Ask HN: Professions Least Impacted by AI?

4 points·wyldfire··5 comments

I'm generally a pretty optimistic person. When I think of AI, I believe that it will augment existing workflows and help people perform more effectively. But I suppose it would be naive to think that it wouldn't result in a net decrease in the need for workers. My children are entering university and will be choosing an area of study / work. Which professions are least likely to be obsoleted by AI in the future?

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From what I’ve read, it’s not one’s that are great. Even five years ago before LLMs were big I remember seeing this debate and it was usually jobs like caregivers that were described as likely safe from AI automation.

In more recent times, I’ve seen a lot of talk about non knowledge work being less effective, for example the trades, but those seem like something you have to commit to while you’re young.

Yeah, this is a weird tech revolution. Physically "hard" jobs like roofing or picking up garbage cans are less likely to be obsoleted than executive positions like COOs or CFOs.

I think y'al should look for careers that can be augmented by AI rather than taken over by it. Maybe something with a physical aspect in science/engineering/history and such, or "specialized" software development rather than, say, generic Python dev.

Honestly that would sound great if retraining wasn’t an overly expensive time consuming risk.

Maybe LLMs can help with the cost?

But strategy games have taught me that higher stratums don't like moving to lower ones.

If you're really bullish, go into software. It will only mean more business software if it takes off.

Truck drivers are in high demand and that's not going to end anytime soon, despite the rhetoric of 5 years ago it's probably one of the least automatable. Ditto for electricians and plumbers.

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