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Here’s the brutal, honest truth: the world of work as we know it may simply not exist by 2030. As I mentioned in my previous post, the statistics are alarming : Goldman Sachs (via the BBC) has estimated that up to 300 million jobs could be lost as a direct result of AI. The automation of half of all the current tasks worldwide could occur by 2045 or earlier. The jobs of 47% of all workers in the USA could directly be threatened by AI by 2035. The IMF has reported that 60% of all jobs in advanced economies are directly at risk of being ‘impacted’ — read, either benefit or be replaced — by AI, while Open AI itself estimates that the figure may be closer to 80% (they are trying to offset these dire figures by dangling vague promises of ‘better jobs’ or ‘productivity and profits’ that could be created by AI without specifying how or what exactly these could entail; ‘AI Specialist’ could literally describe anything).

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I wish I were making this up. But the statistics are already lending more credibility to the doomsday scenarios, and it’s important to read between the lines. And clearly I’m not alone in this: more than half of workers believe that AI will eliminate more jobs than it will create. And in a now-deleted report, Asana reported that nearly 70 to 80% of employees polled mistrusted their company’s transparency on AI use. Distrust and fear are the reigning sentiments of the day: although only 13.7% of workers in the US reported having lost their job to a robot, people who have already experienced being replaced automatically assume that the figure is closer to 47%.

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Who’s the most worried? 52% of Gen-Z and Millenial workers fear that AI will negatively impact their careers: these younger workers, specifically workers aged 18 to 24, are 129% more likely than workers over 65 to worry that AI will make their jobs obsolete. And it’s been reported that 81.6% of digital marketers fear that content writers will lose jobs due to AI. According to a joint survey by CNBC and Surveymonkey in 2023, fully remote workers were 42% more likely to worry about being replaced by AI, as were 51% of workers in advertising and marketing.

These fears are not unfounded: it appears that no job will be spared, with almost 80% of jobs already being exposed to AI (this includes manufacturing, by the way — not just knowledge work). McKinsey noted that more than 75% of all organizations now use AI, and larger companies with revenues over $500 million are more likely to adopt AI. CNN has reported that 40% of companies adopting AI are automating, not augmenting, human work, the World Economic Forum has shown that 41% of employers are planning to downsize their workforces through AI automation by 2030, and earlier in 2025, the CEO of a major AI startup, Anthropic, has personally gone on record expressing fears that AI could cause the unemployment rate to soar to 20% in the USA in the next one to five years (for reference, unemployment rate during the Great Depression was 25%).

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So, what jobs might survive this seemingly impending job loss apocalypse?

1.Religious worker/ aid provider/ charity organizer /NGO healthcare worker

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The unglamorous truth is that the next few decades will almost certainly bring even more economic and sociopolitical crises all around the world. Although AI technology is developing at an exponential rate, AI’s adaptability to unpredictable real-life situations can only go so far. And although it may appear to be getting closer and closer, AI can’t quite replicate this ‘lived experience’ or ‘adaptability’ element of the human experience just yet.

Even the highly controversial, newly released domestic cleaner robot, Neo, still requires remote human control, as do most drones on the ongoing battlefields of the world (although this status quo may undergo some horrifying changes in the next few decades). The logistics of identifying people who are truly in need, connecting them to vetted sources of relief, and then providing them with said resources is a monumental task requiring deeply ingrained cultural understanding, linguistic knowledge spanning different levels of social strata, gut instinct, big-picture understanding, and true empathy of the sort that can’t be manipulated or feigned.

Established religious workers and aid providers cannot really be replaced by AI either, it seems. The quasi-spiritual ‘egregore’ status of LLMs such as Chat GPT have caused many people to look for truth or comfort in the soothing platitudes it has been programmed to provide. However, problems with AI psychosis are now becoming increasingly recognized, as Open AI itself reports that hundreds of thousands of users are holding increasingly psychologically sensitive conversations with the chatbot, with a rising and alarming number of vulnerable individuals reportedly being encouraged to commit suicide by the chatbot itself.

At the end of the day, no matter how sophisticated it might seem to an uninitiated layman, an LLM simply calculates the probability that one word in a specific concept will follow another word. Furthermore, it is simply incentivized to encourage interaction, seek out information, and crave attention. This is a dangerous combination. Any human expert in a given field of research, or any human being with a level of self-insight, can see through the chaotic mixture of hallucinatory lies that are spouted by any chatbot when attempting to engage in a conversation with it as if it were human, or somehow all-knowing. These simple word-mangling programs offer up carefully calibrated empty words that have not been gained through personal suffering or experience or insight. But the vulnerable people looking to AI for wisdom, unfortunately, are driven by little more than desperation.

Of course, being a religious worker or aid provider wouldn’t be a stable career choice so much as a calling, or a necessity. As the existing world order collapses into even more wars and conflicts and crises over the next few decades, the remnants of international NGOs and regionally established spiritual leaders in each local community, without the aid of artificial technology, will have larger roles to play than ever before. It’s very likely that insalubrious actors such as exploitative cult leaders or money-grabbing opportunists might try to take advantage of such spaces.

The best way to prepare for this line of work would be to hone your intuition, stay abreast of international and domestic political developments, stay active in local events or build your local community, and volunteer at soup kitchens or intern at non-governmental organizations to get a sense of what the work requires. Relevant specialization certificates would also be useful.

“But Cookiedough,” I hear a voice at the back of the room mumble hesitantly, “what about… rescue robots? Won’t they replace emergency responders?” My answer would be: no, because maneuvering such machinery still requires human control and dexterity. And that brings me to category 2.

2.Civil servant/ Social welfare service provider/ Emergency response or Crisis responder

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The second job sector on this list refers to government jobs or careers related to emergency response units. Democratic governments by nature can’t explicitly prioritize profits over the welfare of their citizens… not yet, anyway (despite what the recent massive federal layoffs in the USA or growing geopolitical instability worldwide might have us fear).

As such, unlike corporations that can lay off entire departments at the drop of a pin based on some newfangled AI hawking metric, national governments are supposed to be accountable to their citizens. It stands to reason that the most stable employer in a volatile market is always going to be the government, for better or for worse.

Any functional national government is always incentivized to do three things: (1) maintain social order in one way or another, (2) defend its territory from outsiders — however it may define ‘territory’ and ‘outsiders’ — and (3) to control chaos on its own terms. So, for as long as it exists, it will always be looking to hire people who can manage and maintain its clunky apparatus, from the high-ranking official to the lowly bureaucrat.

And no, rescue robots will not replace manned rescue crews, at least not for the next decade or so. Robots are usually used for two reasons: (1) to do necessary things that humans can’t or won’t do, or (2) to increase profit margins over time by eliminating the cost of paying a wage. A government job eliminates reason 2, unless we’re talking about a very corrupt government (this is a completely different topic for another day). And as for reason 1, not only is the technology not quite there yet, but also …… I’d like to believe that people will still want to rescue other people.

3. Teacher/ Educator/ Instructor (caveat: non-academics only)

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Third on this list is the job of ‘educator.’ Of course, just like all the jobs on this list (and just like the eight jobs in my previous list of jobs that AI will more or less replace by 2030), this line of work will undergo massive changes, with many former teacherly duties being outsourced or eliminated altogether through technology.

Case in point: in September of 2024, a school in Texas, USA was reported to be experimenting with replacing traditional teachers entirely with AI. A Pew Research Center study from last spring, picked up by major news outlets, also showed that 31% to a third of AI ‘experts’ expected teachers to be gradually phased out by 2044. And a Microsoft report included teachers in the ’40 jobs most likely to be replaced by AI’ as well. And yet, despite these statistics, why do I believe that teachers are still among the seven jobs least likely to be replaced by AI?

Although edu-tech is certainly giving teachers a run for their money, the human-to-human transmission of education is as of yet irreplaceable. Education is not simply a series of rote memorization tasks that can be algorithmically engineered. As long as humans remain human, the social and emotional elements integral to education will remain central in academic contexts, and most of the people surveyed in this study from Hong Kong are of a similar opinion. Although the notoriously difficult working conditions for teachers in the United States have led to record levels of teacher shortages, it is still widely recognized that good human teachers remain indispensable to the maintenance of a functioning democracy on the whole.

This goes to show that institutions and governments have a vested interest in maintaining the integrity of what remains of standardized education and its role in society: the World Economic Forum, for example, has also advised that teachers must remain central to educational institutions and be supported by AI rather than being replaced by it altogether.

Besides, outside of the context of state schools and public education, one need only look at the proliferation of ‘courses’ hawked by even the least influential influencer to see that teaching as a profession will not be made redundant. Even people without expertise are pretending to know things they don’t in order to sell scammy ‘courses’ online about everything from ‘how to get more followers on socials’ to ‘how to build your own app.’

As the infamous reversal of the Flynn effect has been making headlines regarding the decline of global intelligence, we now know that years of isolation during COVID have severely impacted the literacy of an entire generation worldwide.

As the privatization of education increases the polarization of academic achievement and catalyzes the death of literacy, people will be less and less able to think for themselves, more and more dependent upon self-professed ‘teachers’ and ‘leaders’ to make their decisions for them, and generally more susceptible to swindlers than ever before. This will make the role of actual teachers that much more important.

“Does this mean that academic jobs will make a comeback, since professors and highly educated smart professionals actually know what they are talking about?” you may ask. The answer, unfortunately, is no. If you’re in higher education, you already know that we’ve already plunged headfirst into the worst academic job market in a generation — with disastrous ramifications in and of itself — and major segments of the public are fundamentally rethinking the value of a college education.

But this is already the subject of a whole different subsequent article.

Which brings us to…

4. Cultural worker, content creator (in regions with the relevant infrastructure)

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“But Cookiedough,” you may ask, scrolling through the glut of AI produced slop on your phone, “Isn’t this the most likely profession to be replaced by AI?”

No, and I’ll explain why.

It’s because of the principle of ‘Garbage In, Garbage Out.‘

In informatics, GIGO, or ‘Garbage In, Garbage Out,’ refers to the concept that ‘garbage’ (poor quality) information input produces a resulting output that is similarly low-quality. If the key incentive of AI is ‘deep learning,’ then it will be in the AI creators’ interests to ensure that AI-created ‘slop’ does not over-saturate its major data input sources.

Besides, it would be an understatement to say that the general public is very unlikely to welcome AI with open arms. As of this writing in November 2025, I have over fifteen different social media accounts that I have been using to test and monitor different social media algorithms, and they almost never overlap. Without getting too deep into the weeds, suffice it to say that the “AI slop” algorithm feeds almost never overlap with the “human-guaranteed” algorithm feeds, especially since the actual humans in the comment sections and the human content creators express a vigilance amounting to paranoia when it comes to filtering that stuff out. So far, it seems that the general public, with very few exceptions, is, if not overtly hostile, then at the very least very defensive against openly and knowingly adopting AI-generated creations in their day-to-day lives.

There are easily more online communities than there are people on Earth at this point, with many people adopting multiple avatars and pursuing various interests online. But the more people’s entire lives move online, the more people are increasingly skittish and wary of any hint that the person on the other end of their digital experience may not be taken at face value.

Such caution doesn’t seem wasted, because scam groups have hit record heights: in the United States alone, 73% of US adults have reported experiencing an online scam or attack, and vast organized crime syndicates controlling scam centers spanning areas as disparate as Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia have reached global humanitarian crisis levels. In countries such as Russia and China, where political control of the internet is much more pronounced, the governments have already taken proactive measures to register and authenticate their content creators, and it doesn’t seem unlikely that other countries may also follow suit.

It makes sense, then, that human content creators will always have a foothold in the increasingly diversified and contentious global digital landscape, at least for the forseeeable future.

5. Weapons manufacturer

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Because, well…… think about it.

For the past few years, conflicts around the world have only grown more entrenched, continuing to spread to different regions. Weapons are like steroids for war economies with a gambling streak: the more they get, the more they need. And because you can’t exactly recycle ammunition or missiles that fall into enemy territory, the expenditure is not recoupable and tends to build up, from the purchaser’s point of view. On the manufacturer’s side, the sales can rack up real fast.

But this is, yet again, the subject of yet another subsequent, different article.

6. Security specialist/ bunker builder

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Last month, the BBC reported that tech billionaires such as Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Ilya Sutskever of Open AI, and Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn have all been ‘apocalypse-prepping,’ raising speculation that some “catastrophic event the rest of us have yet to know about” may be on the horizon. Whether or not it’s mere hyper-vigilant paranoia on the part of those experts who view the unhindered and deregulated deployment of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) as a potential doomsday scenario remains to be seen. But for now, what’s sure is that demand for both digital and physical security is on the rise, and projected to thus remain for some time.

So, if you’re out of options, maybe opt for a construction job in New Zealand (where rumor has it that most of these mega-millionaires are building their underground bunkers)!

Or, if you come from money, you could always just default to luxury, because…

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With the polarization of the global economy progressing at a godforsaken pace that would put the Great Depression to shame, even the luxury sector is seeing polarization as never before, with a reported post-COVID growth of the entire luxury market at 15%, and ultra-wealthy clients accounting for 40% of major luxury purchases.

As local economies in not just the USA but all around the world enter freefall, ultra-premium appeals to individual wellness and inane, inflated pop-culture references to a sheltered life will provide a bulwark of denial for those who find it too painful to face our collective crumbling reality, just like this scarier-than-life, entirely-AI-generated short film from Pika Labs clearly shows:

Uh… so are you basically saying that we’re entering World War III, and the AI bubble will collapse?

Not necessarily, but maybe. It’s always wise to keep the worst-case scenario in mind, especially if it’s growing more likely with each passing quarter. For the past month, there has been growing unease surrounding the growing likelihood that AI is a bubble much like the dot-com bubble was, with the major AI companies inflating their market value and trading at hyped-up price points with exorbitant promises that they simply can’t keep. If this is the case, none of this is sustainable at all in the long run.

Besides, the job losses are already hitting badly. Lots of people will try to start their own startups after getting laid off through AI automation processes. And because the statistics show us that more than half of all businesses fail within the first two years, they will most likely fail. And they will require help from categories 1, 2, and 3, while the people in category 4 will be recruited to pump out real content for the increasingly saturated AI mill while placating the general public with the illusion that nothing is wrong. Those with more than disposable income will flock to categories 5, 6, and 7. Simple as that.

But surely Artificial Intelligence is here to stay, and it’s just another nifty tool that we don’t have to conflate with visions of apocalypse?

That’s what everyone would like to think, isn’t it?

“But of course,” the argument goes: “it is important to remember that different technologies can, have, and do coexist for extended periods of time! We no longer use phonographs, but many music collectors still swear by vinyl! We no longer use crossbows for warfare, but archery is still an important Olympic sport! And electronic books can never replace paper books. Besides, AI will only end up creating more new jobs.”

Really?

Over the course of the past few years, I have second guessed myself on this issue more times than I can count. I have considered the perfectly logical possibility that maybe, just maybe, I’m just one of those luddites that used to panic about artists losing their jobs after the invention of the camera.

But I’ve since come to realize that AI is not just any tool, and while panic is never wise, caution to the point of alarm is definitely long overdue. All the arguments that bank on the historical retention of previous tools fall flat when it comes to the issue of AI replacing human intelligence in the labor market. As one prescient Youtuber said in a video essay eleven years ago:

“Imagine a pair of horses in the early 1900s talking about technology. One worries [that] all these new mechanical muscles will make horses unnecessary. The other reminds him that everything so far has made their lives easier — remember all that farm work? Remember running from coast-to-coast delivering mail? Remember riding into battle? All terrible. These city jobs are pretty cushy, and with so many humans in the cities there will be more jobs for horses than ever. Even if this car thingy takes off – he might say – there will be new jobs for horses we can’t imagine. But you, dear viewer, from beyond 2000, know what happened — there are still working horses, but nothing like before. The horse population peaked in 1915 — from that point on it was nothing but down.”

IN CLOSING…

Any and all opinions are welcome in the comments section. I’ll be back regularly with more listicles about the resources that remain for us digital freelancing survivors, as well as survival stories featuring our fellow freelancers. Stay tuned, and safe out there.

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⊹ ࣪ ﹏𓊝﹏𓂁﹏⊹ ࣪ ˖

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Are you a writer, translator, interpreter, or freelance worker in a relevant field that has been affected by the recent deployment of artificial intelligence? Or would you like to feature your services on Cookiedough.online? Contact me with your story at yeinnaya@gmail.com

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⊹ ࣪ ﹏𓊝﹏𓂁﹏⊹ ࣪ ˖

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Human-powered Guarantee (or disclaimer, depending on who you ask!) : I don’t believe in outsourcing my own intelligence to Artificial Intelligence. Unless specifically otherwise noted, all my work is typed using my own ten fingers to compile what my eyes see on my physical screen.

© 2025, YK Jung, a.k.a. the Human Cookie Dough Wrangler.

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