Aibu for being increasingly worried about the job market?

[gymboe]

another threat of redundancy here. Business not going well and to be honest we are full steam ahead with AI.

a quick search in my large town in south of England:

• 5 x nhs jobs (4 of which I am not qualified for and one is really terrible pay as just three days per week)
• school jobs: just three and very low pay
• our high street is mostly made of charity shops and vape stores. Retail doesn’t offer what I want.
• a big employer now hardly owns any office space. There are just a few jobs. I’m not qualified.

I do have a degree but found myself in a specialised account/client mgmt type role. Pays around £50k.

10 years ago there were loads of these type of jobs, decent salary even if you had to start low, good career progression, hundreds of them and tonnes of temp agencies. And the nhs had loads of admin jobs. Not to mention school jobs being plentiful.

where the hell have they all gone?

this is a huge issue. Massive. I’m really worried.

Most of those things aren't done by care workers though.

I worked early shifts in a care home for a couple of years when my children were little - cleaners did cleaning and delivering food to rooms wasn't even a blip on the radar - it was a nice two minute breather from doing personal care, if you had someone who could feed themselves but was in bed.

Mostly any delivering food without feeding the patient was done by a volunteer or the lady who came in to run social activities (to provide chat/ social contact/ read aloud etc. to bedbound people). Most people eating in bed were on palliative care or had very little mobility in hands/ arms and swallowing problems and needed feeding - which a robot couldn't do as there's a huge risk of choking. People who could eat independently generally ate in the dining room.

Being without human contact if bedbound is a huge risk factor for becoming disoriented and even for depersonalisation.

The kind of robots which deliver food are still just a gimmick really, or at best a really expensive automated trolley.

Robots could do a lot of things which it just isn't financially viable to throw money at because those would be incredibly complex, astronomically expensive robots, and the people doing the job now are barely paid anything in comparison to those costs.

Oh absolutely! Carers deserve so much more money for invaluable work they do.

The NHS is desperate for staff HOWEVER budget cuts due to huge dept, means posts are cut ffs! At the same time, we’re being swamped with bloody software that is shit/time consuming and unreliable 😡 Give me 10 real people instead of a fucking computer anytime and we’d get some real work done! Aaaaand breath….

No, I mean as the person needing care.

I've worked in care homes, the care is so dependent on the person, a robot would equalise this.

I actually tend to agree with this - the anonymity appeals - but that's if you imagine a sci-fi person shaped android, not being stored on a platform with sensors so a robot arm welded to the floor could turn you at regular intervals pre programmed to exactly where the sensors tell it parts of ypur body are... Economically viable robot care workers to do actual personal and nursing care wouldn't be humanoid smiley almost humans, that'd just be far too expensive.

Anyway people (even fiercely independent people) tend to become disorientated and start hallucinating if bed bound without human contact, so the robot helper niche really is only going to work for a kind of support dog who finds your glasses and brings you the TV remote, crossed with a high tech self propelled food trolley...

I have a relative who has a cleaning company, and she gets inundated with applications when she advertises a job. Even graduates are applying, and these are for jobs that are only a few hours a week. People are desperate.

If you mean things like fruit picking when you say land work, then that is usually seasonal and requires people to live on site. They are on less than NMW as they need to pay to stay there. Also, if you are in social housing, you run the risk of losing your home if you are living elsewhere.

Care work might be more attractive if it paid more and the working conditions were better, but that will never happen. I have known people who loved care work end up leaving the industry because of how they are treated by their employers.

The advert was deliberately provocative and the company doubled down to boost engagement, BUT they work in a field which makes humans redundant in certain areas.

We don’t actually want people to stop hiring humans - we’re actively hiring across all roles, and I don’t actually think AI is dystopian. The real goal for us is to automate the work that humans don’t enjoy, and to make every job more human. Nobody wants to spend 8 hours a day researching people and writing outbound emails, so we built Ava to do it for them.

In the long run, the stop hiring humans campaign tagline will have more merit. Inevitably as more and more human productivity is taken over by AI, we should first see a 4-day work week. Eventually, we should live in a world where everyone gets UBI, productivity is driven entirely by robots, we’re all free to do whatever we want and you can truly stop hiring humans, but today is not that day. In my opinion, that day will in fact be utopia.

Those boring tasks that nobody wants to do were once the job of a human. In the past drivable road cleaners replaced teams of human road sweepers with their carts, vacuum cleaners operated by one person did the work of whole teams of human cleaners in the same time, combine harvesters replaced the work of a dozen farm labourers.

So yes, we’ve been here before, but I think it’s different this time.

Now we’re training machines to teach other machines how to do things. AI & machine learning means eventually we won’t need a human to programme the solution to a problem, the machine will have identified the issue, researched the way to solve it and effected the repair itself. A human probably won’t realise what’s going on until it’s all completed.

So whereas the redundant road sweepers, cleaners and farm labourers went off to work as retail staff, delivery drivers or call centre handlers, I’m not sure what jobs will be available for them to move into as high street premises close and go online, drones deliver parcels to your door and AI assistants do away with the need for humans to answer the phone to customer queries.

Maybe the ‘new jobs that haven’t yet been invented’ will be visiting people to chat human-to-human. Not to mend your plumbing, take the dog for a walk or even sing you a song. Just to chat, one living person to another. In a world where the unliving does all the work, maybe just interacting with someone who isn’t a machine will become a luxury.

https://www.artisan.co/blog/stop-hiring-humans

This

This is the thing, the EU workforce filled those sorts of roles because they were house sharing to save costs and saving a nest egg that was worth more back home, it worked having that workforce but now we've got people who like you say who don't want to leave the benefits system to do those jobs because they'd be worse off.

I reckon I would be ok with the project hail Mary style arms coming from the ceiling to move me from bed to wheelchair. Having automony to choose when I want to get up would be valuable to me. The human interaction point is valid- I wonder if events and experiences will be the big future growth areas- people may value collective experiences and a sense of community.

Good points and I agree however the bigger picture is that AI, robotics and automation will impact all workplaces. Care work, healthcare and trades (examples trotted out as "AI proof" jobs) will always have a human element but employers will always want to reduce the human staff they have to pay. Sure, robots are a big investment at this point but eventually they will become cheaper and more cost effective and you'll see them zipping around care homes and work sites assisting the humans.

When you look at robotics, compared to computer intelligence, it's still a long way off being viable - robot dexterity is dreadful. The only successful robots thus far are those that perform repetitive tasks using specially adapted tooling (ie on a car production line)

We won't be seeing them on a construction site any time soon - I'm 45 and don't expect that in my working life on the basis of what is currently being exhibited by the top makers in China.

What about the robots that control surgery by keyhole tho.

I know the surgeon is operation them but it would
Not be too big a leap for say a housimg estate to have robots bricklaying the same house layout in groups of houses and one man operating the controls. You could lay bricks for the whole site potentially same for decorating.

If a machine can do surgery then it can paint a wall.

Da Vinci robots, and they are controlled by the surgeon. They are not programmed and left to it. Too many variables and things that could go wrong with surgery anyway.

I have seen videos of what looks like massive 3D printers do things like lay foundations for houses etc. But they still need to be maintained and used by a human.

The trouble is, the people that those machines are replacing are then redundant and jobless. Some people work in physical jobs because that is all they can do.
It just furthers the argument for UBI more, but many people are against that.

I don’t think this is really down to AI. In most sectors, AI isn’t good enough to replace people. I think it’s mostly down to the shit state of the economy, and public sector job cuts. Both the public sector, and Universities, are cutting huge numbers of jobs, which means thousands of extra well qualified people looking for jobs. Reform want to cut the civil service even further, which would make the situation even worse. I don’t know where they think tens of thousands of extra people are going to find jobs. The private sector can’t absorb them all. Even if it can, it will take years. Meanwhile, younger people with little to no work experience will struggle to compete.

There are nearly a million jobs available in the U.K., but the problem is there aren’t enough people to fill them.

In my industry, there’s a serious skills shortage—we’ve been advertising positions for a couple of years, yet there just aren’t enough qualified candidates. The industry is practically begging for people to join, but few are willing to gain the necessary qualifications, so job openings sit there collecting dust.

Anyone claiming the job market is dire right now clearly hasn’t been around long enough to know it’s been far worse before.

It is the other way around. Check the ONS. 2.5 jobseekers to every vacancy.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/jobsandvacanciesintheuk/november2025

But yes, filling positions with specific qualifications is an issue.

Exactly - robots will "help" humans more and more in the future because companies want efficiency. Amazon already does this in some warehouses, where humans stand at their packing station while robotic shelves of products zip around the warehouse, delivering items to them to package. Amazon owns that technology but I could see John Lewis or Next or Tesco buying those robots for their warehouses once the technology is available. I've seen robot baristas that are able to grasp cups, whisk matcha, steam milk, and make latte art. So the idea of a brick laying robot doesn't seem far fetched to me, just far away. Better to be aware than pretend "it could never happen!".

You have been employed for over a decade? That's amazing.

Come back in another ten or twenty when you have some life experience and grown up

YANBU - but the writing has been on the wall for the last decade. The job market in my industry is booming, we can't get enough people. Your job is unfortunately one that will just die out, you've got to retrain.

If the skills shortage was that bad, and the industry was ‘begging’ for people, then surely they would be training people and/or paying for qualifications, rather than just waiting for fully qualified people to turn up?

Not UK here, but I wouldn’t worry too much about major employers not having office space.

During covid, many people were encouraged to work from home and I know in our DD’s company they had a hard time to get employees back into the office.

to use her employer as an example, the commercial office space /industrial land that it sits on and owned outright, would make a significant financial gain in the multi millions if they shut up shop and got everyone working from home, utilising short term conference facilities to have monthly face to face catchups/de briefing.

and everyone is keen to work from home, offering their private space basically for free for the benefits.

(but yes I’m not keen on AI after reading a brief AI summary of emails within our family group).

90% of my job could already be done by ai.

The 10% requiring a human would still need that human to go through and understand the ai output though, which would take just as long as having the human do it in the first place. So the ai tech is a pointless business expense.

Where it will be useful is ai designing the robots that build the stuff to do the tasks that noone wants to do. It's already teaching itself to do this. I think it'll only be a few more years before AI designs a much safer and more economical self driving car for instance. I think desalination plants will be pretty important to it too, which will also be very beneficial to us.

Which moves a ubi much closer.
I personally would be happy to continue doing my job if there was a ubi as it's rewarding in more ways than salary.

The TV industry is notoriously completely fucked at the moment, ask anyone in it. Advertising revenue has crashed - and ad production were how a lot of people cut their teeth - and streaming services aren't filling the gaps in work as so much of it is made elsewhere. There's a move to AI scriptwriting amongst other things. Many industry people at more experienced levels are desperately looking to retrain; entry level jobs have become more specific and demanding and don't pay well enough unless you're able to live at home with family whilst doing them (so no chance of anyone from outside a big city or without parents who can cover the rent to get into them).

Also, you need money to do things like go to the theatre, and people are reining in their spending.

What’s your industry @RealOliveTraybake?