At Upwork, Emily Gertenbach talks about jobs — 120 of them — that are not likely to be automated. For example,

Health care jobs that won’t be replaced by AI 1. General practitioner 2. Surgeon 3. Nurse 4. Midwife 5. Physical therapist 6. Psychologist 7. Psychiatrist 8. Pharmacist “

120 Jobs ThatAI Won’t Replace,” November 27, 2024

When it comes to health questions, a chatbot may have the right answer — or, as we are finding out more and more, it may be hallucinating a completely wrong answer. In either case, most people would really prefer to work with a sympathetic fellow human being.

She finds the same thing with creative arts, skilled trades, teaching, service jobs, and many other fields. We could, perhaps, say that any field where human credentials are important is unlikely to be replaced by a plausible bot.

Some of us think that AI is peaking anyway and that many of the claims are overblown.

As both Pomona business prof Gary Smith and technology consultant Jeffrey Funk have often pointed out here, when you focus on the hard numbers, a very different picture emerges:

OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, was valued at $157 billion in a funding round last October and is now in a funding round that could see the company valued at up to $340 billion. How do these valuations compare to the profits OpenAI generates? Well, there aren’t any profits …

The fundamental problem is that LLMs are not useful enough to yield much revenue.

Gary Smith, “Yes, the AI Stock Bubble Is a Bubble — It’s unfolding the way a financial bubble typically does,” March 28, 2025

True, chatbots can, for example, help students produce plausible BS for essays and cheat on takehome exams — instead of learning the topic — but that won’t revolutionize anything or make anyone rich. That fact may slowly be sinking in.

You may also wish to read: AI’s contradictory impact on productivity: Squeezing a balloon. AI appears to give support workers a big revolution in productivity. But it is somewhat like a child squeezing a balloon; the air pushes out someplace else. (Jeffrey Funk, May 26, 2025)

Hat tip: Ken Francis