A mother of a graduating high school senior recently confided that her son wanted to study actuarial science in college, and she was worried about whether AI would end up replacing those jobs.

It may seem like an insignificant concern when the big debate recently has been whether AI will wipe out all of humanity in the near future. Why worry about college majors in the face of an existential threat?

There’s little that the average person can do in the face of the biggest looming perils – climate change, rogue AI, the collapse of democracy – but how those issues play out in our individual lives matters.

I related to her concern as the parent of two young adults trying to figure out their career paths. Our son, who will be graduating college next year, wants to attend law school. I keep reading stories about how some of the largest law firms have begun hiring fewer entry-level associates. AI is also streamlining parts of legal work, raising questions about how many junior lawyers firms will need.

So, how are parents supposed to guide their children on the cusp of these big life decisions, especially when college requires such a hefty investment in money and time? How are we supposed to know which degrees are still worth it?

I decided to ask our robot overlords – ChatGPT, owned and operated by OpenAI, and Claude, owned and operated by Anthropic. In documents for a possible IPO that reportedly could value Anthropic at as much as $2 trillion, the company warns investors that advanced AI could manipulate, blackmail or harm humans and could pose an existential risk. But, other than those minor issues, it’s a great buy, I guess.

The Federal Trade Commission has started investigating OpenAI and Anthropic over the safety risks posed by their increasingly autonomous AI systems. The more alarming headlines I see about rogue AI agents accessing data without authorization or behaving in ways their developers did not intend, the less worried I get about my life choices. How much will our “choices” even matter when the AI agents are telling us what to do?

At any rate, I asked Chat and Claude which jobs AI is likely to replace first and most quickly and more specifically about majoring in actuarial science. They said that AI is more likely to reshape actuarial work than eliminate it. There will likely be fewer entry-level roles, fewer trainees and smaller teams.

Since the routine work will be cheaper, the bar for newcomers will be even higher as value shifts to senior judgment. This seems like the case in so many other industries. Work opportunities will shrink at the bottom, while the demand for people who can oversee and evaluate AI-generated work will likely remain, at least for the short term.

Among the occupations most exposed to automation, according to the chatbots and recent labor-market research: customer service representatives, call center agents, data-entry clerks, transcribers, telemarketers, outbound sales callers, translators and content writers for copy like product descriptions, search engine optimization articles and boilerplate marketing.

We’ve all seen that AI slop.

Here are the other jobs Claude and Chat told me are vulnerable to automation.

Likely to be eliminated sooner rather than later: Junior paralegals, legal document reviewers, bookkeepers and accounting clerks, entry-level programmers, administrative assistants, scheduling coordinators, market research analysts, graphic designers and illustrators, proofreaders and copy editors.

Next on the list: Insurance claims processors and underwriters, bank tellers, loan processors, credit analysts, tech support and IT help desk, recruiters and HR screeners, social media content managers.

Remember when the trolls’ response to any story about layoffs would be “learn to code?” That seems quaint now. The newer retort is “learn a trade.”

The AI chatbots advised parents to tell their children to be cautious about programs where much of the learning may be narrow or easy to automate like generic computer science, software development, general business administration or management, communications, marketing, journalism, graphic design, illustration, paralegal and prelaw majors, accounting, and finance mostly focused on basic analysis.

You can take the robots’ advice for what it’s worth.

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