> at a societal level, at least, we are already changing too fast for us (ie our institutions) to keep up.

This is a whole other problem that needs addressing in itself: How do we speed up things like the legislative process without losing anything important?

> Can you confidently choose 5 careers you think will still be available to a regular person in 10 to 20 years?

If the singularly really DOES come in that time, no. But trying to plan for that is like trying to plan your career around the collapse of civilisation due to climate change - the idea of a "career" will be irrelevant at that point anyway.

Short of the singularity though, Idon't think the issue will be all careers disappearing wholesale due to AI. I think the short-term issue will be that automation will remove a lot of the "grunt work" from many jobs, resulting in a smaller workforce being needed for the same or greater output.

As an example, ChatGPT shows that the written equivalent of the spreadsheet revolution is upon us. Because it can write tailored, natural-sounding responses to queries, it'll gobble up low-level admin and customer service jobs. In the tech sector, it'll generate well-commented boilerplate code ready to be populated with data. For teachers, it can do the heavy lifting with their lesson planning. For many content writers, it'll reduce their role to prompt, edit and fact-check. Then there are things like medicine, where diagnosis, image analysis etc will be handled by AI, with human doctors acting as a failsafe.

These are the kinds of changes I think we'll see in the next decade. They'll be huge, and there WILL be job losses in areas where large teams can be condensed into smaller ones, but there will still be a need for trained professionals to guide the AI. To ask the right questions, and to sense-check the answers. Domain knowledge will still be important for a while yet. Hell, it'll take a few years for most companies to actually figure out what's possible with this new technology.

In terms of physical jobs, it'll be the same story. The construction sector will move to prefabrication off-site for most smaller buildings, some of which will be automated, but a lot of maintenance will still be done by humans. Robots are great when you can design an environment they can thrive in, but terrible where they have to adapt. Plus, even if robots COULD replace humans, mass-producing them would take time. Driving is an interesting one. I think "platooning" of trucks will become the norm far sooner than true self-driving, but again it'll be a few years before we see too much of that.

Then there are the jobs where human interaction or presence is a key component. Things like the care sector, hospitality, performing arts, sports. Those will be the safest for the longest.

The advice I'd give kids these days is that they're growing up in a world where computers and robots will be able to do most things a human asks. So the most secure careers will fall into a few categories:

• Careers where you're an expert whose job it is to decide what the computer should be asked, work out how to ask it, and interpret the results (like the examples above where domain knowledge is still important).

• Careers where your job is to decide what the computer is or should be allowed to do (politics, philosophy, AI safety etc).

• Careers where people value the fact a human is doing the task (like the arts etc).

When you look at it through that lens, I actually don't think much changes if you're trying to build a career. Find what you're good at and enjoy, look into what careers need the skills those things favour, and tailor your knowledge to match. There will be a career out there for you, you just need to keep a more active eye on what's happening in the fields you're considering.