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?
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)
Beer making -- Similarly, AI likely won't understand taste for quite some time
Woodworking -- When everything is mass produced by automation, I suspect people will want unique, custom, hand-made things more.
Edit: Fix format, clarify statement on next decade :-)
Game development is an interesting one. Looking at the bulk of recent triple-A titles, most of those feel so unimaginative and secondary that I can only assume AI already took over that field. :)
> Woodworking -- When everything is mass produced by automation, I suspect people will want unique, custom, hand-made things more.
Funnily enough I’ve used AI in my woodworking to generate novel coffee table designs, write product descriptions for Etsy listings, and generate a logo.
I used DALL·E 2. I've had better success with it over Stable Diffusion. Prompt was something like "Create a vector logo for a woodworking site with a handplane and the words Burn Box Woodworking" For some reason it can never get the text correct, but it gave my a good enough logo to clean up in Photoshop.
>Beer making -- Similarly, AI likely won't understand taste for quite some time
Might be wishful thinking, presumably you can give it taste reviews from people along with chemical makeup and can predict chemical mixtures that will rank highly on taste.
All your top picks have "innovation as a requirement for success" in common. AI is meant to reproduce outcomes, which means that innovation isn't something an AI can do. Or can it?
They work on text, but could ML/AI design SimCity 2000 in a way that is fun and enjoyable? or a game like Starcraft? (In the next 10-15 years, which is the scope of this Ask HN relative to me)
It might be able to make realistic text, even storylines, but I don't think ML/AI will be able to make GOOD games without significant guidance, especially things that 'break the mold' (Portal, Black & White, the first "Sim" game, the first RTS game)
ML/AI like every tool isn’t about absolute autonomy but rather about force multiplication.
This is what happened to farming, the textile industry, manufacturing etc.
It’s not that anyone thinks that an AI would be able to develop a game or an app from scratch but how many people it would displace by automating things from code generation to UI design and art assets creation.
We still have farmers, however their farms tend to be much larger and there are far fewer farmhands than there were 50 years ago let alone 100 or 150 before the Industrial Revolution kicked into high gear.
Ironically the productivity of AI/ML is quite likely going to open the door for many people the tech part of the tech community was quite often dismissive off - as in “I’m a big picture type of person and I can instinctively know how good looks like but I lack the knowledge to make my dream a reality”.
Whilst plenty of people that think they are like that often fall quite far from that even those who don’t like the Jobs of the world tend to be quite divisive individuals that too many people tend to dismiss as charlatans that failed upwards.
Overall I don’t think that an apocalypse is coming down at least not yet, however I don’t actually mind the fact that there might be more opportunity for people who really want to focus on the problem rather than people who just seem to know what the solution is or should be and find a problem that fits it.
And if AI can get to a spot where it can actually help people iterate solutions in a rapid and cheap manner it can really change how a lot of industries operate.
Also ironically a lot of other far less glorious IT professions are probably safe, old school sysadmins and infrastructure folks seem to be able to demand far higher wages than ever before which is what happens when 9 out of 10 new people in “IT” these days know how to package a hello world app that has 4GB of Node.JS dependencies and write the helm charts and TF deployment code which probably has more lines than the original Windows NT kernel but can’t calculate a subnet mask or know what MAC address is…
If its furniture you're thinking of - people want custom hand-made things now, they just can't afford them. That trend isn't going to change with increased automation.
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?
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.
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.
This is a good point, and something yoga classes should do a better job of. It seems like they don’t generally emphasize community when that’s what many are looking for.
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 a bad thing. We really fucked up lol.
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.
> 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 a bad thing. We really fucked up lol.
Agreed, we were promised self-driving cars and Tesla bots to do our house hores, instead what is really waiting is the dire prospect of being un or underemplyed as so many have been in other developed economies after sustained financial crisis: most of the World is mirroring what Japan has become after the bubble economy.
> 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.
Don't go back to cooking if you value your sanity and respect(ed) your craft, COVID destroyed any level of competence and soaring food costs coupled with untrained and unmotivated staff have choked the life of many of my chef friends: I went on a few stages to see for myself when I was home for the holidays in the US as the tech layoffs were in starting gather steam ahead of Xmas and new years in '22, and while I got work on the line on the spot I refused them for the same reasons: everything is being McDonal'ized in order to compete for market share where corps run things due to thier access to larger budgets, loans and outside investment that allow them to amoratize costs (and even run at a loss with franchise models) so cuisine is not even a post-thought.
This has made me want to see this entire Industry collapse.
Personally, I'm a Machine Learning student in university so I guess I'll be training the algos to take your jobs if this actually happens?
Yeah, growing up, my understanding of “the plan” that we would end up writing poetry and dance in farandoles in orchards while the machines slaves away our work.
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.
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.
Turns out you can get a lot more done by keeping 5 people on track than you can by banging code on a keyboard.
When the internet empowered more people to do the lawyers’ grunt work, compensation became bimodal. There is more value in being on the high end, but less on doing the grunt work.
I think that’s gonna happen with other professions. Including ours (engineering). If you’re doing grunt work – be afraid. If you’re doing high level work – rejoice, it’s about to get easier.
You see this same effect in design for example. An art/design director’s job is about to get easier. The designer making the 5000th billboard for $Brand based on a style guide … could be tough.
That theory is floating around on HN since a few month.
I find it appealing, to an extend.
Even if AI wrote most of the code, who check for completeness and is on prod support ?
I’m not 100% convinced that legal grunt work translate to software grunt work ( I don’t know about real engineering)
It may, but 20 years in that industry make me think that a legal PDF compiling jurisprudence is easier to “maintain” than any sizeable system.
That being said : it the AI output perfect, flawless and 100% up services, you don’t need human to know how the sausage is made. ( until it broke )
Question for you : what is engineering grunt work ? I’m not sure where I stand at this point. Working in giant structure make you feel like a cog, but I’m far removed from my earlier year problematic.
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.
It must be really hard work being a baker, it's very labour intensive and you sell each item pretty cheaply. I guess it's hard to make money. I'm always so happy in France to see every village having it's own bakery which is always busy. Even in the UK we have a great scene in village bakeries making cakes, bread and sausage rolls and pies and pasties. It's one of the finer things in life :-)
Exactly, we like to jokes that it was set us apart from the barbarian.
A lot of excellent memory are associated with bakery. Late at night / super early. Bringing croissant to a new girl that spend the night. Tea with grandma…. You name it.
And joke aside, in France a village goes to another category when the last boulangerie close.
Their is bread in the US, you find good bakery. But the posh and exclusive aspect of it ruins it for me. I’m not driving 15min to buy a 4$ baguettes.
And yes. It’s a taxing job. You are out of synch with normal people.
Right now baker are suffering greatly from increased energy prices. I hope we put them on full life support of cash if needed. That’s worth it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've been looking at switching to solar installation. The problem is whether or not that is a good move, long-term, is super regional (in the US, and I guess I'm assuming you're from the US). For the states that have incentives to pair with the federal incentives, business is booming. But for everywhere else, the return on your investment just isn't there, yet.
Also, installers seem to make little money, whereas sales staff make shitloads. So there's probably something to that if you really thought about it.
Source; We're having solar installed. Without federal and state incentives/tax breaks, the break-even point on the max system our rural cooperative will let us put up is around 30 years, with incentives, it's around 5.
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.
Artisanal Gears? ;-)
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.
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.
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.
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)
Beer making -- Similarly, AI likely won't understand taste for quite some time
Woodworking -- When everything is mass produced by automation, I suspect people will want unique, custom, hand-made things more.
Edit: Fix format, clarify statement on next decade :-)