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Ask HN: What jobs will be big in the future that don't exist yet?

62 points by mojoe ↗ HN
I'm writing a kids' book for my daughter about future jobs. All the books that she currently has talk only about current jobs (chef, firefighter, librarian, etc etc). I'm putting together a list of future jobs that she can think about (space mining engineer, neural lace technologist, prompt engineer, etc). I'll probably throw some jobs in the list that exist but are still rapidly growing, like data scientist.

Fun ideas appreciated!

107 comments

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spot5010
Ecogineer - ecology engineer.
donutdan4114
Autopilot Unstucker: Your job will be to travel around to various roads in your city where an AI driven vehicle has gotten stuck and move it.

Robot Janitor: as more and more robots take over menial jobs someone’s gotta clean and maintain them.

Virtual Friend: become a friend to a random person online. Chat with them, play games, etc. will be more and more common as the loneliness epidemic grows exponentially over the next few decades.

Prompt Expert: a person who comes up with better and more creative prompts for AI generated content. Including AI generated images, music, and likely movies and shows, architecture and design in the future.

Buttons840
> Virtual Friend: become a friend to a random person online. Chat with them, play games, etc. will be more and more common as the loneliness epidemic grows exponentially over the next few decades.

How about "Virtual Non-Romantic Matchmaker". Pair up lonely people with similar interests who just want to be friends and play games, etc.

Wonder how much of this could be solved by removing the automation around matchmaking in online games. I used to find a server with a good ping and mods / rules that I liked and then I'd usually see the same people day after day, eventually people would start saying "hi" to me or laughing at my gameplay even though I made minimal effort to connect with them.

donutdan4114
Huh, actually it would be interesting if online matchmaking in games took into account more of what you’re looking for in a friend. Like if it prioritized matching you with people in similar age brackets and maybe could take into account other interests… so it’d be like the people you’re playing with would make someday likely friends. They could show your match score so you would immediately know if another player had similar interests… I kinda wish that existed!!
tinym
The skill-based matchmaking that's popular today is optimized for setting up a fair game, ie. theres a roughly 50/50 chance of either side winning. It makes logical sense, but it turns out nobody actually wants a fair match!
Buttons840
The old style of games had privately hosted servers, each able to host about 30 people. These games allowed people to drop in and out at will. Newer games are more match focused, with shorter matches and a focus on players completing matches. It would still be nice to join a small pool of 30 players and create smaller matches from that pool, but this would require people in the pool to sometimes wait for the next match to form. Balancing would not be hard, just make sure skill is as evenly distributed as possible. All this would allow match focused gameplay while keeping the pool of players small enough to build a community.

Someone recently commented on HN that online cheating is a social problem, and can be solved by playing with a curated group of players. I agree, and think this could also help with cheating.

jmrm
> Autopilot Unstucker

I think this could be a job for the same people who work when a tree fall in the middle of the road and they remove it.

DangitBobby
Ah "Virtual Friend" reminds me of FriendProxy from Maniac:

> Another equally depressing tech-inspired service in Maniac is called FriendProxy, a fictional company that lets you hire random strangers to pretend to be your close friends. As one customer notes, “I have real friends, this is just more convenient.”

Let's go ahead and add AdBuddy to your list:

> Targeted advertising takes its logical next step in Maniac with AdBuddy, a company that lets you pay for other products and services by listening to some schlub read advertisements to you. Can’t afford a train ticket? Ride with an AdBuddy. Hungry? AdBuddy will pay for your lunch — if you listen to advertisements while you eat.

1. https://www.inverse.com/article/49305-maniac-netflix-adbuddy...

trenning
Maniac is a great watch. Really hit some good dystopian/alternative future vibes.
undeIays
Next you'll tell we have to suffer ads and promotional marketing for rewards or donations just to check out at the pharmacy!
bananaowl
Is advertising to people without money a good business?
ekianjo
> Virtual Friend

Virtual AI Friends that are better than humans on how they deal with you are more likely to exist.

scaramanga
Which will continue to be more of a commentary on the continuing decline and collapse of society, and the ability of people to seamlessly enter delusional states when given only the most superficially convincing data, than it is on the advancements of "AI" :)
speedgoose
Fore sure. Replika is already doing pretty well for many people.
more_corn
People never behave how we are supposed to behave. AI will be way better at behaving properly. The minute AI lovers exist a huge percentage of the population is going to give up on human lovers entirely. No cheating, no fighting, emotionally stable. Proper conflict resolution. Although AI does get weird sometimes.
spookierookie
"as the loneliness epidemic grows exponentially over the next few decades"

hasn't that happened already?

CM30
> Virtual Friend: become a friend to a random person online. Chat with them, play games, etc. will be more and more common as the loneliness epidemic grows exponentially over the next few decades.

Reminds me of those services in Japan where you can hire people to act as relatives or simply be there to talk to.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rental_family_service

I suspect online versions either exist already, or will exist soon enough.

bell-cot
Martian colonist? (Though the reality is likely to be grueling, risky work, no matter how sepia-toned the sky. With a tiny number of actual positions.)

Lunar colonist? (Similar, though "colonist" might be a bit less hyper-optimistic a title.)

Fusion power plant operator.

Nanoengineer.

"Impossible food" flavor/texture/etc. artist. (Kinda like a chef, with not-quite-Star-Trek food-making technology.)

Grimburger
> colonist

These jobs are not going to be given to anyone but the overqualified and irreplaceable anytime soon, a massive failure of space programs. Personally think the boring inconsequential types who society won't fulminate for years over their loss should undertake such risks and them alone. There's more at stake than some idiotic bad press here.

> Nanoengineer

Degrees in nanotechnology have been available for 2 decades now, it's basically a combination of materials science heavy physics and chemistry combined. We also had a bit of biotech thrown in, which I think is probably the most exciting future of nanotech as it stands today.

scaramanga
This wins the prize for the most nightmarish scenario of all.

Here are the assumptions it's based on:

1. Not content with having burned through earth's resources, transmuting them in to garbage and pollution, we fly to space, a hugely energy intensive enterprise which sources even more raw materials to convert in to garbage and pollution.

2. Having had unlimited energy in the form of fossil fuels, humanity causes climate change bad enough to eventually wipe out most species and all of civilisation, driving humans to the very brink of survival. Now, given a new unlimited power source, what next? Escape all responsibility and push forward business-as-usual for a few more decades, maybe a lifetime, to ensure that we eventually asset-strip everything in reach and wipe out all hope for humanity to ever rebuild a civilisation.

3. ???

4. But as all the cattle die off due to the heat, we'll still have burgers with a satisfying mouthfeel, so that'll be nice.

shrimp_emoji
1. All life on Earth, including human life, has a much better chance of surviving a billion years into the future if we make it interplanetary -- billionS of years into the future if we make it interstellar.

2. Nuclear is the only obvious alternative to fossil fuels.

3. ¿¿¿

4. There's no reason to believe handling climate change is hopeless, and there's reason to believe it's hopeful. The biosphere's natural lifespan[0] not so much.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future "500–600 million -- By this time, carbon dioxide levels will fall to the point at which C3 photosynthesis is no longer possible. All plants that utilize C3 photosynthesis (≈99 percent of present-day species) will die.[76] The extinction of C3 plant life is likely to be a long-term decline rather than a sharp drop. It is likely that plant groups will die one by one well before the critical carbon dioxide level is reached. The first plants to disappear will be C3 herbaceous plants, followed by deciduous forests, evergreen broad-leaf forests and finally evergreen conifers.[69]"

hnthrowaway0328
AI trainer?

I have a dystopian view of the future world so I think a lot of tech work will focus on monitoring, analyzing and predicting. AI is going to play a big part of it but I don't think General AI is going to be easy. Most likely people will simply train AI accordingly, like the mainframe operators. Low pay but stable work.

Tech archaeologist?

Going forward a hundred years probably someone has to dig some tech and manual out and re-create them. A lot of the material is online now but imagine what happens if archive.org is forced to shutdown and the data is lost forever to the general public.

brudgers
AI trainer already exists.

They are called “Amazon Mechanical Turks.”

The dystopian future is already here. It just isn’t evenly distributed.

wwilim
Look for new but already existing jobs which have fewer than a few dozen people worldwide working them. High density hydroponic farmer? Zero-G farmer? Artificial meat engineer?
tmtvl
Flint knapper, fire keeper, and other post-apocalyptic Great Reset tasks.
mutt2016
Oddly, I believe this is probably most correct. Depends how far, but a collision with a celestial object or a big volcano could and will eventually end a lot of progress.

Like.. Imagine Yellowstone blowing. Whoever survives the winter is gonna be the ones who knap.

scaramanga
Yeah, cheesemakers, smokers, curers, preservers, fermenters of all stripes, as temperatures increase, energy output declines, and energy demands increase, we'll be having to find new ways to preserve local food products for consumption other than by refrigeration.
meiraleal
robotsitter: in the future humans will take care of robots, one person will take care of many simple ones and many people will team to take care of one very complex. It already happens in some factories by in a few decades it will be everywhere.
justsayinginnt
Tanglement co-ordinator - Someone who can determine whether an object is quantumly entangled with a pair elsewhere.

eMUA - someone who can spruce up your online avatar with the latest looks or graphical techniques/trends. Like going to a IRL stylist.

Privacy Agent - someone you pay when your personal/online details has been hacked into to resolve the situation. Or someone you pay to do a periodic check-up to mitigate them being stolen. Similar to a lawyer who you call when you’re in trouble or a bodyguard to stop you getting into trouble in the first place.

tagami
eMUA - see Second Life
jstarfish
Sanitation Engineer.

(In the context of finding innovative ways to recycle garbage for rare resources.)

revolvingocelot
Funny way to talk about the noble-yet-maligned trashminer. Political correctness gone mad!!
scaramanga
I'd go for "resource recovery technician" myself :)
Qem
- Pollinator drone swarm pilot;

- Landfill miner;

- Waterfighter (like firefighters, but to quash leaks in barriers built to contain rising seas);

- Antarctic illegal migrant (after temperatures rise and becomes too dangerous to move into the global north due to xenophobia);

scaramanga
I live in somewhere affected by an excess of water due to climate change (but from heavy rain, not so much sea-level rise). With things like flood defences, once they are breached, it is too late to patch them. You tend to just let the damage get done, and repair it once the acute problem is over with. And maybe build them back better. You get the chance to do that because sea-level rise isn't monotonic: unexpected storm surges and things happen which expose the weak spots and then the water recedes and you get a chance to rebuild.

It's extremely dangerous to go out during flooding when water is more than ankle or knee deep or so. I suspect that what a waterfighters job would be is more like going out in amphibious vehicles to rescue humans ala https://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_national/1...

blackbrokkoli
I mean, not denying it's dangerous, but stuff like piling up sandbags on top of a critically flooded dyke and lots and lots of related flooding work (picking up people from rooftops, rerouting traffic, ...) is a reality that many people living near the North Sea cost regularly participate in, as I can attest from personal experience.
walrus01
Food/parcel delivery robot rescue van guy.

A person with a small electric (Ford Transit, etc) sized van that drives around dense urban area and retrieves sidewalk based/pedestrian area, stuck/failed/inoperable food/parcel delivery robots from public places and returns them to some regional repair depot.

toast0
Like a scooter picker upper.
ffhhj
Fluid Worker (multi-professional) - A family or group will share the same virtual persona and take turns to work remotely as a single worker. In low-income regions large communities will share job positions with top salaries. A Fluid Worker Chief will be elected to visit the offices for events and parties. Burned-out individuals will be replaced by younger ones. After World Office War I the Fluid Worker will be legalized, and the roles in companies will be performed by sub-companies which are also allowed to contract their contractor recursively, producing the first Fluid Worker mega-mergers.
yen223
"2022: “WOW you can write a prompt and an AI will draw it!”

2028: “You want to write a prompt? First you need to hire 10-15 promptOps Engineers to build out your PromptFlow pipelines which sends promptjobs to your PromptLake from the PromptQueue using the EventPrompt stream”"

https://twitter.com/chrisalbon/status/1567688342124503040?s=...

cercatrova
GPT is already taking away prompt engineering so I doubt it'll exist all the way in 2028.
user_named
How is it taking away prompt engineering? Prompts still have to be written.
autoexec
In the future AI will do it.
rahimnathwani
I don't know about GPT, but people are already using Textual Inversion to turn examples into things that can be used as parts of prompts.
melonrusk
Adding "LARPing as evolution" to the list...
mudrockbestgirl
You also need to hire people to deal with the regulatory prompt framework.
julianeon
One safe bet about the future would seem to be that environment degradation will worsen, and jobs connected to that will increase.

We don’t think too carefully today about optimizing water usage, or protecting houses from wildfire. But there’s billions of dollars in assets that rely heavily on those things. So jobs linked to preserving their value will increase.

scaramanga
Yeah, how about preventing salt-water incursion in to building foundations from destroying buildings. How about retro-fitting subway tunnels to be resistant to storm surges?

I think the problem with this is that it is very optimistic. The costs of doing all this work has to outpace (by some margin) the economic value of the asset being protected multiplied by how long the asset will be protected for. For that equation to work out positively depends on climate change being slow and gradual, not rapid and sudden.

However, the CO2 outputs and temperature rises are exponential, not linear. Because they're a function of exponential population and economic growth.

Many in-place fixed assets which are vulnerable will simply be abandoned, and the huge infra projects will never be viable (or the window of viability passed decades ago).

You are already seeing it in New York (where no serious protection plan is in place) or Miami, where you're seeing deadly apartment building collapses because they couldn't spend $15m quickly enough to do the protection work (and, of course, if the apartment block was in a poor area and less profitable, it would never be economically viable to fix the problems).

Edit: just to say though, I think you are quite right, jobs related to this will increase, just wanted to point out that the economics of many of them are complex/fraught propositions.

3qz
Any job likely to be replaced by AI will have 1 person overseeing the machines or programs that replaced 10 old employees

ex. Person who remote controls a fleet of a dozen trucks to get them unstuck or person who approves AI drawings to verify they’re not offensive

scaramanga
More likely AI's will be replaced by people, who steadily become cheaper, and more disposable.
mejutoco
Remote 6g operator. To deliver on the promise of self driving you remotely control delivery drones/trucks/cars for other people.
prettywoman
Any job that involves feelings or artistic sensibility will survive to AI apocalypse: Actor, psychologist, arts critic, etc...
scaramanga
Which is the situation we currently have where care-work (teacher, nurse, carer, etc.) are simultaneously the most in-demand, the least replaceable, but also the least rewarded.
8bitsrule
Electric car charger repair business. Get the right contract and voom.
trenning
Space guide. When you and your billionaire friends and family go up to Bezos space cock orbiting facility you’ll need a full concierge and guides to show you around all the interesting bits you can observe from your temporary phallic residence.
scaramanga
Along the same lines, how about homoerotic fan-fiction author for billionaires. Oh shit, that already exists but is entirely voluntary :)
quickthrower2
Zero gravity personal trainers. They get you physically ready for the flight. Help you to stay in shape in space. Then retrain you for 1G of force back on earth.