Which skills are least likely to be replaced by AI?

You didn't give a time frame. So I would say, there are no skills that cannot be replaced by AI in an indefinite time frame.

AI might have mastered just about every skill or capability within 10 or 20 years. Some people suspect less.

Your list isn't really just skills but more generally abilities.

Emotional IQ - See the Inflection 2.5 model (Pi).

Creativity - Ask ChatGPT to help you be creative writing poetry and then creating paintings of the poems.

Leadership/management - Claude 3 or GPT4 might be better than the average manager. 70% of my bosses have been barely competent pr!cks though, so I may be biased.

Negotiation is not that complex actually. It's boils down to being willing to walk away. Leading LLMs can be good negotiators already.

Hand-eye coordination - not for every single task, but we have robots that can play ping pong, juggle, catch balls, and solve a Rubik's cube faster than humanely possible.

Critical thinking skills: put the average person off the street against Claude 3 Opus or GPT-4 Turbo and have them take a GRE or similar test. I would bet on the AI.

For your list, we are already there.

I think that "replaced" is not necessarily the best way to think about it though. People still play chess. Or run. Or Jeopardy. We still have plenty of amateur artists that just want to imitate their favorite cartoon or whatever. Even though AI can do all of that better and faster now.

But wait 10 or 20 years. There will be very realistic and fully capable simulations of humans.

Responsibility. As separate from technical ability.

You won't be able to replace doctors, because you want someone to say "I'm a doctor and you need this surgery". What will happen is the doctor will get an AI to help him, and then he will rubber stamp the diagnosis. He captures the gains.

Pilots and captains are also one of these. Someone's gotta be responsible for the people on board, even if a computer is already doing everything on a normal day.

Right now, AI need a huge number of examples to reach decent performance. Therefore, things where a huge number of training examples don't exist and can't be generated by a simulation or self-play. When AI get past that problem, I expect the whole global economy to shift in a couple of months[0].

Also, things where the point is to be human. Working for rich people in any capacity may fill this role, for the same reason they by watches which cost more than apartments yet keep worse time than a Casio F91W.

[0] I'm also assuming this is more likely to happen after we get a significant number of android robot workers; if it happens before that point, then it may take a year or two for the global economy to shift.

My plumber seems pretty safe about AI at least for next century. Unless houses are rebuilt with standards and ease of repairability in mind. But even changing all the houses in the world to this new system would take over a hundred years.

Probably those that require a combination of some high level cognitive processes, tacit knowledge, and physical actuation in uncontrolled environments. For example, plumbers probably aren't going to be replaced any soon. Surgeons too. But between surgeons and plumbers, the latter will take more time to be replaced, because a construction site is less of a controlled environment than a surgery room.

Any physical type of jobs: house repairs such as painting, building, etc. Roof cleaning, moving furniture. Physical therapists like massage/needles/etc. Physical teaching like 1:1 practices of martial arts/dances/etc.

Plumbers, locksmiths, carpenters, HVAC technicians, etc. Trade jobs that require very precise hand-eye coordination and the ability to perform in a wide variety of unpredictable environments.

Nurses/MAs for the same reason, but also the fact that I think people in pain/sickness will still want human compassion. Even if AI and Robots may be able to do the job some day, people want to be helped by other people.

Tour guide, nurses, physio, child care, psychologist.

Anything in front of a screen is vulnerable

The only profession where I’m 100% confident it’ll survive is the oldest profession

Spoiler: this comment does not technically answer OP's question.

Many of the answers in this thread talk about skills where AI seems unlikely to have any direct sort of impact at all (like plumbing). In my opinion, that could easily end up being technically correct but exactly wrong in spirit (assuming the ultimate goal is to have a good job). It's somewhat likely that AI-augmented or AI-enabled professions become so ludicrously profitable that any other profession becomes barely livable.

Instead of trying to avoid AI it might make more sense to ride the wave. Dive right into some industry that's undergoing upheaval, work for AI-powered startups, learn about the technology, and meet the future head-on.

I don't want to sound too "gung ho", I'm a software engineer who feels like my profession will be radically different in less than 10 years and I'm genuinely worried about staying relevant. But I think "staying relevant" is probably a better strategy than trying to get out of way.

Barring global catastrophe resetting humanity's scientific and technological advancement, everything that can be automated will be automated. That's everything outside what could only be a niche market of "Certified Human-Produced".

Countering that, in a way, barring major sociocultural shifts, the elite require serfs, so whatever it is that serfs can be made to do which is somehow necessary for perpetuating the power/financial structures which prop up the elites will be "spared" somehow.

Your question seems to assume that there are some kind of practical human capabilities that cannot be automated. This is false.

Anything protected by a union or government.

Anything that is physical and not 100% replicable.

Anything that is interpersonal relationship.

High manual dexterity in cramped, wet, poorly-lit environments.

Investigative skills. AI can't do anything a detective does. Formulating a theory, testing it, refining it etc.

Also quickly grabbing arbitrarily shaped objects from a pile.

Anything that involves in-person charisma will not be replaced for centuries, if ever.

Ditto for any kind of writing or communication skills that are counter-cultural in nature. It seems pretty clear that the AIs corporations are creating are pretty aligned with whatever values the powers-that-be have. I don't expect AI to invent the equivalent of punk rock.

Motor/hand eye coordination most definitely. That's what millions of years evolution has optimized us for more than anything else. Anything involving manipulating and movement in varying physical environments remains a hard problem to solve in cost-effective manner, despite all the money poured to self-driving cars and general purpose robotics. Of course we have solutions that work in specific contexts, factory or lab environment, but that's about it.

I believe emotional intelligence will become a close second. As long as we don't have perfected humanoid robots like in TV series Westworld, people will likely prefer genuine human contact in certain situations (psychologist, therapist, service sector, nursing...)

I hope we can find a path to a post-scarity, Star Trek world, where people can pursue passions without worrying about marketability and whether "AI" whatever will replace you.

I can get great furniture at Ikea, but some people build furniture because they love it.

AI replacing skills is a moving target. Anything can be replaced by AI (more so information jobs) but as things are replaced humans just have to work harder to be novel. AI is by definition trained on the largest pool of examples, which means being novel will mean your skills are excluded by AI until it catches on. Of course being novel is something that perpetually happens. Ideally the world becomes a place where the AI and robots do the rote busy work and humans are relegated to finding novel solutions.

Even before AI there was the issue of being replaced by cheaper labor. AI just happens to be computational cheap labor. Just be better at what you do to avoid being replaced.

The thing about AI is, the whole point is to replicate and eventually surpass what a human can do, so the eventual answer is nothing. What timescale are you working with? Are you trying to figure out your own career (good luck!) are you trying to advise a kid/student (maybe plumber, maybe?) but all of these are sort of just kicking the can.

Probably one of the most important jobs now is figuring out what the hell the upcoming jobs/activities should auta be.

AI is a convenient scapegoat for putting people out of work and paying employees less than they deserve.

No industry is safe from this malpractice as long as above is true.

I'm fairly sure the oldest of professions will be relatively immune to AI.

But also teaching. AI might be better at teaching actual subjects, physics, maths, and so on, but a good part of school is socialization beyond the family, and that pretty much requires human teachers/coaches/guides/role-models.

Prostitution.

Pornography is doomed, but we're a long way from realistic physical sex robots, AI powered or otherwise.

Industrialization replaced almost all physical labor in factories. Sure there are still some left but those are the ones cheaper to fill/program a human than a robot.

AI will do the same, if allowed, eventually, to mental jobs

Art. By definition, and applied broadly across fields. And I mean real art, not generic, cookie cutter, mass-production "art" (that can be replaced, and makes up the majority)

Sysadmins, as we're the plumbers of the tech world. Someone gotta keep those servers running, right?

Or maybe I just think that because I still consider myself one. Who knows.

Art is never going to be replaced by ML-generated works, because art is self-expression and so requires there to be a self to express.

Basic communication with human interaction. Soft kills >> hard kills

AI is assistance not an replacement to a lot extent

Took them 15 years to replace cashiers with a touch screens in McDonald's.

"AI" still can't drive a car.

Lawyers.

I think AI can possibly replace lawyers, but the powerful people in society will do all they can to prevent it.

Human sacrifice. It's clear the most impactful things I do are when I travel and visit partners/customers and from a material standpoint those are some of the least impactful.

I've come to believe the sacrifice is the thing -- that's why getting on a plane beats the best video conference and always will. The same thing will be true with AI.

Genuine communication will only become more important and those who can communicate well and not sound like LLM drivel (even if it gets really good) will stand out.

By Moravec's paradox, the ones we find the simplest.

So driving for Uber and mowing lawns.

It might be interesting to repeat the questions asked in the context of "bullshit jobs" and "leisure sciences" which were raised in the 1990s.

People then assumed that through automation (not even intelligent automation) we would work less and do more interesting things. Boy were they wrong, and I wholeheartedly assume that we'll be wrong again about the next 20 years.

Making babies.

ensuring and enforcing ethical applications of ML

standup comedy

physical engineering. That will take a while.

Being myself.

Tech CEOs