Ask HN: Last industries to be taken over by AI?

What would you guys think would be the last industries to be fully taken over by AI? This is a relevant question for entrepreneurs I guess.

My bet would be on research and entertainment. I feel like while these will be partially automated earlier, it will be a while until we manage to fully automate them.

Research is probably going to be automated before entertainment, but especially the human behaviour research, where again you need to have a good understanding of human emotions etc I would imagine will take a while. Also, we still can't fully understand how ideas come into our minds, it might be more than just random connections and memories.

Entertainment is highly connected to humans, empathy, emotions etc, which I expect it will take us a while to fully understand and thus 'teach' computers about, or help them learn about it themselves. Actually, I think entertainment is going to be our last activity/job before we are fully obsolete.

I can't think of anything that we won't be able to automate. Which brings quite a few questions in my mind in terms of how we'd be motivated to stay alive - working keeps lots of people off depression. But that's a different topic.

Do you have any thoughts on the topic?

The question is ill-posed at best. What do you mean by "fully taken over by AI"? Take your entertainment example, say movies and TV shows. Do you suggest these are fully taken over when all the actors are replaced by animation? Or also all the marketing and other ancillaries? How about IP ownership? Or is it merely when the movie script is written by AI?

> I can't think of anything we won't be able to automate

A lot of manual labour will never be fully automated, since making a general-purpose robot that is as lightweight, flexible, cheap and self-contained as a human is not going to be a positive ROI.

Especially in this hypothetical age where most humans are left unemployed by AI, the cost of labor will be near-zero. People may even be willing to work for free, just to fill their days. Thus the robot will always be more expensive.

If you want proof of the latter, go on youtube and check out all the people doing metalwork, woodworking, making food, brewing, arts&crafts etc. just for fun.

Subsistence farming? I think anywhere where it is simply not worth putting AI will be the last to go. The easiest industries to replace will be first (factory workers, truck drivers), I think the high value jobs will be next (simply because they are high value, there will be more effort in replacing them) e.g. managers, ceos, engineers. (these will be a little ways off though)

There were a few papers published this year using reinforcement learning to optimise architectures for CNNs and recurrent neural nets, I think this sort of thing will only get bigger. If you think about it, researchers just do a bit of guided random search, something that reinforcement learning can do pretty well. So the 'research' job title may describe applying these AIs instead of actually doing low level research.

Even though it feels like a bit of a non-answer, I'd say the last industry taken over by AI is probably the AI/automation industry itself (or, in a broader sense, programming/software engineering).

art but it is not an industry and also psycholgists. apparently it takes a human to understand a human better