Which jobs are most vulnerable to AI? | Hacker News Reader

Which jobs are most vulnerable to AI?

washingtonpost.com

20 pointszh327 comments

Author here. The new contribution of the research[0] this article visualizes is a measure of the adaptability of workers across different occupations, should they be displaced by AI.

> But there’s another dimension to the picture. Some workers will find it easier to adapt, the researchers argue, based on factors like their savings, age and transferrable skills.

> Most web designers will be fine. Many secretaries will not. The most vulnerable occupations are largely held by women.

[0]: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/measuring-us-workers-capa...

Any job where human-judgment is not required and there’s clear rules on the tasks required.

In practice, is AI incapable of performing human-judgement ... at the levels most humans do?

If we are talking about jobs (quantity) maybe to some extent. But if want to be honest, it’s qualitative (human-judgment) question. And even if a job seems totally AI-ready on paper, it might have invisible side effects.

(Thought experiment: do I want an AI robot to perform a surgery on me, if it only has 2% chance of hallucinating? My answer is no, bring the surgeon)

I wonder if we will see some perverse incentives emerge to make the AI seem even better. For example, say a well rested, stress free surgeon can have a 1% error rate. Well, lets make the job harder then, fatigue the surgeon, lay many of them off (or just not rehire as they leave) and spread the remainder thin. Make them hit 3% error rate. Then fire the lot because it would be malpractice not to.

If that’s the dystopia we would live in, I’d imagine an alternate healthcare/legal system would emerge. Also, personally I’m far more forgiving of the human-error than that of the machine

For the musk class maybe. But for you and I?

> if it only has 2% chance of hallucinating

I want people to have jobs.

Setting that aside, it is dependent on error rate of human surgeons, right?

even with human judgement, it will become way more efficient because LLM will prepare input and you press y/n. As results way less human judges will be required, so job market will shrink by factor N.

so none :)

Answer: Any job where the majority (or all) of your work can be done strictly by using a computer, and for tasks that have easily verifiable and objective outcomes. And from an economic perspective, jobs that have the highest cost (i.e, highest margins for AI companies to replace) have a strong economic incentive to be automated first. So Software, Finance, Accounting, Law, etc.

Yes - this means software engineers are likely the first to go, along with other high paying computer jobs.

> this means software engineers are likely the first to go

Nope. Grab a random person off the street and ask them to write Enterprise software using an AI. Good luck with that.

The job will change but it still requires a lot of deep knowledge about software development to be effective with AI.

One thing that irks me about this place is the great-confidence people make claims, when they have zero idea about stuff outside of their domain.

I know ten people who work across Accounting and Finance in high-level positions who have all told me that in the past few months, the LLM-steam has wore off and they aren't seeing any material benefits.

Non original echo-chamber Journalists who serve the same meal since years and already lost huge amount of readership even before AI?

Just noticed the tagline of the paywalled page:

  Democracy Dies in Darkness

Nah, they are there because they have a following of readers.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260316095424/https://www.washi...

https://wapo.st/4cP2ZHM

Anything paid more than 50k a year

"Which jobs are most vulnerable to computers?" "Which jobs are most vulnerable to the Internet?"

Management.

Nobody read their presentations and documents, and they are already using ChatGPT to make them and do their “mission, vision, strategy” bullshit

I feel this article knows nothing about AI robots that can clean how a Janitor does.

In any event adoption of tech can take time as hard as it might be to believe.

It might not take 40 years for factories to adopt electricity when it comes to AI.

"AI robots that can clean how a Janitor does"

I am yet to see a robot that could clean my bathroom. And I have a pretty basic bathroom: a toilet, a shower, a bathtub, a sink, a mirror, some shelves, laundry baskets, a washing machine, a window, a door, a floor.

How would you design a robot that can clean all of those?

https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1b592gp/...

that bathroom was clean already, not clear what robot did really

I appreciate that you are taking the Janitor example quite literally.

From a jobs to be done perspective of any housekeeping task, there is a lot more progress in the past year than I realized. I thought the same until it was shared with me.

https://www.figure.ai/

There are others as well, quite a few out of China.

2 weeks ago: robot on the line in BMW production https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2uPkPLijgs

With interactive chart searchable by occupation.

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