There is always room at the top, and there may always be room for humans at the top of any career. Assume (this is a tough ask, I know) that you are NOT one of those people.
What is your fallback job? What skills do you have or would like to acquire that might keep you going? Bicycle mechanic? Teach music to children? Woodworking/carpentry? (Living off your stock options or investments does not count)
I'd guess something else driving/piloting some kind of vehicle that isn't as saturated.
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.
And what if there aren't? Hope is not a strategy.
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...
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.
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.
My expectation is more crap produced faster, and/or by fewer people.
“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.”
But if I can't do that, maybe I'll be a pastry chef instead.
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.
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 hear Dominos is hiring if you want to leverage the power of the private sector for pothole filling. ;)
The deeper point is that the skills that were mentioned are very important in terms of getting along with a variety of people.
Wish there were more like her!
The same thing I do now, but different: support. Everything ~burns~ breaks
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.
You can pay someone upwards of $10,000 to drill a well for you. FTFY!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A plus is that this gives enough free time and energy during the late afternoon and evening hours to do interesting tech work.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Always wanted to learn carpentry. Demand will be soaring one way or another.
There are many good principles to teach
Or some kind of related “experiences” business even though I’ve never done it before.
I wouldn't mind teaching high schoolers. Tutoring as a side gig would be nice, too.
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 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.
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
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.
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
Figured I'd post since seeing changes in responses over time can be interesting (if any of the typical responses have changed at least).
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.
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.
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.
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.
mattl•17h ago