What to do in the face of AI taking jobs

August 3, 2025

This was produced by recording a conversation, transcribing it with whisper, then letting ChatGPT clean that up, followed by post editing.

When I looked out the shower window this morning, I thought, I should be working on my drums. But then again… I had a better reason to get out, like human contact. Talking while driving around in the car…

What to do in the face AI and large language models, etc particularly with regard to careers is a hot topic these days. I saw an interview the other day on the YouTube channel called “Diary of a CEO” with Nobel Laureate Geoffrey Hinton, often called the grandfather of AI. At one point the interviewer asked him, “Did you see any of this coming when you started working on AI 10, 20 years ago?”

Hinton said no, not back then. But in the last few years, he’s been sounding the alarm.

At one point, the interviewer pressed him: “What should people do, people worried about their careers with all this AI development?”

And Hinton, almost sheepishly, said, “Learn to become a plumber.”

Nervous laughter.

But the point landed. AI isn’t taking over plumbing. Or carpentry. Or electrical work. It’s creeping into other areas—video editing, accounting, research, even security. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. One time I took Bruce to Sam’s Club and there was this robot just gliding up and down the aisles. When I worked at Lowe’s, we had something like that—a little autonomous machine patrolling the halls, maybe it was delivering mail.

Ny friend Laura said, “It’s not security like I do it, but it’s still a presence. It’s doing 20% of the job.”

That’s where the 80/20 rule kicks in. Twenty percent of the code gets you 80% of the results, 20% of your customers account for 80% of youre revenue, etc. AI, right now, is getting good enough to handle that twenty percent slice that counts. It’s not as good as a human, not by a long shot—but it’s enough to disrupt a lot of jobs.

She: “Still, a robot’s not much of a deterrent. I mean, when they tested AI security bots, someone ran up for help, and it told them to go away and started singing Happy Birthday. That’s real.”

What if all you need is something to walk the halls and send alerts when something is amiss? That’s already happening. Humans get sent in when the bot goes offline—or when something has a baseball bat, or it detects smoke or any other anomalous things.

That interview got me thinking about my own career. It’s been about 80% tech. But I’ve taken these little detours over the years: worked in signage, did some carpentry with my brother-in-law’s friend the general contractor, even stocked shelves and talked to people at in retail. I used to think of those as side trips. Now, I’m wondering if they’re actually the seeds for my future. I’ve always thought of myself as a tech guy dabbling in trades. Maybe it’ll be the other way around.

It’s funny. The company I work for now? They’re not just aware of this shift—they’re profiting from it. In my office, they’ve got these big screens showing off all our latest breakthroughs. One of the slides boasts that our new devices are “space-ready.” Space has all kinds of weird environmental challenges like radiation, etc but future probes will make AI really useful. Sending cameras into space instead of humans makes sense. Less risk, more data. But I grew up in the 60s and 70s, when we were putting people on rockets. It felt different. More human, but sending special kinds of sensors like the James Webb telescope, Hubble, various other specialty satellites. These don’t benefit from having a human there. Not to mention that space is a really inhospitble place place for humans “Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids.” But this ties into the security robots.

Lately I’ve been thinking—maybe I could be a handyman. I like using my hands.

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