How to Keep Your Job Despite AI

By the author of What School Should Have Taught You: 75 Skills You’ll Actually Use in Life

Part of staying frugal is making sure that you can actually earn money come what may. Given that artificial intelligence has absolutely taken the world by storm ever since ChatGPT was released back in November 2022, the idea of not being able to make money doing what you normally do is something that’s been on a lot of peoples’ minds.

What kind of jobs is AI taking over?

Between ChatGPT, DALLE, Midjourney, and others, the possibilities here are truly astounding. Right now, for the most part, these AIs are being relegated to cyberspace. They can paint, do graphic design, write content, organize things, categorize, pattern check, and so on, just like (and often better than) any human out there, but again, this is largely within the realm of cyberspace.

It’s because of this that a lot of people are rightly growing concerned about what this may mean for them with their job. If literally anything you do right now involves a computer, this is something that concerns you.

Whether you’re an accountant, writer, teacher, tax preparer, consultant, photographer, content creator, stenographer, coder, translator, interpreter, artist, lyricist, songwriter, scheduler, receptionist – whatever – you need to start thinking about this. AI is coming for your job.

Consider that Sports Illustrated recently let go a great portion of their staff to be replaced with AI.

IBM just did the exact same. Buzzfeed did the same before it shut down. Not all of these positions were writers either.

Once AI gets its foot in the door at your company, it’ll only push the door wide open.

How can you protect yourself?

This is why I think that you really need to start thinking about applying the principle of diversification to your current skillset at work. You need to be learning to do as many things as possible at your job so that you can do things that the company hasn’t figured out a way to apply AI to yet. You need to make yourself as indispensable as possible.

Is there a problem at work that needs solving? You be the one to do it. Difficult customers? To the best of your ability, do what you can to help. Other job tasks that may technically be outside of your job description but you don’t see any difficulty in your mastering? I would recommend doing it.

This will help to make it so that you are the last person that your company would ever want to see walk out those doors. Sure, maybe AI will take over a significant portion of what your daily job tasks used to be that way, but you’ll still have a job that way.

But for some people, that won’t be a foolproof plan of action. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how valuable you think you may have made yourself, the end result is a pink slip in your hand. (Here are the first things you should do if you lose your job.)

Again, this is where I think diversification of skillset can apply.

As noted earlier, AI is largely stuck within the realm of cyberspace at the moment. We’ve seen examples of ChatGPT being put into robot dogs, and there are some rather intimidating robotics that are being built by Boston Dynamics, but these technologies are a step removed from the great bulk of us. They’re still being tested and are too expensive for most companies to want to incorporate into their business.

This means that you can have a good deal of job security if you know how to work with your hands. I’m not saying that you need to go out tomorrow and enroll in trade school necessarily, but I do think it would be prudent for you to learn how to do something in the tangible real world that’s not on paper or on a computer.

Can you lay tile, mow lawns, paint a house, pressure wash, pour concrete, knit, leatherwork, tan hides, guide fishing trips, bake bread, clean, raise food, do medical stuff, or the like?

These types of skills (and this isn’t an exhaustive list) are things that are largely safe from the world of AI and robotics at the moment. To be sure, robotics will try to muscle in on those fields as well at some point in the future, but for the right here and right now, learning how to do those things and slowly building a marketplace for whatever “real life” skill sets you have at the moment is one of the best things that you can do to make sure that you still have marketability come what may.

Don’t keep all your eggs in one basket.

The fact of the matter is that we don’t know what the future holds. That’s the way it’s always been, right? But there is wisdom in the old saying that you don’t want to keep all your eggs in one basket. Why? Because you just might drop that basket.

Apply the same principle with your job skills.

At your job, place “baskets” throughout the workplace. Within your own life, spread “baskets” of job skills, learning as much as you can about as much as you can. If you do that, you’ll be better guarded and prepared against whatever these advancements in AI and robotics will bring.

What do you think about this? Do you agree or disagree? Is AI a threat at all? Is your job at risk? Let us know what you say in the comment section below.

About Aden

Aden Tate is a regular contributor to TheOrganicPrepper.com and TheFrugalite.com. Aden runs a micro-farm where he raises dairy goats, a pig, honeybees, meat chickens, laying chickens, tomatoes, mushrooms, and greens. Aden has four published books, What School Should Have Taught You, The Faithful Prepper,  An Arm and a Leg, The Prepper’s Guide to Post-Disaster Communications, and Zombie Choices. You can find his podcast The Last American on Preppers’ Broadcasting Network.