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by keiferski 22 days ago
The easiest thing IMO is probably to just pick a career path that isn’t reducible to a person doing something on a computer.

If I were 20 again and picking future-proof careers, personally I think I’d go into sailing / ships or become a chef. Neither are easy jobs and the income is less than working in tech, but I don’t see Claude replacing ship captains or head chefs anytime in the next fifty years.

3 comments

Both careers have notoriously bad work life balance. My father was a head chef and later restaurateur and had a very messy personal life because he worked many holidays and often 7 days a week, 14 hours a day. Not saying it can’t be better than that, but there has to be better options.
>>I don’t see Claude replacing ship captains or head chefs anytime in >>the next fifty years.

The nature of AI is that it can do any role.

"Autonomous cargo ship" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_cargo_ship

"Robotic kitchen with AI cooks and serves 120 meals an hour without human help" - https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/autonomous-ai-...

Yeah, and these are niche things that aren't going to replace the professions of cook or ship captain for 99.99% of scenarios. People paying for a high-end meal especially want a trained chef making their meals, not a robot. And the vast majority of restaurants don't have the resources to install an AI robot in the first place.

For sea captains, I'd say it's highly likely that even automated ships will have captains on board for a very long time.

In general it's like a lot of these "AI predictions": people making claims don't actually understand anything about the industries they're supposedly going to replace. Just because it can do something in an isolated scenario doesn't mean that it's economically viable as a whole.

That second one has been tried numerous times, the first being 60 years ago:

https://hackaday.com/2015/06/09/retrotechtacular-automatic-f...

We're still waiting.

Who exactly will you be a chef to, when all the high income jobs with disposal are automated? There are only so many oligarchs to cook for