Asking for a friend … which jobs are safe from AI?

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 29.8K Ratings

🗓️ 10 September 2025

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

There’s one question we seem to be hearing everywhere: “Is my job safe from AI?”

Dozens of you, our listeners, have written to us about this. Saying things like, “Maybe my yoga teacher side gig is actually my safest bet now,” and “My parents were in real estate, and I never thought I’d say it ... but maybe that’s what I should do?”

If only there were a list that could tell you which jobs are safe from AI. We go looking for that list…and find that the AI future is going to be even weirder than we’d imagined.

Today on the show: We talk to two researchers who have come up with some first drafts of the future. We learned more about the machines that might be coming for our jobs, and also, more about what it actually means to be human.

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Today’s episode was produced by Eric Mennel and edited by Marianne McCune. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Robert Rodriguez. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:05.2	Last summer, Charlie Baker was very bored.
0:09.6	He was a rising college senior, had an internship at the New Jersey Department of Community Affairs.
0:14.6	Entering data into spreadsheets, that was what he did on an exciting day.
0:19.4	One day, he's in the break room.
0:21.2	I'm picturing beige, everything beige.
0:23.1	Yeah, or gray.
0:25.7	It's like, and it also, it has this sort of smell of like a thrift store, if that makes sense.
0:31.5	Yep, I do know that smell.
0:33.2	It's not, you know, I don't love it for you, but I know it.
0:35.9	And in that pungent break room, he sees on the table, something that in other circumstances, would not be exciting.
0:44.1	Someone had left out like an LSAT studying book, and I was like, oh, maybe I should check this out.
0:50.6	He starts working through this book, doing practice questions for the law school admissions exam for fun.
0:56.9	And it is like the perfect law school meet cute.
1:00.4	The LSAT book and Charlie run into each other in the break room and the rest is history.
1:04.5	It's all weird little like puzzles, the most convoluted riddles like anyone has ever written.
1:10.5	And I was like, oh, I should really do this.
1:12.4	Do this meaning take the LSAT and go to law school.
1:16.4	But almost immediately, it's like the soundtrack shifts in Charlie's mind.
1:20.3	Maybe he's not in a fun law school rom-com.
1:24.7	Maybe he and everyone he knows is actually living in some kind of dystopian technological
1:30.5	horror movie, where there's an evil robot on the prowl going after every last job.
	...

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