I can see Truck drivers being replaced by self-driving trucks, others like crop pickers, bar tenders, customer service, etc. And most areas of Fast Food Service: cooks, cashiers; think kiosks style.

And your thoughts … ?

26 comments

  1. Agriculture would be great for automation, assuming they can get the harvesting down.

    Production will also see further automation.

    I believe that service based positions will only be partly automated. There is a “human” element to a bartender or barber that can’t be replicated yet.

  2. Automation has already hit most of those jobs. The ones A.I. is coming for are the ones done 100% on a computer.

  3. Customer service can never truly be replaced by AI.

    Just think of phone trees for getting support on things and how angry it makes you often. There’s always going to be use in humans involved there

  4. Personally, I don’t see AI cars becoming a mainstream thing outside of experimental cities where only they are permitted on roads (or at least I feel this is the best way). There’s too many factors for what can go wrong especially in truck driving for AI to just replace it. Maybe double it in the next 40 years or more.

    As far as bars and restaurants go there are already 100% automated ones in China and Japan and likely other countries but as far as cultural acceptance here in the US would go I feel like it would take longer to see (just think of how many support cashiers over full self-checkouts). In retail and warehouses this is already coming.

    To some extent you already have “AI” in agriculture to help with water efficiency but other people could comment on this better.

  5. Traffic police would be nice.

    If someone gets pulled over for barely speeding, I think that a police-bot is less likely to shoot them.

  6. Bar tenders and customer service are always going to involve humans. Self driving trucks aren’t going to replace truckers at scale any time soon.

  7. AIs – that is, expert systems – are already more reliable at interpreting medical diagnostic images than humans. Humans tend to ‘read’ what they expect into images, the machines have no expectations.

    I expect anything routine and that doesn’t involve physically manipulating objects to be taken over by AI, even things like routine visits to the doctor – you’ll answer questions and have a technician do some basic exams and feed the results to a computer.

  9. It doesn’t have to be a 100% replacement to be a disruption. Something that would just allow a 10-25% downsizing in a certain sector would have a pretty severe ripple effect. People can say “yeah but people will still be doing X”, if X is going through a structural decline its going to get worse and worse for the people still doing it.

    A lot of automotive jobs are going to be greatly disrupted. The number of people who own gas vehicles is going to shrink. Corporate fleets like Amazon are going to be going all electric. Engine mechanics, particularly diesel mechanics are going to see a huge drop in demand. On the flip side, there are going to be a lot of jobs created in construction and anything related to the renewable sector. Right now just in the factories being built in the US, they need an additional 100,000 workers per year. Figure every building that gets sunshine on the roof is going to have solar panels on the roof. The elimination of parking lots and structures in urban areas is also likely going to bring on the largest urban construction boom in American history. These places will not have a place for people to store cars and will be for people who give up car ownership to use the RoboTaxi.

    Uber/Lyft/Taxi drivers are going to face a massive disruption in any city that has RoboTaxi rollout. If you follow this space you will see there is massive year over year technological improvement and the limited rollout is already starting right now. For some areas this will also challenge car ownership, definitely in the 2030s. Car ownership has been a requirement for nearly everyone who doesn’t live in NYC, Boston, Chicago, DC, and maybe San Francisco. That is all going to change. This idea that downtown areas are occupied by small and medium sized buildings and then seas of parking is going to change. The irony is, many towns will look much more how they looked 100 years ago. This is going to be what disrupts the housing market.

    Digital Personal Assistants are going to be more and more of a thing in the upcoming years. This is going to greatly disrupt the administrative assistant sector, but its also going to pretty much allow every person to have their own virtual assistant in life. Think of advanced ChatGPT crossed with Siri and Quickbooks. It can track all your expenses for you, keep track of your schedule, personal information, block incoming calls and answer the phone for you, help you with your taxes. The computer in your pocket is going to turn into an MBA, a CPA, and general assistant.

  10. AI will become the battle-bots for both health care vendors and health insurance sellers.

  11. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution luddites have fretted that we’d all run out of jobs and starve

    When the ATM was introduced, there was a panic about bank tellers. When the bar code scanner was introduced, there was a panick about checkout ladies.

    Some jobs will be automated, others won’t, and new jobs will be created.

    The AI panic will go down with the others for what it is – people afraid of the future.

  12. I don’t expect many fields to get completely automated. What I am expecting is the *bottom end* of *most* fields getting automated. Just as an example, I’m a translator. Right now, you can go onto Fiverr and get a cheap, mediocre translation done. I expect AI to take over there pretty soon. But good translation is much harder and much more expensive. That’s going to take a lot longer. I’m sure AI will manage it eventually, but I guarantee the high end will last longer than the low end.

  13. I expect fast food will be completely automated. That industry seems to be quickly moving in that direction. I think eventually uber/lyft/taxis will be phased out in favor of self driving vehicles as well.

  15. >I can see Truck drivers being replaced by self-driving trucks,

    I’m a truck driver and I don’t believe this will happen in the next 20 years. We don’t even have reliable self-driving cars. Trucking is too complicated. Will the self driving trucks be able to park in a dock door? Will it be able to park a trailer in a spot on a yard?

    I know it won’t be able to unhook from one trailer and hook to a new one. It won’t be able to strap and tarp a flatbed load. It won’t be able to deal with the pins on a container chassis.

    It would be a huge change to the trucking industry. People will still be needed to do all the things not directly driving related. It just doesn’t make much sense logistically to not just have a driver.

    It may happen someday, but not any time soon.

  16. I do believe it would be easier to say what *isn’t* going to be replaced by ai in the next 20 years.

  17. Ai will not replace customer service any time soon. Areas that it will replace would be automation so things like Kiosks are going to replace fast food restaurants. Cashiers will be pointless, automated pickers for agrilculture will happen. Basically anything that requires repetitive tasks will be relegated to AI. Anything that is NOT repetitive will still require human interaction. That is why I don’t believe self driving cards will ever work as long as humans are driving. If it was nothing but AI robots it would be fine. But humans are not rational.

  19. Writing, entertainment, and teaching jobs most likely. I am going to milk the latter as long as I can though.

  20. It can and may replace the majority of all jobs. It will just be nowhere near as fast as its being hyped to do though.

    We cant even get the most basic phone apps to work consistently. Much less have AI do important life or death jobs.

    Half of chat GPT is incorrect information.

    Its just the latest buzzwords people are trying to profit off of.

    100-200 years from now yes ” AI” will take most current jobs but there will.be new jobs invented.

  21. Lots of writing, technical writing is essentially dead. Also modeling and photography for print ads. That will be taken over by AI generated images and “models.”

  22. Mostly, menial white-collar work. Either it’s:

    – highly domain-specific manual but predictable tasks: automatable via code
    – moving numbers around on excel spreadsheets: automatable via a combination of automated ETL pipelines and AI allowing natural-language querying of data
    – doing repetitive tasks reading or creating paperwork: largely automatable with AI, but with manual oversight

  23. Depends on how successful AI is

    If we take an AI is wildly successful viewpoint, there won’t be a job that isn’t impacted by AI and analytics.

    That said the next wave of AI will likely have a much bigger impact on white collar jobs than service oriented jobs.

  26. A long time ago I always thought it would be hard labor, but it seems like it’s more creative tasks. I think ai will have a huge impact in the following

    * art
    * animation
    * video
    * writing
    * programming
    * accounting
    * markets/trade
    * planning (events and weddings)
    * engineering
    * logistic (including driving)
    * warehouse

    I’m not saying these jobs won’t exist, but instead of 5 employees it may drop to 1 or 2.

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