When being a SysAdmin wasn't a viable option anymore, I ended up making gears, and gear like objects (such as vanes for water meters) in a Gear cutting job shop. The pay and commute were horrible, but I know some, if not most, of those gears will still be in use in the year 2100, long after I'm gone.
By sending manufacturing jobs overseas for decades, America sold out blue collar families so that the rich could get richer. After if/when AI will do the same to middle-class white collar workers, maybe people will realize that it's long overdue that we eat the rich.
While some labor intensive jobs did migrate overseas, most job losses were to automation, not other countries. Today 2% of people are in agriculture and production is higher than its ever been. This pattern is reflected across the spectrum. Overall American production in 2024 is up there with the best production years ever.
And yes, automation improves profits thus enriching the owner class.
Overall the value of production is still there. America is still the richest country. It's not the amount of richness that is the problem, it's the distribution of riches.
Europe for example followed a path of high taxation, high benefits for all. People work less, but get more. Sure, it's harder to be a billionaire but it's also harder to be completely destitute or medically bankrupt. (Not impossible obviously, just harder.)
AI will be a net gain in Europe. Productivity per man hour increases, and society is already primed to pass that saving onto the public - perhaps shorter working hours, perhaps more leave, perhaps more benefits.
Unfortunately the US is not going to adapt to AI as well, because culturally the US treats thr unemployed badly. Unemployment is the intimate Calvanistic sin, and has connotations of laziness. The concepts of universal health care, unrestricted unemployment grants, taxing the rich to fund the poor are against the very ethos of the American way.
The ease with which social programs are gutted, unions disparaged, taxes on the rich reduced would suggest that the public still sees wealth and worth the same. This is cultural, not political, and it will take generations to change.
So no, there are no "blue collar manufacturering" jobs coming back. And white collar jobs are just as susceptible to automation. Indeed computerization has already gobbled up a bunch of those.
But perhaps, maybe, hopefully, we can start moving to a place where we disassociate 'job' from 'worth' to a place where the excess of plenty can be shared.
I'm slowly building a business which produces and sells plant tissue cultures. I have many years to go before I can do it full time, but that's the goal in around 5 years. One of the big challenges is scaling up. This work is fairly labour intensive once you've got several batches on the go, and different species and protocols lead to different timelines and so on. There's always something to do. At some point, assuming things pick up, I'll have to go all in on the business. That'll be scary. There'll be an extremely busy liminal zone in which I have a full time job and thousands of cultures to manage. The margins aren't incredible, so it'll be a slog with fairly limited rewards. However, once I get past that zone and can leverage economies of scale and more safely invest more in the business, it should get quite a bit easier. Here's hoping. The risk and sweat equity factor is truly not appreciated if you haven't done it before.
That frankly sounds fascinating & amazing. Are the cultures used for grafting onto plants or something else entirely? I had an aunt that used to grow specialty crops and they were always rotating the varieties and raising different seedlings to see what they would like grow next.
It’s very fascinating and totally amazing! I almost exclusively grow terrarium and aquarium plants for hobbyists at this point, with a few businesses buying small allotments. As I expand what I can offer and gain more traction it should allow the business to grow a bit, slowly but surely.
The terrarium plants get acclimated in 2” pots. Aquarium plants go straight out in vitro.
I’ve got some blueberries on the go as an experiment because I know a farmer who would like to buy them, and that could be a future avenue to do higher volume. But at this point I’d prefer to stay away from agriculture if I can. I enjoy it, but it doesn’t really keep me ticking like the others do.
I'm always surprised how nobody in these threads try to be the one who gives AI the job.
A few years ago, everyone kept talking about how they were inspired by tim ferriss and rich dad poor dad to quit their jobs and become entrepreneurs. Now people are talking about how they miss having jobs.
People were automating businesses on less then. If you have something with the capabilities of putting someone out of a job, then what about being a solopreneur? Without a large team to feed, you don't need the big markets; you can do niches like say, fitness for diabetics, and all kinds of crazy features you couldn't do 5 years ago like calculate glycemic load from a photo of a hot dog.
for one, because I am not an entrepreneur and do not care for the details of running a business. but over and above that, I do not believe AI is capable of doing my job. it is certainly capable of being given my job by company owners who resent paying wages a lot more than they resent paying the capex and opex for AI coders, but I do not envy the middle layer of people tasked with getting the shiny new toys to actually do the job of the people who were fired on spec.
That's when you suddenly realize that many people who successfully start new companies aren't just developers. They have knowledge, connections, experience etc in another field. Otherwise what you get is SaaS tools for developers... Kind of emplains why there's already so many of those right?
Dibs on being a politician. I have never heard about a starving one, and it doesn't require an awful lot of skills beside being a good liar. (This is only half-joke. I do have some vague aspirations for changing some public stuff that grind my gears)
In my experience, it does require a lot of skills. You won't notice them if you only interact with politicians through reading about them in the news, but successful politicians have a lot of charisma, are very good at remembering names and faces of people they meet once at a crowded party, and are good at spinning answers to make everyone hear what they wanted to hear.
The most essential talent required of politicians is to extract the greatest amount of donations, funding for themselves and their party. Below the media polished image, it is all about money. Power is about being able to get the money.
>[they] are good at spinning answers to make everyone hear what they wanted to hear.
To me that definitely reads like the original comment was alluding to an ability to bend the truth or frame things in an advantageous way, which is essentially lying's brother, manipulation.
Besides, politicians have earned their reputation a hundred times over. Good luck convincing anyone that it's unfair to suggest politicians are liars.
I similarly half-joke about the same thing. Being "replaced by AI" would be the kick in the pants to finally make a run of it.
In Seattle, I feel like I could get really far on a dumb, single-issue platform: "I will fix the potholes on 1st ave." I won't talk about anything except that. I'll only try to accomplish that. And then I'll leave.
One of the most though-provoking things that I've heard AOC say is (paraphrasing), "I'm not a very good politician, but I'm an excellent public servant."
She is a great politician given the attention she can grab from the media. The primary goal of politicians is to get votes and she seems to be excelling at that.
Well, I used to paint houses professionally. I can also tile, frame rooms, and know basics of electrical and plumbing. I can also make pretty good pizza.
But painting can earn a really good amount of money. Once you know what you're doing, you can make $3-5k in ~2-5 days, but it's a hustle, and you may not always have clients.
Ha you sound like me in terms of your other skills. Throw "decent shade-tree mechanic" in there for me. If it can be done with wrenches and other basic tools, I can probably do it.
One of my kids painted for a while. He made good money but business tended to come in waves (mostly during the summer when apartements and houses changed over) and not much in winter (worked well with his being a student at the time).
But reaching over your head with a brush or roller for 8-12 hours a day will eventually cause RSI.
Something adjacent to what I do now I guess. AI will need humans to run its datacenters, maintain its hardware, design its chips for the foreseeable future. I'd like to think that I have the intellectual ability to pivot into something else.
Building software is about solving problems, if software goes away I'll just solve problems in another domain.
8 months ago was such a different world. I think we're starting to see the first hints of societal collapse, so people are taking it a lot more seriously now.
I feel like my wife’s job is AI proof as a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, but there might be a downturn that affects how much she can earn, which means I don’t need as lofty ambitions for my future job of “farming” - basically 1-2acres of veggie patches, and couple chicken coops to sell and eat.
Many people are using AI for therapy now. Even if AI gets as good or better than the average therapist, I think some people will prefer to see a human in person, so her job should be safe in that sense. But I wouldn’t be surprised if rates go down as the fee sensitive shift to AI.
I wouldn’t trust AI with my therapy. I’ve done “sessions” with it before to just see how good it would be, it’s about as good as Eliza. My wife ripped them apart.
It gets concepts wrong, and can’t resolve interweaving narratives which a human can follow without issue. The advice it gives is generic and impersonal, and if you’ve ever had real therapy, you immediately sense of it’s short comings.
I’m sure a lot of that gets less noticeable as training and models get better, but it seems like we’re plateauing in the returns we get from more training.
Unless something changes, I think that even the idea of AI being your "friend" is a giant meme. Kind of like dating apps, people will claim all the kids today have AI friends and AI therapists and talk it up as if it's just ad good, but there's a good chance that, given a decade, everyone will recognize that it's crap.
Human knowledge is not the same thing as human experience. Create an AI that experiences the world autonomously, experiences trauma and come back to me.
I say this as someone who uses AI and doesn't completely dismiss it like many on HN these days. So far, I don't see it replacing the human being for connection and understanding. Replacing coders? That's a whole other question.
I'm not sure how AI would be successful for group therapy like marriage counseling though. One of the the primary benefits is having a mediator for conversation.
I haven’t tried it, and I’m not sure how good it is currently in terms of actually therapeutic benefit, but I would guess using OpenAI’s advanced voice mode, and giving it a good prompt telling it to play the role of a marriage therapist, would actually work pretty well in terms of conversing with two people, listening to both, being empathetic, guiding each person to really hear the other, etc.
Similar plans, but the problem I have is that property taxes are onerous anywhere near a population center.
The food you grow can likely sustain you depending on where you are in the country, you can dig a well for water, and you can buy solar panels for power. But the taxes never go away.
Ag exemptions vary, but it usually ends up that you still owe a significant amount. Usually it's something like you get a break on the tax on the land/barn/etc,but still owe all or most of the amount on the house.
Where I am, the ag exemption barely blunts the taxes. You can claim the exemption on the land on which your house does not sit, but the house itself and the 1 acre around it is not exempt. Anywhere near a major population center, a house + 1 acre can be thousands, if not tens of thousands, per year in property taxes.
Our property tax is right at $250/yr. It’s the home insurance that terrifies me, went from $1300/yr to $2300 last year, and I’m waiting get the new increase in August.
I'd like for them to explain it. The data I have shows .5% tax is one of the lowest values, with $2300 insurance being the national average for a $300k dwelling. Based on this data, the numbers don't add up. Maybe they can explain so we can learn.
No fallback path, but I've started to think about such possibility this year. I guess I can do telecom support, as in doing physical wiring, installing hardware in cabinets, tuning signal etc. Being a QA on telco project gets me maybe 20-30% of the skills required. But I suspect the pay will be crap, work hours a lot more than 40/week and hazardous working conditions at roofs, basements, in any weather etc.
I would probably not start a business due to lacking initial capital, and not having a fallback option for that failure. And I don't have even clue what to do which is not immediately bankrupt.
Retire. I lived fairly frugally since when I entered the workforce 15 years ago and saved a bunch, so I like to think I’m financially prepared for it. I hope to retire soon even if AI doesn’t replace me :-)
If my financial situation won’t be enough, I like to think that things would be so bad that not even keeping a job would have helped.
You selling options with that nest egg? A lot of people have retirement accounts just sitting there. You can start making income far in excess of dividends.
For instance, an anemic stock like Ford will yield the quarterly dividend amount each month if you sell options. If you sell puts you can also keep the cover cash in a 4% money market account. Cash just pours in.
Take a look at the option chain on VZ and PFE right now. Brokerages (Fidelity in my experience) have great free courses and tools. YouTube is loaded with good info.
Completely out of tech: my sister has a dog training business. I will go train dogs with her and help her run her business. It may not be totally safe from a big economic downturn. People tend to spend less on their pups in hard times. But we've also owned dogs pretty much forever so it'll never completely disappear. And I am certain it will never go the way of automation.
But more likely, still within tech: pivot to IT or security or some other Thing within tech. All of it's still fascinating to me and I could get down with anything, just happened to fall into code.
Either a restaurant or (more likely) food truck, I’ve always loved cooking and have a few things that I make very well better than most restaurants I’ve eaten at (like kabobs).
Or some kind of related “experiences” business even though I’ve never done it before.
It's unlikely we'll automate all of software engineering without also making considerable steps in the software of robotics(since that is also software). This puts many physical jobs up for automation as well.
Robots are expensive, heavy, and require skilled workers to service. Even if they (for example) became competent electricians tomorrow, they wouldn't be cost competitive versus a human any time soon.
More generally, you don't have to replace "all of software engineering" to cause a lot of software engineers to lose their jobs. If you can make your top engineers twice as efficient, that replaces a lot of average engineers.
I believe there are countless ways to do your computer-based work while also pursuing creative projects. Ever since Paleolithic times, humans have had an innate creative impulse—and that impulse is poised to be reborn now.
In the near or distant future, we’ll step away from screens and return to eras of pure imagination—new needs will arise to fill the spaces that our work hours once occupied.
Creators will compete for attention on social media. The best time to launch a brand was ten years ago; the second-best time is now.
You must stake your claim before the explosion of AI and the surge of human leisure reshapes the landscape entirely.
While we are in an unlikely hypothetical of all computer-based jobs going away, I will pick the just-as-unlikely hypothetical of me making enough money to call it a job off of making wooden boxes, furniture, other crafts. Wouldn't that be great :P
As I’ve been lucky to be in computers my whole career and I started taking health/wellness seriously before things got too bad, I can probably stock shelves at a grocery or Wal-mart type store.
Why would they hire me over a teenager or someone slightly older? Because I’ve proven for 20+ years that I’ll show up and do the work. I’ve already figured out that I can “survive” on minimum wage. My house is paid for. My truck is paid for. I put “survive” in quotes in hopes that I don’t have cancer diagnosed or some kind of heart disease and need long term medical care.
I’ll put you to work as an electrician if you get a journeyman license in Minnesota, my job selling and running electrical work won’t be automated any time soon.
I really have no idea what it is like, but numerous cabin view videos are so mesmerizing to watch. There is something magnificent in the combination of machine's power and operator's ability to control it.
The Caterpillar Museum [1] in Peoria, IL has a few VR-ish cockpit mockups that you can try out. I’m fairly certain at least one of them is an excavator.
PS, it shares a parking garage with an art/science museum [2] that is pretty nice.
I've considered starting a handyman business if I truly can't find work in software again. I'd probably make more doing that than I've ever made from my actual job, the only difference would be I wouldn't have energy to focus on my startup ideas/side hustles.
Innkeeper (bar, food, rooms) in some gateway town, still get some hopefully fun human contact, do some crafty stuff. Or probably anything in the theme of “local business in a small town that experiences all 4 seasons”.
None. But only hope is that when this happens we all will be so fucked and so much together. So that is my hope in the collective misery of working population.
But tha doesn’t mean I have hopes that the collective outrage and demand for care will bring something up that’s a good or good enough outcome. In this post truth world and authoritarianism reining all over and all around and increasing demand for the right wing politics and policies all over the world doesn’t leave much to be hoped.
In short - we are fucked, or rather we will be fucked. Will start with IT (services) jobs. The employment bloodbath I mean.
I haven't looked into it for some time, but there were school districts that would hire math and science teachers with just a bachelor's as long as they agreed to earn the teaching certification while teaching. They'd even pay for the classes.
I wouldn't mind teaching high schoolers. Tutoring as a side gig would be nice, too.
To be quite blunt, my assumption is that when/if AI can fully replace everyone like me, then society will have either collapsed or advanced to the point where unemployment is not a death sentence.
At that point, the economy cannot be sustained by armies of home carpenters and bicycle repair artisans. The money will all drain away to whichever gigacorp now literally owns all the AI workers. Society either fails and most of us die, or it evolves and (most) everyone lives.
Bleak take, yeah, but it's a pretty fucking bleak scenario.
Did 6 years as bicycle mechanic/sales in highschool, was ok, could do again. Electronics engineering - presumably in this scenario the software aspects might be reduced, but probably longer before LLMs can do board design, debugging, type approvals etc.
Right now AI has a ton of money being dumped into it. I think there will be a lot of jobs that are replaced short term that will not be profitable for AI long term. AI will not be as cheap as it is now in a few years.
been thinking about this a lot lately and realized the skills that made me good at building products, breaking down complex problems, explaining things clearly, helping people think through decisions… those transfer really well to education.
I actually did that early in my career (2013/14/15), wrote content on frontend tech like bootstrap for sites like sitepoint. published multiple books which helped me get my o1 visa :D
there's something appealing about work that's fundamentally about humans helping other humans grow. way harder for AI to replace the relationship part of learning
been mentoring junior devs and it's honestly the most fulfilling work i do. if tech gets fully automated, at least i'd be doing something that actually feels meaningful
I'm a production editor, I can do copyediting and proofreading. I don't see anything about AI that will reduce the need for copyeditors and proofreaders. All the spellcheckers and grammar checkers we have now haven't done that. The suits may want to believe they won't need to pay for that, but I don't think it will happen in my lifetime anyway.
But if I can't do that, maybe I'll be a pastry chef instead.
"I don't see anything about AI that will reduce the need for copyeditors and proofreaders."
Former copyeditor here. That ship has already sailed. The suits realized the copy desk was a cost center that they could live without.
For the most part they were right. The burden of copyediting and proofing fell to writers and editors. Print publications were closed down, and everything shifted to digital, meaning errors could be corrected after the fact (often after readers caught the mistakes). Technology also helped catch errors before publication (spelling and grammar checks, software like grammarly, etc.)
All the people with that title I used to work with were laid off years ago and are in different careers now (mostly in marketing, but one person is an emergency services trainer).
I think where the real skills gap exists in the AI world is fact checking and getting the "voice" right. I don't think the hallucinations problem will be solved, and AI generated and copyedited text is so milquetoast.
Better be teaching UBI and Marx, or everyone is going to be living in favelas while a tiny upper class enjoys comfort and normalcy only upstaged by a handful of billionaires and trillionaires. Widespread discontent and making peaceful revolution impossible leads to a preventable situation.
Why not? When we all started our careers, whenever that may be, we looked at the world, chose a path, and learned the skills to walk it. Changing paths is the same process. Look at the world, then choose, learn, and walk. Hope is completely appropriate because it embraces that freedom to adapt to whatever changes may come.
Sounds like a problem to be fixed, not a reality to feel hopelessly stuck in. Change is challenging in the current environment, to be sure, but that is all the more reason to find a way to take actions that will invoke change.
>Changing paths is the same process. Look at the world, then choose, learn, and walk
Oh good so after spending $40k on my education to be a valuable software engineer and build things I get to spend another $40k on some sort of retraining to be one of the ever shrinking professionals who make any money in the US.
What a great outlook that is. I guess I'll put off owning anything for another 20 years? Maybe by the time I'm 50 the world will stop throwing "Once in a generation" events at me and I can have a hope of actually building a life with my family.
A lot of us are going to end up driving ubers and delivering takeout to the 5% of the US that makes all the money. They only have so many needs to serve so plenty will just starve.
AI gets the investment it does explicitly because their intention is to not pay humans anything ever again. There's not going to be new jobs to go to.
Quote from Max Tegmark book Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: “In his 2007 book Farewell to Alms, the Scottish-
American economist Gregory Clark points out that we can learn a thing or two
about our future job prospects by comparing notes with our equine friends.
Imagine two horses looking at an early automobile in the year 1900 and
pondering their future.
“I’m worried about technological unemployment.”
“Neigh, neigh, don’t be a Luddite: our ancestors said the same thing when steam engines took our industry jobs and trains took our jobs pulling stage coaches. But we have more jobs than ever today, and they’re better too: I’d much rather pull a light carriage through town than spend all day walking in circles to power a stupid mine-shaft pump.”
“But what if this internal combustion engine thing really takes off?”
“I’m sure there’ll be new new jobs for horses that we haven’t yet imagined. That’s what’s always happened before, like with the invention of the wheel and the plow.”
Alas, those not-yet-imagined new jobs for horses never arrived. No-longer-
needed horses were slaughtered and not replaced, causing the U.S. equine
population to collapse from about 26 million in 1915 to about 3 million in
1960. As mechanical muscles made horses redundant, will mechanical minds
do the same to humans?"...
The problem is it will take years for the jobs to come back and a lot of people don't have years of liquidity.
If every developer is now 10x more productive, most businesses will be able to downsize until they start to be outcompeted by competitors who decided to build 10x better products rather than downsizing. The current norm is to keep the same productivity and shrink the workforce outside of small startups.
Well some companies decide to produce more as well, this happens in every industry, once they can get more efficient for the same price, they see it as an opportunity to produce more.
Where's the scarcity mindset in the OP's question? If it's as you say and some jobs disappear but others grow, the OP's question is even more relevant than ever.
How do you that? I am thinking that with my carpal syndrome and sciatica I can claim some type of disability when my career goes up in flames… but how much disability can I claim?
Stock daytrading, but expect to lose for several years before you begin to win. It is skilled work, so don't get advice about it from those who believe it's not possible. It even is true that it's not possible for most people.
A plus is that this gives enough free time and energy during the late afternoon and evening hours to do interesting tech work.
You're obviously being sarcastic. The goal is not to win big - the goal is a steady income, perhaps even a compounding one. Wanting to win big is above my skill grade, and I get it.
When being a SysAdmin wasn't a viable option anymore, I ended up making gears, and gear like objects (such as vanes for water meters) in a Gear cutting job shop. The pay and commute were horrible, but I know some, if not most, of those gears will still be in use in the year 2100, long after I'm gone.
By sending manufacturing jobs overseas for decades, America sold out blue collar families so that the rich could get richer. After if/when AI will do the same to middle-class white collar workers, maybe people will realize that it's long overdue that we eat the rich.
While some labor intensive jobs did migrate overseas, most job losses were to automation, not other countries. Today 2% of people are in agriculture and production is higher than its ever been. This pattern is reflected across the spectrum. Overall American production in 2024 is up there with the best production years ever.
And yes, automation improves profits thus enriching the owner class.
Overall the value of production is still there. America is still the richest country. It's not the amount of richness that is the problem, it's the distribution of riches.
Europe for example followed a path of high taxation, high benefits for all. People work less, but get more. Sure, it's harder to be a billionaire but it's also harder to be completely destitute or medically bankrupt. (Not impossible obviously, just harder.)
AI will be a net gain in Europe. Productivity per man hour increases, and society is already primed to pass that saving onto the public - perhaps shorter working hours, perhaps more leave, perhaps more benefits.
Unfortunately the US is not going to adapt to AI as well, because culturally the US treats thr unemployed badly. Unemployment is the intimate Calvanistic sin, and has connotations of laziness. The concepts of universal health care, unrestricted unemployment grants, taxing the rich to fund the poor are against the very ethos of the American way.
The ease with which social programs are gutted, unions disparaged, taxes on the rich reduced would suggest that the public still sees wealth and worth the same. This is cultural, not political, and it will take generations to change.
So no, there are no "blue collar manufacturering" jobs coming back. And white collar jobs are just as susceptible to automation. Indeed computerization has already gobbled up a bunch of those.
But perhaps, maybe, hopefully, we can start moving to a place where we disassociate 'job' from 'worth' to a place where the excess of plenty can be shared.
They'll be living in bunkers in New Zealand, secured by armed guards wearing shock collars (so that the guards don't eat them).
If the collars are IoT then the hackers will mount a coup
I'm slowly building a business which produces and sells plant tissue cultures. I have many years to go before I can do it full time, but that's the goal in around 5 years. One of the big challenges is scaling up. This work is fairly labour intensive once you've got several batches on the go, and different species and protocols lead to different timelines and so on. There's always something to do. At some point, assuming things pick up, I'll have to go all in on the business. That'll be scary. There'll be an extremely busy liminal zone in which I have a full time job and thousands of cultures to manage. The margins aren't incredible, so it'll be a slog with fairly limited rewards. However, once I get past that zone and can leverage economies of scale and more safely invest more in the business, it should get quite a bit easier. Here's hoping. The risk and sweat equity factor is truly not appreciated if you haven't done it before.
That frankly sounds fascinating & amazing. Are the cultures used for grafting onto plants or something else entirely? I had an aunt that used to grow specialty crops and they were always rotating the varieties and raising different seedlings to see what they would like grow next.
It’s very fascinating and totally amazing! I almost exclusively grow terrarium and aquarium plants for hobbyists at this point, with a few businesses buying small allotments. As I expand what I can offer and gain more traction it should allow the business to grow a bit, slowly but surely.
The terrarium plants get acclimated in 2” pots. Aquarium plants go straight out in vitro.
I’ve got some blueberries on the go as an experiment because I know a farmer who would like to buy them, and that could be a future avenue to do higher volume. But at this point I’d prefer to stay away from agriculture if I can. I enjoy it, but it doesn’t really keep me ticking like the others do.
Would love to do something around robotics. Or take a shot at self-sufficiency in the sticks.
That said, don't have one. By the time it catches up with me either society has come up with a game plan or we're all fucked.
Specifically, it seems to me that the amount of training data available is what matters & that's very unevenly distributed between jobs.
I'm always surprised how nobody in these threads try to be the one who gives AI the job.
A few years ago, everyone kept talking about how they were inspired by tim ferriss and rich dad poor dad to quit their jobs and become entrepreneurs. Now people are talking about how they miss having jobs.
People were automating businesses on less then. If you have something with the capabilities of putting someone out of a job, then what about being a solopreneur? Without a large team to feed, you don't need the big markets; you can do niches like say, fitness for diabetics, and all kinds of crazy features you couldn't do 5 years ago like calculate glycemic load from a photo of a hot dog.
for one, because I am not an entrepreneur and do not care for the details of running a business. but over and above that, I do not believe AI is capable of doing my job. it is certainly capable of being given my job by company owners who resent paying wages a lot more than they resent paying the capex and opex for AI coders, but I do not envy the middle layer of people tasked with getting the shiny new toys to actually do the job of the people who were fired on spec.
A few more years ago everyone wanted to be a startup founder. Then everyone wanted a cozy FAANG job and now people are afraid of AI taking it.
That's when you suddenly realize that many people who successfully start new companies aren't just developers. They have knowledge, connections, experience etc in another field. Otherwise what you get is SaaS tools for developers... Kind of emplains why there's already so many of those right?
Money. People want that. You need a job until your biz takes off.
Dibs on being a politician. I have never heard about a starving one, and it doesn't require an awful lot of skills beside being a good liar. (This is only half-joke. I do have some vague aspirations for changing some public stuff that grind my gears)
In my experience, it does require a lot of skills. You won't notice them if you only interact with politicians through reading about them in the news, but successful politicians have a lot of charisma, are very good at remembering names and faces of people they meet once at a crowded party, and are good at spinning answers to make everyone hear what they wanted to hear.
The most essential talent required of politicians is to extract the greatest amount of donations, funding for themselves and their party. Below the media polished image, it is all about money. Power is about being able to get the money.
I hadn't realized America glorifies the almighty dollar to the extent that it does until recently. Everything boils down to this; I feel like a fool.
Most of what you've written just boils down to the ability to being a good liar. :)
That's an extremely uncharitable take. Especially when nothing about the post suggested that.
The deeper point is that the skills that were mentioned are very important in terms of getting along with a variety of people.
>nothing about the post suggested that.
>[they] are good at spinning answers to make everyone hear what they wanted to hear.
To me that definitely reads like the original comment was alluding to an ability to bend the truth or frame things in an advantageous way, which is essentially lying's brother, manipulation.
Besides, politicians have earned their reputation a hundred times over. Good luck convincing anyone that it's unfair to suggest politicians are liars.
I similarly half-joke about the same thing. Being "replaced by AI" would be the kick in the pants to finally make a run of it.
In Seattle, I feel like I could get really far on a dumb, single-issue platform: "I will fix the potholes on 1st ave." I won't talk about anything except that. I'll only try to accomplish that. And then I'll leave.
> "I will fix the potholes on 1st ave."
I hear Dominos is hiring if you want to leverage the power of the private sector for pothole filling. ;)
One of the most though-provoking things that I've heard AOC say is (paraphrasing), "I'm not a very good politician, but I'm an excellent public servant."
Wish there were more like her!
She is a great politician given the attention she can grab from the media. The primary goal of politicians is to get votes and she seems to be excelling at that.
Well, I used to paint houses professionally. I can also tile, frame rooms, and know basics of electrical and plumbing. I can also make pretty good pizza.
But painting can earn a really good amount of money. Once you know what you're doing, you can make $3-5k in ~2-5 days, but it's a hustle, and you may not always have clients.
Ha you sound like me in terms of your other skills. Throw "decent shade-tree mechanic" in there for me. If it can be done with wrenches and other basic tools, I can probably do it.
One of my kids painted for a while. He made good money but business tended to come in waves (mostly during the summer when apartements and houses changed over) and not much in winter (worked well with his being a student at the time).
But reaching over your head with a brush or roller for 8-12 hours a day will eventually cause RSI.
Something adjacent to what I do now I guess. AI will need humans to run its datacenters, maintain its hardware, design its chips for the foreseeable future. I'd like to think that I have the intellectual ability to pivot into something else.
Building software is about solving problems, if software goes away I'll just solve problems in another domain.
Your post took off significantly more than mine, but I asked something similar roughly 8 months ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41736600
Figured I'd post since seeing changes in responses over time can be interesting (if any of the typical responses have changed at least).
8 months ago was such a different world. I think we're starting to see the first hints of societal collapse, so people are taking it a lot more seriously now.
Relevant analysis: https://guyren.me/2025/04/16/programming-in-the-age-of-abund...
To be honest? I don't have one; I'll be pretty fucked. I'm doing my best to not worry and be financially responsible in the meantime.
I feel like my wife’s job is AI proof as a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, but there might be a downturn that affects how much she can earn, which means I don’t need as lofty ambitions for my future job of “farming” - basically 1-2acres of veggie patches, and couple chicken coops to sell and eat.
Many people are using AI for therapy now. Even if AI gets as good or better than the average therapist, I think some people will prefer to see a human in person, so her job should be safe in that sense. But I wouldn’t be surprised if rates go down as the fee sensitive shift to AI.
I wouldn’t trust AI with my therapy. I’ve done “sessions” with it before to just see how good it would be, it’s about as good as Eliza. My wife ripped them apart.
It gets concepts wrong, and can’t resolve interweaving narratives which a human can follow without issue. The advice it gives is generic and impersonal, and if you’ve ever had real therapy, you immediately sense of it’s short comings.
I’m sure a lot of that gets less noticeable as training and models get better, but it seems like we’re plateauing in the returns we get from more training.
Unless something changes, I think that even the idea of AI being your "friend" is a giant meme. Kind of like dating apps, people will claim all the kids today have AI friends and AI therapists and talk it up as if it's just ad good, but there's a good chance that, given a decade, everyone will recognize that it's crap.
Human knowledge is not the same thing as human experience. Create an AI that experiences the world autonomously, experiences trauma and come back to me.
I say this as someone who uses AI and doesn't completely dismiss it like many on HN these days. So far, I don't see it replacing the human being for connection and understanding. Replacing coders? That's a whole other question.
The most recent AIs are really good. Which one did you use? The AI is free and always willing to talk and adapt to your needs.
I'm not sure how AI would be successful for group therapy like marriage counseling though. One of the the primary benefits is having a mediator for conversation.
I haven’t tried it, and I’m not sure how good it is currently in terms of actually therapeutic benefit, but I would guess using OpenAI’s advanced voice mode, and giving it a good prompt telling it to play the role of a marriage therapist, would actually work pretty well in terms of conversing with two people, listening to both, being empathetic, guiding each person to really hear the other, etc.
How will you pay for property taxes?
Similar plans, but the problem I have is that property taxes are onerous anywhere near a population center.
The food you grow can likely sustain you depending on where you are in the country, you can dig a well for water, and you can buy solar panels for power. But the taxes never go away.
I think you can apply for an ag exemption depending on location
Ag exemptions vary, but it usually ends up that you still owe a significant amount. Usually it's something like you get a break on the tax on the land/barn/etc,but still owe all or most of the amount on the house.
Where I am, the ag exemption barely blunts the taxes. You can claim the exemption on the land on which your house does not sit, but the house itself and the 1 acre around it is not exempt. Anywhere near a major population center, a house + 1 acre can be thousands, if not tens of thousands, per year in property taxes.
Our property tax is right at $250/yr. It’s the home insurance that terrifies me, went from $1300/yr to $2300 last year, and I’m waiting get the new increase in August.
That doesn't seem to add up. Even .5% on a $150k house should be 3x that tax. $2300 in insurance on a $150k house is outrageous.
You seem to be familiar with the situation. What are the property tax laws and insurance risk where the commenter lives?
I'd like for them to explain it. The data I have shows .5% tax is one of the lowest values, with $2300 insurance being the national average for a $300k dwelling. Based on this data, the numbers don't add up. Maybe they can explain so we can learn.
Yep the escrow for taxes and insurance is the biggest part of my mortgate payment by far.
> you can dig a well for water
You can pay someone upwards of $10,000 to drill a well for you. FTFY!
No fallback path, but I've started to think about such possibility this year. I guess I can do telecom support, as in doing physical wiring, installing hardware in cabinets, tuning signal etc. Being a QA on telco project gets me maybe 20-30% of the skills required. But I suspect the pay will be crap, work hours a lot more than 40/week and hazardous working conditions at roofs, basements, in any weather etc.
I would probably not start a business due to lacking initial capital, and not having a fallback option for that failure. And I don't have even clue what to do which is not immediately bankrupt.
Retire. I lived fairly frugally since when I entered the workforce 15 years ago and saved a bunch, so I like to think I’m financially prepared for it. I hope to retire soon even if AI doesn’t replace me :-)
If my financial situation won’t be enough, I like to think that things would be so bad that not even keeping a job would have helped.
You selling options with that nest egg? A lot of people have retirement accounts just sitting there. You can start making income far in excess of dividends.
For instance, an anemic stock like Ford will yield the quarterly dividend amount each month if you sell options. If you sell puts you can also keep the cover cash in a 4% money market account. Cash just pours in.
Take a look at the option chain on VZ and PFE right now. Brokerages (Fidelity in my experience) have great free courses and tools. YouTube is loaded with good info.
Completely out of tech: my sister has a dog training business. I will go train dogs with her and help her run her business. It may not be totally safe from a big economic downturn. People tend to spend less on their pups in hard times. But we've also owned dogs pretty much forever so it'll never completely disappear. And I am certain it will never go the way of automation.
But more likely, still within tech: pivot to IT or security or some other Thing within tech. All of it's still fascinating to me and I could get down with anything, just happened to fall into code.
Optimus has entered the chat.
I will train to become a nurse. They are highly sought after and the job seems rewarding to me. I heard it's quite stressful though.
Either a restaurant or (more likely) food truck, I’ve always loved cooking and have a few things that I make very well better than most restaurants I’ve eaten at (like kabobs).
Or some kind of related “experiences” business even though I’ve never done it before.
Artisanal live (as in-person) coder at a computer museum
It's unlikely we'll automate all of software engineering without also making considerable steps in the software of robotics(since that is also software). This puts many physical jobs up for automation as well.
Robots are expensive, heavy, and require skilled workers to service. Even if they (for example) became competent electricians tomorrow, they wouldn't be cost competitive versus a human any time soon.
More generally, you don't have to replace "all of software engineering" to cause a lot of software engineers to lose their jobs. If you can make your top engineers twice as efficient, that replaces a lot of average engineers.
What I'm hearing from you is that you'll take up piano?
Advising others how to do my previous job effectively with AI. Ends up being the same job, with better tools and hopefully less tedium/grind.
I believe there are countless ways to do your computer-based work while also pursuing creative projects. Ever since Paleolithic times, humans have had an innate creative impulse—and that impulse is poised to be reborn now.
In the near or distant future, we’ll step away from screens and return to eras of pure imagination—new needs will arise to fill the spaces that our work hours once occupied.
Creators will compete for attention on social media. The best time to launch a brand was ten years ago; the second-best time is now.
You must stake your claim before the explosion of AI and the surge of human leisure reshapes the landscape entirely.
While we are in an unlikely hypothetical of all computer-based jobs going away, I will pick the just-as-unlikely hypothetical of me making enough money to call it a job off of making wooden boxes, furniture, other crafts. Wouldn't that be great :P
As I’ve been lucky to be in computers my whole career and I started taking health/wellness seriously before things got too bad, I can probably stock shelves at a grocery or Wal-mart type store.
Why would they hire me over a teenager or someone slightly older? Because I’ve proven for 20+ years that I’ll show up and do the work. I’ve already figured out that I can “survive” on minimum wage. My house is paid for. My truck is paid for. I put “survive” in quotes in hopes that I don’t have cancer diagnosed or some kind of heart disease and need long term medical care.
Yeah, just insurance is my biggest worry/cost. Cheaper to house and feed a family than cover them with non-employer health insurance.
Expert witness testifying in court against people who negligently applied AI to software projects.
I like it!
Retirement as I’m almost there anyway. But as I work with mainframes I think there will be non-AI jobs there for a while yet.
Hopefully I can move back into the laboratory. I'm a scientist who moved into lab software admin a few years ago, and there are days I miss it a lot.
Hey, I'm really interested in lab software administration as a career. I have some related experience. Can we chat?
Electrician or plumber
I’ll put you to work as an electrician if you get a journeyman license in Minnesota, my job selling and running electrical work won’t be automated any time soon.
Excavator operator.
I really have no idea what it is like, but numerous cabin view videos are so mesmerizing to watch. There is something magnificent in the combination of machine's power and operator's ability to control it.
The Caterpillar Museum [1] in Peoria, IL has a few VR-ish cockpit mockups that you can try out. I’m fairly certain at least one of them is an excavator.
PS, it shares a parking garage with an art/science museum [2] that is pretty nice.
[1] https://www.caterpillar.com/en/company/visitors-center.html
[2] https://www.peoriariverfrontmuseum.org/
I've considered starting a handyman business if I truly can't find work in software again. I'd probably make more doing that than I've ever made from my actual job, the only difference would be I wouldn't have energy to focus on my startup ideas/side hustles.
I suspect there are many of us out there slowly but surely transforming into plumbers.
YouTuber or move to the mountains.
Innkeeper (bar, food, rooms) in some gateway town, still get some hopefully fun human contact, do some crafty stuff. Or probably anything in the theme of “local business in a small town that experiences all 4 seasons”.
None. But only hope is that when this happens we all will be so fucked and so much together. So that is my hope in the collective misery of working population.
But tha doesn’t mean I have hopes that the collective outrage and demand for care will bring something up that’s a good or good enough outcome. In this post truth world and authoritarianism reining all over and all around and increasing demand for the right wing politics and policies all over the world doesn’t leave much to be hoped.
In short - we are fucked, or rather we will be fucked. Will start with IT (services) jobs. The employment bloodbath I mean.
Well, it was going to be pilot but then I've been hanging out on /r/flying lately and it sounds pretty rough in that world right now.
I'd guess something else driving/piloting some kind of vehicle that isn't as saturated.
Just practice your Captain Allears and First Officer Blunt roleplay, and you'll be fine
Retirement
I could teach high school math, but it takes two years to qualify to be a high school high school teacher where I live.
I haven't looked into it for some time, but there were school districts that would hire math and science teachers with just a bachelor's as long as they agreed to earn the teaching certification while teaching. They'd even pay for the classes.
I wouldn't mind teaching high schoolers. Tutoring as a side gig would be nice, too.
The banana stand
There's always money in the banana stand
I'd likely become an EMT, or some kind of craftsman.
Always wanted to learn carpentry. Demand will be soaring one way or another.
Park Ranger. Getting outdoors more and getting paid for it sounds good.
I assume this is in a non US country? Since NPS had that huge RIF, for an already incredibly competitive job
I'm in the US. I was actually thinking more along the lines of state, regional or county parks.
Pizzaiolo, shawarma maker, high end assassin using drones to do work.
Middle aged male content creator on onlyfans.
AI is taking those jobs too
I'm astonished at how fast the scene for AI daddy blew up. These apps are getting 100k+ downloads despite only being around for 4 months or so.
Wendy's dumpster then.
already occupied by wsb members.
drat. I was planning to starve in the streets at retirement, but I suppose I can bring it forward if things keep going the way they are.
Work at Walmart or a warehouse. Maybe see if I can so some CAD work somewhere or be a tech teacher.
To be quite blunt, my assumption is that when/if AI can fully replace everyone like me, then society will have either collapsed or advanced to the point where unemployment is not a death sentence.
At that point, the economy cannot be sustained by armies of home carpenters and bicycle repair artisans. The money will all drain away to whichever gigacorp now literally owns all the AI workers. Society either fails and most of us die, or it evolves and (most) everyone lives.
Bleak take, yeah, but it's a pretty fucking bleak scenario.
I'm a moonshiner with delusions of someday opening a micro distillery.
Manufacturing, sales, or crazy inventor who ends up blowing himself up with his inventions.
Did 6 years as bicycle mechanic/sales in highschool, was ok, could do again. Electronics engineering - presumably in this scenario the software aspects might be reduced, but probably longer before LLMs can do board design, debugging, type approvals etc.
Farming watermelons and trading options.
Right now AI has a ton of money being dumped into it. I think there will be a lot of jobs that are replaced short term that will not be profitable for AI long term. AI will not be as cheap as it is now in a few years.
honestly? teaching or coaching.
been thinking about this a lot lately and realized the skills that made me good at building products, breaking down complex problems, explaining things clearly, helping people think through decisions… those transfer really well to education.
I actually did that early in my career (2013/14/15), wrote content on frontend tech like bootstrap for sites like sitepoint. published multiple books which helped me get my o1 visa :D
there's something appealing about work that's fundamentally about humans helping other humans grow. way harder for AI to replace the relationship part of learning
been mentoring junior devs and it's honestly the most fulfilling work i do. if tech gets fully automated, at least i'd be doing something that actually feels meaningful
Retirement? Nah, just start a new business.
big tech's desired outcome is the capture of the majority of value currently generated by employment
quite how they expect capitalism or liberal democracy to survive this scenario I don't understand
there will be mass unrest long before it gets to this point
> quite how they expect capitalism or liberal democracy to survive this scenario I don't understand
Bizarrely quite a few of them don't want it to survive. [1]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment
Presumably homeless.
Hurting myself on camera (like Jackass)
User name almost checks out
Bartendar
AI agent performance coach.
AI agent therapist
I'm a production editor, I can do copyediting and proofreading. I don't see anything about AI that will reduce the need for copyeditors and proofreaders. All the spellcheckers and grammar checkers we have now haven't done that. The suits may want to believe they won't need to pay for that, but I don't think it will happen in my lifetime anyway.
But if I can't do that, maybe I'll be a pastry chef instead.
"I don't see anything about AI that will reduce the need for copyeditors and proofreaders."
Former copyeditor here. That ship has already sailed. The suits realized the copy desk was a cost center that they could live without.
For the most part they were right. The burden of copyediting and proofing fell to writers and editors. Print publications were closed down, and everything shifted to digital, meaning errors could be corrected after the fact (often after readers caught the mistakes). Technology also helped catch errors before publication (spelling and grammar checks, software like grammarly, etc.)
All the people with that title I used to work with were laid off years ago and are in different careers now (mostly in marketing, but one person is an emergency services trainer).
I think where the real skills gap exists in the AI world is fact checking and getting the "voice" right. I don't think the hallucinations problem will be solved, and AI generated and copyedited text is so milquetoast.
Retirement grease
Economics teacher
Better be teaching UBI and Marx, or everyone is going to be living in favelas while a tiny upper class enjoys comfort and normalcy only upstaged by a handful of billionaires and trillionaires. Widespread discontent and making peaceful revolution impossible leads to a preventable situation.
The invisible hand of the marketplace will be with us no matter how well off we are.
There are many good principles to teach
Why do we have this scarcity mindset of AI taking away jobs?
Sure some jobs may go.
But ultimately there will certainly be new jobs created by AI that in turn will make an abundant future for all of us.
> But ultimately there will certainly be new jobs created by AI that in turn will make an abundant future for all of us.
And what if there aren't? Hope is not a strategy.
Why not? When we all started our careers, whenever that may be, we looked at the world, chose a path, and learned the skills to walk it. Changing paths is the same process. Look at the world, then choose, learn, and walk. Hope is completely appropriate because it embraces that freedom to adapt to whatever changes may come.
Because 60 percent of Americans already don't generate enough income to meet their basic needs.
Americans are losing spending power, say researchers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44270120 - June 2025
Most Americans don't earn enough to afford basic costs of living, analysis finds - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cost-of-living-income-quality-o...
https://lisep.org/mql
Sounds like a problem to be fixed, not a reality to feel hopelessly stuck in. Change is challenging in the current environment, to be sure, but that is all the more reason to find a way to take actions that will invoke change.
Not every problem is fixed peacefully. Remember the French in 1789.
>Changing paths is the same process. Look at the world, then choose, learn, and walk
Oh good so after spending $40k on my education to be a valuable software engineer and build things I get to spend another $40k on some sort of retraining to be one of the ever shrinking professionals who make any money in the US.
What a great outlook that is. I guess I'll put off owning anything for another 20 years? Maybe by the time I'm 50 the world will stop throwing "Once in a generation" events at me and I can have a hope of actually building a life with my family.
A lot of us are going to end up driving ubers and delivering takeout to the 5% of the US that makes all the money. They only have so many needs to serve so plenty will just starve.
AI gets the investment it does explicitly because their intention is to not pay humans anything ever again. There's not going to be new jobs to go to.
Quote from Max Tegmark book Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: “In his 2007 book Farewell to Alms, the Scottish- American economist Gregory Clark points out that we can learn a thing or two about our future job prospects by comparing notes with our equine friends. Imagine two horses looking at an early automobile in the year 1900 and pondering their future.
Alas, those not-yet-imagined new jobs for horses never arrived. No-longer- needed horses were slaughtered and not replaced, causing the U.S. equine population to collapse from about 26 million in 1915 to about 3 million in 1960. As mechanical muscles made horses redundant, will mechanical minds do the same to humans?"...The problem is it will take years for the jobs to come back and a lot of people don't have years of liquidity.
If every developer is now 10x more productive, most businesses will be able to downsize until they start to be outcompeted by competitors who decided to build 10x better products rather than downsizing. The current norm is to keep the same productivity and shrink the workforce outside of small startups.
Well some companies decide to produce more as well, this happens in every industry, once they can get more efficient for the same price, they see it as an opportunity to produce more.
"10x more productive" does not imply "10x better products"
My expectation is more crap produced faster, and/or by fewer people.
If every developer is 10x more productive, that means the total addressable market just got that much larger!
Where's the scarcity mindset in the OP's question? If it's as you say and some jobs disappear but others grow, the OP's question is even more relevant than ever.
Current AI is clearly not going to replace everyone.
It will certainly reduce low-level clerical work, so plenty of jobs will, are already, going, but new jobs will of course be created.
But what if we get actual AI? All bets are off then. The only jobs left will be very specifically human jobs. The oldest profession, probably.
Instead of high paid western jobs, the new jobs could be created somewhere in India. Are you ok to have $20k annual salary?
Looxuray! Mid-senior devs on <$10kpa here.
What about intellectual property and cultural nuances. I can think of many jobs that can't be outsourced because of this
AI has pretty much shown that Intellectual Property is a sham
I’m learning how to sculpt both with and without a computer.
yoga instructor. how is a robot going to do yoga?
MAGA grifter.
How do you that? I am thinking that with my carpal syndrome and sciatica I can claim some type of disability when my career goes up in flames… but how much disability can I claim?
Despite mythology, crime does pay. /s
The same thing I do now, but different: support. Everything ~burns~ breaks
Stock daytrading, but expect to lose for several years before you begin to win. It is skilled work, so don't get advice about it from those who believe it's not possible. It even is true that it's not possible for most people.
A plus is that this gives enough free time and energy during the late afternoon and evening hours to do interesting tech work.
99.99% of all gamblers give up before winning big. Don’t give up after 5-10 years of losses, because you know what they say: no pain, no gain!!!
You're obviously being sarcastic. The goal is not to win big - the goal is a steady income, perhaps even a compounding one. Wanting to win big is above my skill grade, and I get it.