What will our kids/grandkids do for work when so many professions turn to AI?

General Chat
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I was having an interesting-yet-depressing conversation with a colleague about AI today. I use ChatGPT on occasion to help with debugging my code and drafting emails and such, while he has access to some of the more advanced models out there and uses them for all sorts of things. He was telling me about all the specialised models out there, specific to fields like legal, medical diagnostics, finance, etc. It really is incredible how good the models are getting, but also terrifying…

He told me his son is really into coding, but they had a conversation the other day where he basically told his kid there is no future in coding - within 5 years the vast majority of coding jobs essentially won’t exist due to AI. That got me thinking about my daughter, who’s best subject is Chinese. She loves languages, and is planning on doing Chinese all the way through A-levels and uni. But what then? If everyone has real-time text- and voice-translation capabilities in their pocket 10 years from now (which will absolutely be a thing), what jobs will actually exist for someone who speaks Mandarin fluently? Who will go to law school when people can use LegalAI to do all their court filings? Who will study accountancy when MoneyAI can do manage your finances better than any person can?

When my son was 5 he talked about how he wanted to move to Wales with his friend Henry and be a farmer (this was during his second year at the local private school…). I now think that might be the most realistic job for him to actually aim for! I’m wondering if I should find a local stonemason I can apprentice myself to on weekends so that when I lose my job to AI I can at least build walls for a living!

Some of this is hyperbole, but is it really? Many on this forum will remember the early days of the internet, when things moved a bit slowly, before it all exploded into what it is today. That’s where we are with AI right now, jobs are already being impacted by AI, albeit a pretty small amount. But that is going to change, it will change soon, and it will change fast.

I guess I’m just wondering what people’s thoughts are on the subject. People have been shouting about the AI future for a long time, and it is pretty much here. What is going to actually happen to jobs? Should today’s children aim for careers with low AI-impact? What even are those, besides manual labour? What can we do to make sure our society continues to function during what could likely be the most disruptive transition in human history?

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Wow :rofl:

There are tonnes, and tonnes of examples where AI has got this completely wrong on every level.

AI is great at perhaps giving a different perspective, crunching data etc, but it’s very far from taking over from what a human can actually do.

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I’m sorry to put a damper on that dream, but there are already bricklaying robots out there…

With regards to AI, it is like every major revolution in technology.
Computers? What will happen to the humans??
Robotics/automation? What will happen to the humans??
AI? What will happen to the humans??

Every time, humans have adapted. Jobs have disappeared, and new jobs created. New generations trained in jobs that 2-3 generations previously wouldn’t even have dreamed would exist. While many other jobs stayed the same or got more efficient but stayed within human domains.

Imagine my great-grandpa being told “your great grandson will be a computing specialist”. He’d be like “what even is that?”.

My personal take is all this “all coding will be done by AI in the next X years” is quite the hyperbole. We have supercomputers and yet we still employ accountants to do our taxes. We have access to the entire body of knowledge of humankind in our pockets and we still employ teachers to teach our kids (and many adults too).

Programming will adapt. It will get faster, but you will still need a human who knows what they are doing to ensure the code is optimised, accurate and above all, secure. Businesses who think otherwise and are sacking their developers to replace them with “AI” will just have a rude awakening sooner or later.

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I read this then thought, “I wonder what ChatGPT would make of this”. So here’s the AI answer:

Just to add- there’s something slightly sinister about AI telling us what careers are “safe”.

You’re tapping into a growing, very real anxiety. AI is no longer a novelty—it’s a transformative force already reshaping industries. The early-internet comparison is spot-on: we’re at the tipping point, and the pace of change is accelerating.

What’s Actually Happening to Jobs?

AI isn’t just automating repetitive tasks—it’s starting to take on complex cognitive and creative work. Roles in software development, law, finance, and content creation are already seeing major disruption. We’re entering an era where being good at something isn’t enough—AI may be better, cheaper, and faster.

But the bigger shift is structural: fewer traditional jobs, more hybrid roles, gig-style work, and the need to constantly adapt. Work won’t disappear entirely—but it will look very different.

So What Careers Are Safe?

Some areas are more resilient:
• Skilled trades: Plumbing, electrical, carpentry—these involve real-world problem-solving that’s hard to automate.
• Human-centered jobs: Therapy, nursing, education, social work—where empathy, trust, and presence matter.
• AI-adjacent roles: People who guide, audit, or interpret AI outputs—prompt engineers, AI ethicists, data trainers.
• Creative and strategic roles: Especially where taste, originality, or leadership in ambiguous situations is needed.

What Should We Be Doing?

This transition is going to be massive. We need:
• Reskilling infrastructure: Lifelong learning, not one-and-done degrees.
• Policy support: Universal Basic Income, shorter workweeks, and safety nets to protect against job displacement.
• Cultural shifts: Valuing work not just for productivity, but for meaning, connection, and well-being.

It’s not about fighting AI—it’s about figuring out how we want to live with it. That means preparing for a world where being adaptable, creative, and human becomes the most valuable asset of all.

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This for me. There absolutely will be roles that simply won’t exist in a few years. Administering, reporting, order processing and some finance spring to mind.

I also think there will be a material impact on labour jobs such as factory workers.

Will it mean the end of all work ever? No. I don’t think we’ll ever get to that stage. I do think it will fundamentally change how the work is done and what does it though.

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When stakeholders can’t articulate accurately to me what they want, a robot has no chance.

So I think I’m safe for a little while yet.

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The code development tools are impressive, but also essentially boilerplate versions of applications. The problems will be trying to make ongoing updates to it as you’ll end up with a more fragmented codebase the more it tries to update it, like when you use those face filter apps over and over and it gets further away from looking like a human each time. You’ll also have people making things with AI (“vibe coding” I think it’s called) who would have no actual idea how it works, what code is there, how to debug it, how to host it. It can be a time saver for sure, but building full scale complex maintainable applications with AI alone would be a long way off still.

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No, he wouldn’t. In his time ‘computers’ were people who did calculations. So in his time a computing specialist would be someone who specialised in doing calculations. Which, if you think about it, isn’t massively different from what today’s computing specialists do. OK, we don’t use pencil and paper, but then the computers in his day would have been using mechanical calculators.

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That’s why I chose my great-grandpa and not my grandpa. My great-grandpa would have been born in the late 19th century. Even if the term ‘computer’ had been in use by then, he would most likely not have heard about it and not have a clue what that was, even in human terms.

Depends what kind of factory. I have experience in textiles. When I was in that industry, we had lots of workers measuring, cutting, sewing, packing and shipping items. We also had an automatic/robotic machine for a few years, for the really large orders, but that too needed the humans to assemble it, set it up for every order, load fabric rolls, change threads on the sewing machines, set the width/length/parameters, unjam it, clean it after every order, maintain it and so on. That’s in addition to the humans still needed for the small order tasks (and for shipping).

I don’t see any of those jobs going anywhere any time soon, not until robots start looking like actual Terminators.

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I’ve been waiting on flying cars since the Jetsons. Not gonna worry too much about this - we’re not exactly into Terminator territory just yet.

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There’s still a need to know coding and programming as there should always be a need to check the generated code.

I’ve started Vibe coding in the last few months where I’m just writing a comment // need a method here that will take x do this that and the other and return y.

It’s already at a stage where it’ll work or may need a slight tweak but generally it’s getting you 99% of the way there in before you have finished writing what you need.

I’ve already pivoted away in my job so I’m not a dev anymore but my decades of dev experience comes in handy to spot when someone is wrong and what’s needed to fix.

For the moment at least we still have some models chucking out something resembling Dreamweaver generated code or not understanding how a human would interact or dreaming up API endpoints that it think should exist.

Probably will be smaller dev teams in future and more focus on interface and user journey and overall stack architecture.

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I’ve been mulling this over for a while with respect to medical research. I think for me/us in that field, AI is probably going to be a huge productivity boost and help with perhaps preventing some of the time and money that gets wasted on poorly designed studies.

I’m basing this on how Alphafold and some of the ways the underlying tech has been leveraged has helped fine tune my own ideas and re-evaluate hypotheses for projects/studies I’ve been thinking of.

My hope is that AI more generally becomes a productivity booster rather than a way of getting rid of people from the work place.

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I suspect it will have a similar effect as photocopiers did. Back pre photocopier, large numbers of civil servants at what’s now Admin Assistant level had the job of copying documents. Those admin assistants didn’t lose their jobs but moved on to other things. Similar to all those scribes pre printing, of course.

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I think we’re already well on the path towards this, I see a lot of prompt engineer roles in the civil service and it’s not surprising this is moving the goalposts.

Personally I see the finance sector and business intelligence sector taking the biggest hit. What would’ve taken a BI analyst a few days I can now ask CoPilot at work for, and the results are identical, if not better.

That’s a slightly hyperbolic statement right there, and not intended to offend anyone working in that sector. But if someone can get mission critical data faster and to the same integrity, which I think is possible now, it can’t be long before robots just do this over humans.

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It’s always remembering that there are still buggy whip manufacturers, thatchers, etc. Just not so many of them, though there is a scheme to train new thatchers.

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And yet there are millions of companies that rely on Jim typing data from a sheet into excel for the weekly numbers. Analysts are safe for a little while yet.

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It is scary with all this AI stuff, as someone that is totally blind it is terrifying, all these self service checkouts that are appearing in supermarkets now, if they take away all the tills where there are actually people there, we are going to be so limited! I dread the day when I go to check into a hotel and there’s no one at reception and it’s just some AI thing. Or if you have a drone or robot drop off your delivery, I won’t know where they’ve left it? although some delivery drivers do that now to be honest, dump your package god knows where on the floor and you’re scrabbling around hunting for it!

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Some places do that now.

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I never said they weren’t :wink:

But I do think that to completely dismiss it (which I’m not saying you are) is naive. AI is, if nothing else, heavily reliant on clean data.

Do I think we’re there yet, no. Do I think that in the next few years companies will have done the effort to automate and clean that data. Yes I do.

Thinking AI will not come for some jobs that exist now is a bit like thinking the mines won’t ever close. There needs to be high thought and support for people to reskill in those areas that need it.

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Oh of course.

If you want to know daily revenue or customer acquisition etc etc then it can easily do that now but none of that is that tough anyway. A simple pivot table would get you that.

It’s the nuance that AI can’t do yet. It will definitely get better but so many data requests aren’t clear or just want “insight” that AI can’t do because it can’t speak lazy-boss.

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