Ask HN: What is your fallback job if AI takes away your career?

[7402]

For the sake of argument, assume that if your job consists of sitting at a computer, reading on a screen, and typing on a keyboard, then your career will go away.

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)

[glonq]

By sending manufacturing jobs overseas for decades, America sold out blue collar families so that the rich could get richer. After if/when AI will do the same to middle-class white collar workers, maybe people will realize that it's long overdue that we eat the rich.

[bruce511]

While some labor intensive jobs did migrate overseas, most job losses were to automation, not other countries. Today 2% of people are in agriculture and production is higher than its ever been. This pattern is reflected across the spectrum. Overall American production in 2024 is up there with the best production years ever.

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.

[chairmansteve]

Manufacturing as a percentage of gdp had been flat since the late 1940s. Automation has eliminated a lot of jobs.

"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...

[disqard]

They'll be living in bunkers in New Zealand, secured by armed guards wearing shock collars (so that the guards don't eat them).

[not_your_vase]

Dibs on being a politician. I have never heard about a starving one, and it doesn't require an awful lot of skills beside being a good liar. (This is only half-joke. I do have some vague aspirations for changing some public stuff that grind my gears)

[mitthrowaway2]

In my experience, it does require a lot of skills. You won't notice them if you only interact with politicians through reading about them in the news, but successful politicians have a lot of charisma, are very good at remembering names and faces of people they meet once at a crowded party, and are good at spinning answers to make everyone hear what they wanted to hear.

[goostavos]

I similarly half-joke about the same thing. Being "replaced by AI" would be the kick in the pants to finally make a run of it.

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.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

One of the most though-provoking things that I've heard AOC say is (paraphrasing), "I'm not a very good politician, but I'm an excellent public servant."

Wish there were more like her!

[csomar]

> I have never heard about a starving one

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).

[steve_adams_86]

I'm slowly building a business which produces and sells plant tissue cultures. I have many years to go before I can do it full time, but that's the goal in around 5 years. One of the big challenges is scaling up. This work is fairly labour intensive once you've got several batches on the go, and different species and protocols lead to different timelines and so on. There's always something to do. At some point, assuming things pick up, I'll have to go all in on the business. That'll be scary. There'll be an extremely busy liminal zone in which I have a full time job and thousands of cultures to manage. The margins aren't incredible, so it'll be a slog with fairly limited rewards. However, once I get past that zone and can leverage economies of scale and more safely invest more in the business, it should get quite a bit easier. Here's hoping. The risk and sweat equity factor is truly not appreciated if you haven't done it before.

[dv_dt]

That frankly sounds fascinating & amazing. Are the cultures used for grafting onto plants or something else entirely? I had an aunt that used to grow specialty crops and they were always rotating the varieties and raising different seedlings to see what they would like grow next.

[mystified5016]

To be quite blunt, my assumption is that when/if AI can fully replace everyone like me, then society will have either collapsed or advanced to the point where unemployment is not a death sentence.

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.

[mikewarot]

When being a SysAdmin wasn't a viable option anymore, I ended up making gears, and gear like objects (such as vanes for water meters) in a Gear cutting job shop. The pay and commute were horrible, but I know some, if not most, of those gears will still be in use in the year 2100, long after I'm gone.

[satisfice]

Expert witness testifying in court against people who negligently applied AI to software projects.

[more_corn]

Nice, sign me up

[ryandrake]

I like it!

[Havoc]

Would love to do something around robotics. Or take a shot at self-sufficiency in the sticks.

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.

[whatamidoingyo]

Well, I used to paint houses professionally. I can also tile, frame rooms, and know basics of electrical and plumbing. I can also make pretty good pizza.

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.

[SoftTalker]

Ha you sound like me in terms of your other skills. Throw "decent shade-tree mechanic" in there for me. If it can be done with wrenches and other basic tools, I can probably do it.

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.

[mettamage]

Not sure if I'd do this, but one semi-serious idea I'd have is to become a dating coach with a focus on finding a long-term partner. I had a lot of dating issues, fixed all of them. I'm happily married now.

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.

[bigstrat2003]

To be honest? I don't have one; I'll be pretty fucked. I'm doing my best to not worry and be financially responsible in the meantime.

[more_corn]

Try plumbing. It all makes perfect sense when you get in there. But there’s enough subtlety and complexity to be interesting and when people need you they really need you.

[molochai]

Completely out of tech: my sister has a dog training business. I will go train dogs with her and help her run her business. It may not be totally safe from a big economic downturn. People tend to spend less on their pups in hard times. But we've also owned dogs pretty much forever so it'll never completely disappear. And I am certain it will never go the way of automation.

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.

[datavirtue]

Optimus has entered the chat.

[cedws]

Something adjacent to what I do now I guess. AI will need humans to run its datacenters, maintain its hardware, design its chips for the foreseeable future. I'd like to think that I have the intellectual ability to pivot into something else.

Building software is about solving problems, if software goes away I'll just solve problems in another domain.

[adamredwoods]

Computer adjacent, is my thought, too. Computers will always be around.

We may have to sell skills in application domains, so ecommerce, agriculture, fintech, etc, rather than by language or library skill set.

[gisborne]

Relevant analysis: https://guyren.me/2025/04/16/programming-in-the-age-of-abund...

[sky2224]

Your post took off significantly more than mine, but I asked something similar roughly 8 months ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41736600

Figured I'd post since seeing changes in responses over time can be interesting (if any of the typical responses have changed at least).

[muzani]

8 months ago was such a different world. I think we're starting to see the first hints of societal collapse, so people are taking it a lot more seriously now.

[deanmoriarty]

Retire. I lived fairly frugally since when I entered the workforce 15 years ago and saved a bunch, so I like to think I’m financially prepared for it. I hope to retire soon even if AI doesn’t replace me :-)

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.

[datavirtue]

You selling options with that nest egg? A lot of people have retirement accounts just sitting there. You can start making income far in excess of dividends.

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.

[bravesoul2]

Artisanal live (as in-person) coder at a computer museum

[massung]

I love my job. I love programming, what I work on, who I work with, etc.

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.

[jermaustin1]

I feel like my wife’s job is AI proof as a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, but there might be a downturn that affects how much she can earn, which means I don’t need as lofty ambitions for my future job of “farming” - basically 1-2acres of veggie patches, and couple chicken coops to sell and eat.

[orionsbelt]

Many people are using AI for therapy now. Even if AI gets as good or better than the average therapist, I think some people will prefer to see a human in person, so her job should be safe in that sense. But I wouldn’t be surprised if rates go down as the fee sensitive shift to AI.

[Dig1t]

How will you pay for property taxes?

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.

[muzani]

I'm always surprised how nobody in these threads try to be the one who gives AI the job.

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.

[morkalork]

That's when you suddenly realize that many people who successfully start new companies aren't just developers. They have knowledge, connections, experience etc in another field. Otherwise what you get is SaaS tools for developers... Kind of emplains why there's already so many of those right?

[zem]

for one, because I am not an entrepreneur and do not care for the details of running a business. but over and above that, I do not believe AI is capable of doing my job. it is certainly capable of being given my job by company owners who resent paying wages a lot more than they resent paying the capex and opex for AI coders, but I do not envy the middle layer of people tasked with getting the shiny new toys to actually do the job of the people who were fired on spec.

[HellDunkel]

A few more years ago everyone wanted to be a startup founder. Then everyone wanted a cozy FAANG job and now people are afraid of AI taking it.

[bravesoul2]

Money. People want that. You need a job until your biz takes off.

[Yizahi]

No fallback path, but I've started to think about such possibility this year. I guess I can do telecom support, as in doing physical wiring, installing hardware in cabinets, tuning signal etc. Being a QA on telco project gets me maybe 20-30% of the skills required. But I suspect the pay will be crap, work hours a lot more than 40/week and hazardous working conditions at roofs, basements, in any weather etc.

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.