Ask HN: If the bots take your job, what would you do?

Struggle to re-establish my economic viability before my marriage collapsed under a pile of unpaid bills. Worst case scenario I'd slam my car into a bridge piling at a hundred and twenty miles an hour knowing my life insurance policy would cover the mortgage and my son's college education. Edit: oh wait...is this a thought experiment where capitalism isn't a thing anymore?

Other than, attempt to retrain and look for another job?<p>Without quite knowing the scope or seriousness of question, it&#x27;s tricky.<p>I&#x27;m in IT, started as a sysadmin in PeopleSoft&#x2F;ERP world, currently a hands-on team-lead. A lot of stuff we do can, should, and will be automated. Which will remove my hands-on portion and reduce my team-lead portion.<p>I&#x27;ve been lucky&#x2F;careful to retrain both up (relative direction) and laterally over the last decade, partially to avoid being off-shored (pretty much every time I moved a position, shortly thereafter previous one was no longer done in-house), partially to remain relevant to management and clients.<p>I enjoy learning, but one day I may burn-out, and&#x2F;or no longer be capable of learning fast enough, and&#x2F;or all the things I&#x27;d like to &#x2F; can easily learn will be automated. At that point, I haven&#x27;t a clue, we&#x27;ll see in which way we get there...

Change my business cards to say &quot;artisanal codesmith&quot; and go looking for employers who value the wabi-sabi of code with genuine organic bugs. [edit - spelling, or were they genuine organic errors?]

Why do only few people realize that bots ARE NOT(!) the problem! Our f*cked up economic system is! If we would live in. better society in which capitalism is finally known to be horrible by a majority of people, everyone would profit from robots and almost everyone (except those mind-sick workaholics) would be happy. We just need to finally acknowledge, that capitalism is bullshit, period.<p>P.S.: I hate communism more than capitalism, so don&#x27;t dare to accuse me of being one of those who my family fled from...

I definitely wouldn&#x27;t put all my fears, hopes, and dreams in to a vote for a politician who promises to bring my job back.<p>What I WOULD do is move to a place with the lowest possible cost of living and become a bartender or something equally undemanding.

Are we assuming a magic source of income?<p>If yes: I&#x27;d take up writing, teaching and practicing yoga, and charcoal drawing.<p>If no: I&#x27;d probably have to be some kind of nanny or domestic help. :&#x2F;

If the bots can pick up the phone, make a sale and get a client to pay me on a subscription basis, I won&#x27;t need to do anything. I will sit on my couch, sip some wine and watch TV. Until then, I have a job.

As some others have mentioned, the title vs the text confuse a little.<p>The main difficulty in the thought process is what is meant by &quot;my job&quot;. Of course, it can&#x27;t literally be just my job. It would have to be a class of jobs. What class? I do a little supervision, a little data analysis, a little CRUD app maintenance&#x2F;development. The hardest part of my job is translating customer requests&#x2F;requirements into action without adverse side effects. So we can imagine a NLP+AI type bot could potentially solve that problem.<p>So in that case, there&#x27;s now globally little-to-no demand for intermediate level programming and analysis. So I can&#x27;t just switch to another, similar job.<p>At that point, what happens depends strongly on the environment. My wife is now in training to be a nurse. Has she completed that training and is so working when the automation event occurs? If so and if her job is unimpacted, then we simply downsize our lifestyle to accommodate the reduced income.<p>Does basic income exist at the point when the automation event occurs? If so, that&#x27;s a fallback.<p>Have any new industries appeared as a result of new technology that don&#x27;t exist today? If so, what kind of entry requirements are observed? What timeline would I estimate to attempt to retrain? Could it be done before the target industry itself is automated away?<p>As a final fallback, I&#x27;m lucky to have a supportive family in the area. I would describe my situation and offer to do their household chores in exchange for room and board.

With condition of being suppled by resources for living I think it&#x27;s a good idea to go into research.<p>It&#x27;s a bit unrelated, but I think that maybe instead of just introducing basic income to suppress social tensions caused by bots taking jobs it would be better to spend the money to create new research jobs at large scale. There are plenty underexplored directions in science and research in lots of them can&#x27;t be automated anytime soon.<p>If there were much more PhD positions that paid solid stipend (and colleges were accessible to everyone and paid solid stipends too) and there were a lot of open research positions, people losing their jobs because of automation would go to these programs and then do research which eventually might make the world a better place to live.<p>Just replying to someone who is going to say that not everyone is able to meaningfully participate in research, I think it is not true. Yes, different people might have different productivity and abilities, but science needs not only researchers generating new ideas, but also laboratory assistants and experimental scientists mostly just doing meticulous measurements.<p>However it&#x27;s simpler to just throw money at people and tell them that they don&#x27;t need to work rather than scale the educational and research systems to the extent that would allow them to engage a large part of the population into them.

Become a Robot service engineer...oh wait that&#x27;s what I already am! Sorted.<p>Edit: I am not an actual robot service engineer except in so far as all devs service automated systems.

That depends a lot on the type of the world we live in at the time the robots take my job. Are their jobs available still that I can retrain for, or are we living in a post-work world where the Robots have taken all the jobs? If it’s the former I will hopefully be able to retrain for a new job or have accomplished plan A. If it’s the latter I’m not really sure. That world would look so much different than today’s world that I’m not sure I can predict what I would be doing. Hopefully, I would be doing some kind of creative work like playing music. I suspect that even when AI is capable of producing art and entertainment there will still be a desire to go watch other humans create. Plan A is to save enough money that by the time my job is automated away I will be able to live off of my savings. That way I will have the freedom to retrain for a job that hasn&#x27;t been automated away or to be able to work in a volunteer capacity or on some creative endeavor without expectation of financial return. I will probably always want to work in some capacity, so I don&#x27;t see myself just retiring into leisure.

I am actively engaged in building as many robots as I can to do as much of my work for me as is expedient. &quot;Part-time Robot manager&quot; is my dream job. Alas, the requirements seem to change as fast as I can automate them, so I expect to be a full time robot engineer for the foreseeable future.

I&#x27;m guessing that when i&#x27;m no longer able to find a job (i&#x27;m a software engineer) our society found some solution for all of us.<p>Might be a little bit selfish but i do think that when i as a person with my knowledge and capabilities is no longer needed and we have still a well working economy, i&#x27;m not the only one without a job.<p>If the spread is to big between &#x27;average middle class people living an acceptable life with an acceptable lifestyle&#x27; vs. &#x27;not&#x27; our society will put that much pressure on everyone above middle class that they have to do something. Who wants to live in a country as a rich person when you have a lot of desperate people who want something from you?<p>Yes i do know that in usa or in south africa they have big fences but i would act and not accept the new side of the fence.

We&#x27;ll all be living in a VR utopia while the robots do all the work and feed us intravenously...

This story has been playing out for a long time now. The plowshare, the printing press, textile mills, cars, etc...<p>The plowshare replaced a team of people doing the work by hand. What happened to those people when the plowing &quot;robot&quot; took their job?<p>I bet it was hard times for them, but you can&#x27;t avoid the fact that we&#x27;re all better off for it.<p>So, since we know what happened in history and can&#x27;t see into the future, a more interesting way to pose this question with an understood context would be: if you were a field hand that lost your job to a plow, what would you do?<p>Or maybe something a little more recent in history?

I would go in the wild to do math and design algortihms and catch fish.

I think I&#x27;d do like Charlie Brown did and set up a &quot;Psychological Help - $5&quot; booth.

As a chef - learn to code the bots, so I can continue to be creative.<p>Aside from that, go back to work on my voice recognition software for gaming.<p>Or become a hobo under a bridge, drinking from a glass jar and reminiscing about the good old days before those damn machines took over.

As a man, learn to accept a life of celibacy. Sadly, women&#x27;s tendency to evaluate men by their occupation is not going to change as quickly as the jobs market.<p>(This is admittedly a dystopian view, but I believe it&#x27;s possible.)

This study on this very concept was written over 52 years ago:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.imdb.com&#x2F;title&#x2F;tt0734633&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.imdb.com&#x2F;title&#x2F;tt0734633&#x2F;</a>

I become a carpenter, probably living in a van down by the river.

Buy robots, obviously.

I&#x27;d become an electrician. Or if I wanted my own business, a carpenter.<p>Decent pay, and there&#x27;s lots of jobs everywhere, so I could have a low cost of living.

Become the messiah to the robots hoping once they realize they don&#x27;t need humans that they would still need their human messiah.

They already did. I started wrestling, maybe I&#x27;ll be good enough to teach it one day. That&#x27;s my plan A. :(

I&#x27;m legitimately scared by this question. What bot knows how to take a design and implement it in software?

Choose a new career where the margins are small enough to not justify being replaced by bots before I die.

Find something else to be good at way before this happens, so that I don&#x27;t have to worry about it.

I&#x27;d program a bot better than the one that took my job and take his (and yours)! :)

X evangelist, where X is a job that has yet to be replaced by bots

I would start building bots.

Become a bot and get to keep your job. :)

Build bots.

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