1 month ago
23
With AI driving the human race toward a new kind of Industrial Revolution, the workforce is rapidly changing. Everyone knows someone who's been suddenly laid off or replaced by a quicker, cheaper solution, but there's no question that some careers are more stable than others.
When I saw Reddit user u/Opposite-Question-32 ask, "What's a career that will become obsolete in the next decade?" I was understandably nervous to scroll through everyone's answers. But here's what I found:
1. "Those guys that want to sell you cable TV."
"People have been saying this since the early 2000s. While it seems reasonable, unless a major government reform forces it, I don't think it will happen at all."
2. "Fighter jet pilots. It'll probably be more like 20 years, but still. It's ointless to have a human in there creating G-force limitations and reaction time restrictions."
3. "I manage a call center team for a popular bank, and I can confidently say that most entry-level staff are already in talks to be replaced by AI. Escalations, of course, won’t be replaced since there needs to be a human to take over from the worthless AI. In fact, some departments are already entirely replaced, and they have been collecting data to replicate in other departments."
4. "Reddit moderators."
"So many of my most upvoted and replied comments are on threads deleted by mods.
Reddit is functionally deleting history, and I’ve started saving really important info into text documents instead of just bookmarking the URL."
5. "I have friends who work in this job, so I hate to say it, but police dispatchers. I know it can be an emotional role, but one too many human errors occur with calls. Once AI becomes reliable enough, I expect this job to go. I'd expect nothing but a small team to speak directly to officers for responding if the incoming 9-1-1 calls make it past the AI filter."
6. "I'm probably going to get downvoted for saying this, but as a software engineer, I feel like my job might be getting very obsolete within the next 4–5 months. It's not going to be totally gone; there will be some left, but the job itself will look very different from a few years ago. Many of us have stopped writing code by hand, so the knowledge is going away, and it only gets worse from here."
8. "Anything in the neon-light industry. LEDs are much cheaper and easier to construct."
9. "I wouldn't be surprised if receptionist roles were replaced by AI. They have already implemented an AI receptionist at my local doctor's office."
"We really need to have a cultural shift around customer service. It shouldn't be seen as menial labor; it should be seen as the primary PR for the business. If your business sucks to interact with, then I will go somewhere else. Good customer service employees should be well paid and respected; they keep the business alive if it's customer-facing in any way."
10. "Garbage people. Self-driving vehicles and robotic armed trucks are replacing them very easily. They’re high cost."
11. "No one is saying used car dealers! I'm shocked at the number of my coworkers doing fully online trade-ins with online services. It's just tow-in and tow-out, with no hassle."
12. "Appliance salespeople, most likely, unless the physical store can actually be saved. Telemarketers in 10–15 years, unless things change. We won't be 'talking to robots,' but AI instead. Shenanigans and hilarity will ensue, of course, but it's a bleak future."
13. "I don't know the answer, but the career I WISH became obsolete is the influencer."
14. "Basic translation."
"I feel like that will be very unlikely.
You tend to need certain officially translated documents, and I doubt that an embassy will accept a ChatGPT-translated document."
15. "Any rail-based public transport operator. Trams, trains, monorail, metro, etc. Source: I am one."
16. "Maybe not in the next decade, but in my lifetime, I would say mail carriers. Source: I am a mailman."
17. "I'm surprised customer support is not at the top of this list. It's already been phased out over the last few years, replaced by AI chatbots instead. I doubt there will be any human customer support agents by 2040."
"I used to think this, but I immediately demand to talk to a real person 90% of the time. Many people are the same. If I’m calling, it’s because I’ve already exhausted public documentation or regular means of fixing something. I want to talk to a human."
19. "I don’t know about a decade, but I would imagine self-driving cars will make taxi, limo, and truck drivers obsolete."
20. "Video editors and photo editors, AI can do whatever someone wants to a video or a picture."
21. "Honestly, tons of grunt work. Teams will need layers of oversight and one guy essentially running these AI models, but the bottom-line grunt work is not only easy to automate even now, but it’s also sitting on top of decades of templates and case studies. Producing new templates of slides, procedures, and whatever else at that level is usually a time drain anyway. The market is about to be so much more fucked for the next few waves of graduates."
22. "Definitely digital art and animation. It kinda already is."
23. "Marketing."
"Yep. My husband's marketing agency is seeing a lot less traffic. The 'good' clients are still there, but there's a lot less demand for graphic design and photography from new clients now that people are perfectly content to pay bargain prices for AI slop."
24. "Interior design is already a rough place to be. AI makes people have unrealistic expectations that you’ll never meet."
25. "Unfortunately for me, accountants and lawyers. Particularly personal ones. AI will learn the tax loopholes, and there’s already software out there for taxes. You can use AI for financial advice, so the remit for accountants has already shrunk massively. The market will likely still exist for corporate."
26. "Anything low-level in graphic design, absolutely. The junior designer role is now dead. What will still exist are art directors who will just manage the creation process and check the work. We had an apprentice designer at our company, and I tried to convince her that the most important part of the job would be managing clients. The making pictures part is almost completely irrelevant these days. As soon as we get an AI that can do decent typesetting, then it's game over."
27. "Basic data entry jobs."
"I did medical billing data entry for a few years. It was so repetitive that I was burnt out at the end. This was a long while ago when ICD-9 codes and patient info were normally handwritten on specimen requisitions."
28. And finally: "None. People are massively overrating AI capabilities. A decade is a short period of time for a career to become obsolete."
The future of AI and how it will change our lives remains a mystery, and I'm sure this list only touches on a fraction of the jobs that may change or disappear entirely in the coming years. Still, like several of these commenters, I am hopeful and optimistic that nothing, not even superintelligent AIs, can replace the creativity and authenticity of the human mind.
Note: Responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.
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