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

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.

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.

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)

I decided not to compete against AI, but to work with it. That’s why I built WFGY — it doesn’t replace logic or creativity, but stabilizes and expands it. I treat it like a philosophical tool, not a co-worker.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

My day job is troubleshooting tech issues for small/med business. Auality hardware is pretty reliable (now). But increases in software reliability are offset by increases in system complexity.

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.

I'm a production editor, I can do copyediting and proofreading. I don't see anything about AI that will reduce the need for copyeditors and proofreaders. All the spellcheckers and grammar checkers we have now haven't done that. The suits may want to believe they won't need to pay for that, but I don't think it will happen in my lifetime anyway.

But if I can't do that, maybe I'll be a pastry chef instead.

Pizzaiolo, shawarma maker, high end assassin using drones to do work.

I'm just about to start my new job as an airline pilot at 46. I didn't primarily decide to career shift away from IT because of AI, but it was definitely a consideration.

Middle aged male content creator on onlyfans.

Either a restaurant or (more likely) food truck, I’ve always loved cooking and have a few things that I make very well better than most restaurants I’ve eaten at (like kabobs).

Or some kind of related “experiences” business even though I’ve never done it before.

While we are in an unlikely hypothetical of all computer-based jobs going away, I will pick the just-as-unlikely hypothetical of me making enough money to call it a job off of making wooden boxes, furniture, other crafts. Wouldn't that be great :P

It's unlikely we'll automate all of software engineering without also making considerable steps in the software of robotics(since that is also software). This puts many physical jobs up for automation as well.

I believe there are countless ways to do your computer-based work while also pursuing creative projects. Ever since Paleolithic times, humans have had an innate creative impulse—and that impulse is poised to be reborn now.

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.

As I’ve been lucky to be in computers my whole career and I started taking health/wellness seriously before things got too bad, I can probably stock shelves at a grocery or Wal-mart type store.

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.

I'm interested in personal finances, but I have no degree and if AI takes software development away, it will take also personal finances away.

If that's the case, I'm probably doomed. At 36 that's scary.

If/when we get to the point where my job is automated out of existence, then so will a large enough categories of jobs that there's going to have to be some sort of universal basic income system in place, so hopefully I'll just be on that and work on one of my creative passions, like writing or music or board game design/development, and supplement that with what I've managed to sock away so far.

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.

Simple. Upscale and hop onto new roles created by AI

Electrician or plumber

I think (hope?) that if such a thing happened we'd be looking at 10% annual GDP growth and 15-20% long term average stock market growth. So I would just hope that I could live off the capital I have.

If not... Some kind of teaching or tutoring.

Hopefully I can move back into the laboratory. I'm a scientist who moved into lab software admin a few years ago, and there are days I miss it a lot.

Retirement as I’m almost there anyway. But as I work with mainframes I think there will be non-AI jobs there for a while yet.

I'm considering being a hotdog street vender.

I could teach high school math, but it takes two years to qualify to be a high school high school teacher where I live.

I've considered starting a handyman business if I truly can't find work in software again. I'd probably make more doing that than I've ever made from my actual job, the only difference would be I wouldn't have energy to focus on my startup ideas/side hustles.

Did 6 years as bicycle mechanic/sales in highschool, was ok, could do again. Electronics engineering - presumably in this scenario the software aspects might be reduced, but probably longer before LLMs can do board design, debugging, type approvals etc.

YouTuber or move to the mountains.

Excavator operator.

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.

Park Ranger. Getting outdoors more and getting paid for it sounds good.

The banana stand

Innkeeper (bar, food, rooms) in some gateway town, still get some hopefully fun human contact, do some crafty stuff. Or probably anything in the theme of “local business in a small town that experiences all 4 seasons”.

Well, it was going to be pilot but then I've been hanging out on /r/flying lately and it sounds pretty rough in that world right now.

I'd guess something else driving/piloting some kind of vehicle that isn't as saturated.

Advising others how to do my previous job effectively with AI. Ends up being the same job, with better tools and hopefully less tedium/grind.

I will train to become a nurse. They are highly sought after and the job seems rewarding to me. I heard it's quite stressful though.

Retirement

To put this in perspective.

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.

Farming watermelons and trading options.

Why do we have this scarcity mindset of AI taking away jobs?

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.

None. But only hope is that when this happens we all will be so fucked and so much together. So that is my hope in the collective misery of working population.

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.

I'd likely become an EMT, or some kind of craftsman.

Always wanted to learn carpentry. Demand will be soaring one way or another.

Painting houses.

honestly? teaching or coaching.

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

Work at Walmart or a warehouse. Maybe see if I can so some CAD work somewhere or be a tech teacher.

Hurting myself on camera (like Jackass)

I'm a moonshiner with delusions of someday opening a micro distillery.

Manufacturing, sales, or crazy inventor who ends up blowing himself up with his inventions.

Whole foods or Sprouts bagger

Presumably homeless.

Maybe an entertainer. Take my improv and acting skills and make something out of that? I just hope it isn't in the instagram/tiktok platform dystopia though. I dream and wish for community theater to come back.

I’m learning how to sculpt both with and without a computer.

big tech's desired outcome is the capture of the majority of value currently generated by employment

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

Retirement? Nah, just start a new business.

Right now AI has a ton of money being dumped into it. I think there will be a lot of jobs that are replaced short term that will not be profitable for AI long term. AI will not be as cheap as it is now in a few years.

Even before the AI craze, I saw the writing on the wall for enterprise software developers - what most of the 2.8 million developers in the US do.

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.

Bartendar

AI agent performance coach.

Retirement grease

Economics teacher

yoga instructor. how is a robot going to do yoga?

MAGA grifter.

Despite mythology, crime does pay. /s

The same thing I do now, but different: support. Everything ~burns~ breaks

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Stock daytrading, but expect to lose for several years before you begin to win. It is skilled work, so don't get advice about it from those who believe it's not possible. It even is true that it's not possible for most people.

A plus is that this gives enough free time and energy during the late afternoon and evening hours to do interesting tech work.