What Jobs Will Be Lost to AI (And How to Make Yourself AI Proof)

I came across a video of a woman who lost all of her income over time to AI, and it made me realize how many freelancers/employees I myself stopped using because I now use AI to do their paid tasks.

The woman is a 39 year old Chartered Linguist from Cambridge with over 15 years of experience, and here’s what happened to her, in her own words:

Slowly over the past 12 to 18 months, thanks to AI. At first, it was slow, gradual. Some clients I worked with started sending me less work and then no work.

One of them at least told me that they were experimenting with AI and machine translation before they stopped sending me work altogether.

Last year… a major client stopped sending me work because of AI and this time it was very explicit. The agency told me that the end client decided to use automated AI translation instead. That was maybe 30% of my income. So that was tough.

But last week it all happened overnight. So mid-January, I mean February, I lost my number one source of income. That translation agency accounted for maybe 80% of my income and overnight, I mean really overnight, I stopped getting work.

At first I thought it was maybe a blip. I emailed the agency after a few days of not getting any work asking what’s going on. They told me they were automating using AI.

More and More People Will Be Replaced with AI

This lady who lost most of her income to AI is just in the first wave of people getting hit by the new tech. Eventually it’s going to hit more and more people in more and more industries.

This is something I predicted over 2 years ago:

AI is the Computer Revolution 2.0. Computers also automated a lot of what is called “donkey work” where humans were literally doing mechanical tasks that involved little use of intelligence.

The general way to think about AI replacing humans: If you do something that can be boiled down to executing a set of rules, you are eventually going to be replaced by AI.

What was this translator doing? She knew the grammar rules and words for a few languages, and she turned text from one language to another.

Because it is very easy to teach AI these rules, it can easily take over the entire task and do it in 0.01% of the time.

It’s actually easier than people think. I remember writing my own compiler when I was studying for my open source degree in computer science. (It was a course called Nand to Tetris and is well worth the time.)

The VAST MAJORITY of office workers are basically executing a set of rules, whether they know this or not.

Accounting

What is an accountant doing? He’s following a set of rules:

• The accounting rules (“Golden rules”)
• Standards (Accounting standards)
• Presentation templates (Financial statements i.e. Balance sheet, Cash flow statements, P&L, etc.)

Nothing complicated, even though it takes a few years for humans to learn.

These rules can be taught to AI (already happening) and much of the labor of accounting can be done by AI (already happening in firms that aren’t asleep at the wheel).

What will happen to the human accountants? 95% of them will lose their jobs.

You will still need a few people (5%) to make sure that the work done by AI is correct, and to guide AI when it hits transactions it’s not sure how to deal with (suspense account management).

Merchant Banking

I have many friends in merchant banking and many of them make hundreds of thousands of dollars from their jobs. What do many of them do?

They take numbers from financial statements and input them into templates to create projections. They then fill all the data up in a format that generates the necessary documents as needed (valuation certifications, IPO docs, etc.).

Because all they are doing is just following a set of rules and templates, their work will eventually be done by AI.

80% of these jobs will be lost. (Fewer, because this industry has an element of personal relationships involved e.g. for selling a company, you need relationships with relevant people with the money to buy.)

Travel Planning

AI can easily generate itineraries, answer travel questions, and AI agents can handle bookings using online reviews to make good decisions. The value a travel planner adds to the world today is reducing every day.

If you’re a travel planner, you’ll go out of business sooner or later unless you somehow manage to have offerings that AI cannot replicate e.g. many travel planners in India will arrange a cook to travel along with large Indian groups. His job is to cook Indian style food during the trip.

How to Make Yourself AI Proof

Ok, so AI proof is too strong a term in the modern day. The correct title should be “AI resistant” but that is less catchy, so we’ll go with AI proof.

DON’T DO WORK THAT IS JUST YOU EXECUTING A SET OF RULES.

There is simply no other way. If what you do is just executing rules, then AI can do it too.

And AI WILL do it eventually, because it’s going to be cheaper than paying you to do it.

This applies to both the physical world and the office world.

Technically a dog walker or cleaner should be safe from AI, but eventually we’ll have AI powered robots that will do tasks of this type (or allow 1 person to do 10 people’s work, and thus kill 90% of the market).

The guys in merchant banking who input financial data into templates to generate projections will be replaced with AI.

The guys who have relationships with HNIs and bring in deals and close them will not be replaced by AI.

The problem is that it is not obvious how someone can go from work that involves following a set of rules to work that does not.

The main traits seem to be:

• Connections with humans (whether you know the right people in real life, or have a social media presence – see The Art of X to learn how to build one)
• Physical products (AI can’t import from China or warehouse or ship anything, at least not for a while)
• Legal barriers (AI can’t become an auditor, even though it can assist auditors)
• Specialized skills for high value clients (e.g. law or surgery)
• Dealing with humans (A dating coach is very unlikely to be replaced with AI)

If what you do does not fall in these categories, you are eventually going to be replaced with AI.

If you can’t figure out how to incorporate any of these in what you do, you need to RESKILL RIGHT NOW.

Not tomorrow, not next month, not next year. You need to do it NOW.

If you do not, then just like the Chartered Translator lady, you will also find that your business is reducing with time. Eventually your large clients will go away too and you will lose 80-90% of your income.

If you are an employee and not a business owner, you will lose your job when this happens to the business/industry you work at.

You will lose 100% of your income and it will become very difficult to find a new job.

The writing is on the wall.

You have been warned.

– Harsh Strongman