Living in an AI future
"Safe" careers in an AI led world
I’ve given a fair bit of attention to the development of AI in the last few years, and upon watching the trends it is pretty clear what sectors will be relatively safe from AI disruption in near future.
Before we begin, I must point out two caveats from my previous lines. First, I say “relatively safe” - as there is nothing out there which won’t be affected to some degree by AI.
Second, I say “near future” because the pace of AI development is so high that it’s almost impossible to predict what happens after decades. So we stick to a 3 to 5 year timeline here.
Content
This is sort of a beaten to death horse at this point, but I feel the content creation industry will easily 100x from here.
We still haven’t hit full internet enablement in India, and the smartphone and internet connectivity in many areas isn’t good enough to support large scale content consumption.
The quality of content will improve massively, and even the common man will soon be making full scale movies using AI. Monetisation from said content is also relatively poor. There’s an easy 10x possible in both content adoption and monetisation.
AI will help create even more content than it was possible before as AI based editing, filming, and creating tools will bring the creation cost to zero.
Also, most of the part of being a successful creator is consistency, ideation, taste, execution - not necessarily your face. All of these are human traits, and it’s hard to replace the influencer economy fully by AI, at least for the next few years.
Heck, you can even make your own AI videos and make a living on YouTube. The scope of the content industry will only grow with AI.
IRL interactions/events
As people get more addicted to short form content, AI chatbots, and other digital means of comfort or addiction - IRL events make a comeback.
We already saw a miniature version of this post lockdown. So many people were predicting that the world will move to Zoom and Instagram but the IRL (in real life) economy has only grown since then.
All time high tourism, concerts, restaurants, etc show that people crave physical, real connection more than anything online.
As the world disconnects further thanks to AI chatbots and social media, the price of the physical world and its demand rises.
While people often say that a physical, in person business isn’t as frictionless as an online one, you cannot deny the rising demand and stability of such a business.
Hotels, restaurants, events, music, exotic experiences will all rise and no AI or automation can replace them - at least for now.
Building on top of AI
In the last few years, almost everyone who build a software or UI layer on top of LLMs has made a small fortune, if not big.
Even across jobs, the hiring for Data Scientists and ML engineers can’t stop rising.
You should see LLMs like the Internet - it’s not a business in itself, the businesses of future will be built on top of LLMs (and as we evolve further, even LLMs go obsolete and new tech takes over - a business layer doesn’t get affected if they adapt, but the tech goes to zero)
“If you can’t beat them, join them” - this phrase couldn’t be anymore true on today’s times.
I still think AGI is at least a decade away. I would suggest you to read up some books about AGI to know what it actually means instead of reading made up internet BS (this book is awesome).
You don’t necessarily have to build a business (although I strongly suggest it, the future is not certain for traditionally employed folks). Even picking up a job in these sectors is good enough as you won’t necessarily laid off (as there will likely not be a layoff).
As usual, being the best at what you do keeps you thriving no matter what. The best coders in the world won’t get replaced by Cursor or Antigravity. The best financial analysts don’t have to fear Grok doing better than them.
Remember, competence always gets rewards.
Useful links:
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My startup course where I share how I built my high margin content business.