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Looking for an AI-Proof Career? The Trades are a Smart Choice.

Looking for an AI-Proof Career? The Trades are a Smart Choice.

While AI proceeds to decimate career paths, take heart: Not all jobs are at risk. Educators, and many others, are seeing the hands-on trades as skilled, high-paying careers that robots can’t replace.

May 09, 2025
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Craftsmanship
Craftsmanship
Looking for an AI-Proof Career? The Trades are a Smart Choice.
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Welding instructor Robert Collins teaches students at The Crucible in Oakland, using chalk diagrams to explain MIG welding techniques.
photo by Andrew Sullivan

Looking for an AI-Proof Career? The Trades are a Smart Choice.

Story by
Todd Oppenheimer

As the school year winds down—whether you’re in college or not—this is often a time when young people start to think more seriously about their next steps.

Looming over those decisions these days is an entirely new threat: artificial intelligence, and its potential to eliminate any number of white-collar jobs, for which many students have put themselves through years of study, and taken on thousands of dollars of debt in the process.

The professions most vulnerable to AI include everything from accounting, finance, data analysis, and law to fields often considered creative, such as computer coding, journalism, and writing in general. But fret not. There is a plethora of well-paying jobs that, at least for now, are considered safe from AI’s seemingly insatiable appetite.

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