner will become ever more important a metric for medical professionals and doctors who don't like that aspect of the profession will become steadily more dissatisfied.<p>Thus the best way to automation-proof your job isn't to do professions that are difficult to automate, but rather where automation would compliment your skills and let you do more of the parts you find fulfilling. For example I foresee AI revolutionizing many creative professions in the not too distant future like art and music by offering tools that eliminate much of the technical skill necessary to turn an idea into reality, allowing for artists to focus more on coming up with cool ideas. Similarly things like product development and marketing are going to be much more fun and be much more accessible, though they may not pay as well.
Prison guard. With AI good enough to put programmers out of work, there's not much that is safe from its reach. So, until prison reform happens such that human guards are no longer needed, the market for prison guards will be healthy enough to make it until I decide to retire (or join the Butlerian Jihad myself).
I'm a software dev and it would be depressing if AI took over.
The part I enjoy the most is solving a problem, which seems to require imagination and deep understanding of the problem, so there is some hope I can retire while still doing something similar.
Haha since my profession has lately been nothing but studying human surgeons in training - with tedious user experience sessions - I don’t think what I’m doing is going away anytime soon. If anything AI has been helpful in transcribing, sorting and understanding all the video material. But I try to stick to human problems, and those are a plenty in medicine.<p>Watching them work though, I think I would want to start doing proper medicine. I’m extremely jealous of medical professions - I wish I could meaningfully contribute.
If I hadn't gotten pushed out of the labor force by Long Covid, I'd still be making gears, and gear like objects, in a job shop. Producing real goods that have value to society in small batches.<p>Artisanal Gears? ;-)<p>I'd like to make a small machine that turns out gear hobs. I'd also like to figure out how to skive bevel gears, which is impossible at present, because the pitch of the tooth varies across its face.
Hate to be a downer, but the likely outcome is that a lot of us would get angry, depressed, and addicted. This future is a hypothetical for our industry, but it's happened before with other industries, so we have some precedent to look to. The "don't worry, you'll learn new skills and switch careers" promise has been tried, too. Results have been mixed at best.
I would probably volunteer more in my state's museum and attempt to break into academic paleontology. I've already donated some of my specimens and have the knowledge / skills to contribute to research. I expect the risk of automation in archaeology / paleontology is low.
Collect UBI presumably. If my role gets AI'd then presumably so has the vast majority of humanity.<p>In a field that is supposedly easy to automate (accounting) but senior enough that I'm essentially just doing crisis management on novel situations and project management.
Would turn to personality optimization. After that i would go to heaven. <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48484.Blindsight" rel="nofollow">https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48484.Blindsight</a>
Landlord, author, and a youtube channel (a hybrid of Colin Furze's mad tech and Primitive Technology's silently building and showing is something I'd want to watch and have not yet found).
I work in AI research, so if AI eats my profession I guess I'm joining the resistance in the First AI War. Or maybe we'll have a post scarcity AI utopia? TBD.