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)
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.
"Manufacturing's share of real GDP has been fairly constant since the 1940s, ranging from 11.3 percent to 13.6 percent. It sat at 11.7 percent in 2015."
https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2017/april/us-manu...
The deeper point is that the skills that were mentioned are very important in terms of getting along with a variety of people.
>[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.
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. ;)
Wish there were more like her!
Politics make Silicon Valley startup culture like a stable career. You only hear about non-starving politicians because you only hear about the successful ones. Politics is extremely hard which is why only people with no technical skills can make it (they max out on emotional/social skills).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Winter does slow down, especially in the north. I live in Florida now, though, so painting is done year-round. I don't paint anymore, but I do miss it.
> But reaching over your head with a brush or roller for 8-12 hours a day will eventually cause RSI.
Absolutely.
It took 2 years of rejection and then 2 years of fine tuning, for about 10 hours per week on average. Then it took a lot of psychology courses + extracurricular psychology courses and relationships to understand that part well enough so that I can be in a loving relationship that will last.
I sometimes talk about this and speak with HN'ers about it from time to time whenever I have some free time and someone is curious about my advice. I think I've helped at least one person a bit on here. So that's good to know :)
But when AI comes, I'd probably focus on this as AI can't fully touch this business. I don't see a robot going out to a club to help train a person's social skills for instance. But who knows, maybe I'm wrong, maybe AI will surprise me.
It'd be a hell of a ride though, because I'm not sure if I could make this business sustainable (if anyone wants to help me with that, let me know! My email is in my profile).
Society deserves more love, romance and connectedness.
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.
Building software is about solving problems, if software goes away I'll just solve problems in another domain.
We may have to sell skills in application domains, so ecommerce, agriculture, fintech, etc, rather than by language or library skill set.
Figured I'd post since seeing changes in responses over time can be interesting (if any of the typical responses have changed at least).
Also politics have had a significant shift. A lot of power vacuums opened up all over the world at the same time. This leads to some instability. Wealth parity will often dampen political instability. But that pillar was struck during COVID lockdowns. Crypto messes with IS-LM. AI is messing with productivity-wealth distribution in general.
It's like a small cut that got infected, and somehow that infection is heading towards sepsis. The 'sepsis' point might be bank runs. It can be cured. But are we doing enough?
During power shifts, tech is often the weapon wielded. When Americans fight AI and Chinese force it into the school syllabus, I guess we'll just see what happens.
Simon Willison did a great write up about the advancements of LLMs over the past six months, and it was a pretty cool read.
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.
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.
Another things that’s easy to over look is being forced to sell your stock when the covered call you sold ends up in the money means you may have to pay taxes on the gains, which also eat into potential upside.
That said, the best "job" I ever had was volunteering at the Jewish Community Center while in college. It was forever ago, but I speak Russian and was able to help Ukrainian immigrants (right after the cold war ended) who couldn’t speak English: go to the doctor, grocery store, help translate documents, get a driver’s license, help their kids learn English more quickly, and generally just be someone they could call to ask questions at any time.
If I found myself suddenly jobless, I’d look to do something like that again. Or maybe even go abroad and get a job teaching English as a second language. I’ve personally found it to be an absolutely great way to break down cultural divides.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Sure, I'm old enough to remember when that was a lot, and I only missed that kind of (paid) user base being "take the whole company across the Atlantic to celebrate" level by a year or so, but these days it seems like even a million paying users gets a "meh".
(If you mean "all users including ones who don't pay", as I recall my Mac shareware around 2009/10 got about 10k downloads in a few months, of whom something like 1% actually paid).
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.
By 2015, it had already become a commodity where there were plenty who were “good enough”. If you compare the median wages in most non west coast cities, they haven’t kept up with inflation. I started moving up to more architectural and then customer facing strategic consulting that and sales will be the last thing that AI will take over and before AI, that could be outsourced or commoditized.
But if you are just a mid level ticket taker - regardless of title - you are screwed.
Yes, my ultimate plan B is to move to Costa Rica or Panama City with the savings I already have. My wife and I are already planning to stay there during the American winters starting next year.
If not... Some kind of teaching or tutoring.
Or some kind of related “experiences” business even though I’ve never done it before.
If that's the case, I'm probably doomed. At 36 that's scary.
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.
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 LLM will eventually do is hide more and more levers away inside of black boxes. They won't take away my job so much as make it impossible to perform.
For my fallback plan, I'm over 50 and w/o health ins. My first serious medical incident will likely end me. I expect career-ending LLMs to arrive sometime after that.
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.
Essentially, make tools for others in my position that are going to try selling pottery or soap until they can hopefully turn it into a full time thing.
I wouldn't mind teaching high schoolers. Tutoring as a side gig would be nice, too.
Handymen with good customer service skills could probably do quite well?
I could see myself doing teaching also. Or just become a barista or cook, but I'm not sure I can handle standing for that long at a time anymore, the front of one of my thighs starts tingling and bothering me (when walking it doesn't really have a problem, it's mainly when I stand mostly in place, like when I'm cooking).
I wouldn't mind doing some sort of research but I've don't have any experience with that, outside of research projects in college a couple of decades ago.
I'd guess something else driving/piloting some kind of vehicle that isn't as saturated.
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
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.
“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.”
And what if there aren't? Hope is not a strategy.
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.
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...
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.
That's been the trajectory of software product development for the past twenty years, at least.
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.
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.
Always wanted to learn carpentry. Demand will be soaring one way or another.
All those billionaires on Wall St? You think they make money day-trading their own accounts? No, they made money trading other people's money and charging them huge fees for it.
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
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
For most of history, the majority of people were born into rigid social positions with little mobility, owing labor, tribute, or service to elites who controlled land, resources, and political power. Personal autonomy as we understand it was rare.
As modern people, we see this backslide as impossible. Surely we'll fight back if this happens, right?
But what if we won't? What if we just make do, as we always have. Our ancestors adapted to feudalism, slavery, totalitarian regimes, caste systems - not just the beneficiaries, but the oppressed too. History suggests that people are remarkably capable of normalizing and accommodating to systems that previous generations might have found intolerable.
I don't have faith in the general public fighting back against this new wave.
Bizarrely quite a few of them don't want it to survive. [1]
There are many good principles to teach
This generally speaking accounts for somewhere between 60-70% of all the jobs out there in the US right now, those jobs called white collar jobs.
For the sake of argument, let me ask you these questions, and upon you answering, I think the answers will become clear and the majority will understand that we are in a crisis where no one is responding because our politicians are asleep at the wheel, our communications have been compromised, and people individually having been paralyzed unable to respond in unity to even save themselves. The politicians are front-of-line blocking to extract value from their positions.
> Is there anywhere that can absorb 60-70% of the jobs in an economy? That is a much simpler to answer question, no there are not.
People have finite time, they must exchange that time for money to buy food. This under austrian and other economics is called capital formation, though its usually referred to the excess above and beyond what we use individually; AI forces time labor value to 0, destroying this. There are limits to exchange where exchange will not happen (Adam Smith). The neglect towards this limitation follows a standard Demand vs. Need misconception that most people have. Demand includes only those that have the resources to make a successful equitable exchange. Need includes all the people who do not. The two are not the same. What do you do with the people who need food but lack ability either physically, or mentally? Not all people are capable of work in all areas. If there is nothing to trade, without food they die. You also don't have children without sufficient resources, and the population dies from aging out too.
> Is there any way to discriminate and know upfront who is skilled and competent, and who is not?
There are costs that any business must exceed in profit, but even more importantly, there are costs that are borne by those seeking employment unpaid, that are finite. What happens when they can't differentiate between legitimate employers and dead drop shredders that lead you on (ghost positions/candidates). This is a communication channel that becomes jammed. Is there any way to exceed Shannon's Limit on noisy channels? No.
There is currently no way to differentiate a signal so you get the same action in communications networks as you get with RNA interference in cellular networks. Matches don't happen, and the effective pool shrinks with the best/brightest/competent moving to areas that are not disrupted (brain drain).
> Is there any way in a sequential pipeline structure (career development) when nothing goes in, for something to come out?
What happens to professions where there is no economic benefit to specializing into that skill set?
You have to invest first upfront with no return; who will choose to do that with a guaranteed loss baked into the choice. What happens to Chemists, Engineers, Doctors, Researchers... the professions needed to sustain our current society.
> When production is disrupted, what happens under systems based in money printing (deficit spending).
Generally speaking, you get inflation to the point of helicopter money. Simultaneously the firm unable to compete against an unconstrained money-printer will go out of business, sieving the money and resources into fewer hands, right up until a critical point where the less money in circulation forces deflation. When growth can no longer move forward, you get a huge crash. When that money printing continued for 3 generations, and you equally have a generation incapable of going back because the knowledge and experience based on the principles that underpinned everything was lost and not passed on.
With no path forward, no medium of exchange, no production is possible, and this is what is called in some circles, Socio-economic collapse.
Without modern supply chains, we can't produce the food to feed ourselves at current population levels. The process of extraction of resources destroyed the natural sustaining flows (Catton). Globally, the planet may only sustain 2Bn people in total following such a die off, assuming MAD doesn't make the environment uninhabitable.
The people who became wealthy will die off during that phase change, because they became wealthy through parasitism, and the inherent value of things largely disappear when you have no one whom you can trade with.
The only people who may have a shot of surviving are the ones who prepared ahead of time (potentially breaking laws that are intended to disarm and make helpless). Basically those who can both ruthlessly defend their resources, and produce everything they need independently from scratch.
I don't know a single person today that can do this in its entirety. Even for the basics, you rely on material dependencies processed with high-tech processes, procedures, and professions; that individuals largely cannot do themselves. The details matter, where many single points of failure (SPOFs) means there's a high likelihood you don't survive. This is the structural problem with centralization.
The same thing I do now, but different: support. Everything ~burns~ breaks
A plus is that this gives enough free time and energy during the late afternoon and evening hours to do interesting tech work.
Have you heard of Warren Buffet's 1 million dollar bet? Even professionals on Wall Street can't beat the S&P 500. You think you can?
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/030916/buffe...