I’m an attorney. If anything were to happen to cause civil society to collapse, I would be completely useless.
Artificially intelligent machines with the capacity to design, manipulate and/or create imagery/polygons according to the whims of the client/director.
For the first time, I’d feel earnest pity for a machine.
An apocolyptic zombie virus.
An LTE meteor collision.
Pretty much anything that would end humanity.
Downloadable knowledge/implanted skills. The invention of the classic SF “learning machine.”
If we were able to totally do away with defects in ICs.
We’re pretty safe.
Tell me your profession! :mad:
This thread won’t be fun if we don’t know what your profession is.
Long-term total economic collapse or the technological singularity. Other than that I’m good.
Haa-OOH! Haa-OOH! Haa-OOH!
Hell, my profession would evaporate pretty quickly if the niche database application FileMaker Pro ceased to occupy its niche. Could happen easily enough and there are plenty of IT dept heads who consider it a tinkertoy (i.e., not a SQL system) or otherwise an application that doesn’t belong in the enterprise environment (e.g., not a Microsoft product). There have been 2-3 year stretches in the period since 1998 where it looked like FileMaker was going to go the way of Panorama and 4D and Lotus Approach and there’d be no market for skilled FileMaker developers. Hasn’t happened so far though.
Same here. I do technical business analysis – that is, turning business processes into something coherent and unambiguous that can then be built as software.
I’m a computer security guy. I do forensics and investigations when there is a data breach. If computers are ever made impregnable and administrators become infallible, or if humans ever stop wanting to steal things, I’m screwed.
I’m a teacher and a metalworker. I don’t do obsolete.
In other words, when people stop being stupid and evil.
You’re even safer than I am.
Thats an interesting part of the (really pretty good) zombie novel ‘World War Z’, after the (inevitable) zombie apocalypse social status and utility has changed markedly, many formerly respectable professions are now obsolete and others gain prominence, in one scene a woman is heard objecting to having to take orders from her former cleaning maid.
I wouldn’t get too worried about it. 
I work in cloud software, so I suppose the day that companies stop selling things.
I guess that would mean when the teabaggers fears are realized and the jackbooted socialists finally take power.
If everyone were to spay/neuter their pets and take care of them responsibly, ever lose their home and have to move, and all the puppy mills and backyard breeders were put out of business, well, at the very least, I would have a lot less to do.
Dog rescue is not so much a profession, but a vocation, but it’s what I do.
I’m a nurse. Only the end of the world will make me obsolete.
Not even the end of the world will make me obsolete, I’m unemployed
I was a pharmacist. Technically, I still am, because I’m still licensed, but my bachelor’s degree is worse than useless because not only does it identify me as experienced (i.e. graduated prior to the late 1990s, when most schools switched over to the Pharm.D. degree) but it also prevents me from getting a job doing anything else. So, now I have a home-based business.
And honestly, it’s no longer the profession I trained for and I don’t want to do it any more. The support I’ve received from professional colleagues has been universal. :eek:
If people just throw up their hands and say, “If the environment is just going to get worse and worse, what’s the point in doing anything about it? Fuck the Clean Water Act! Let’s party!” then I’d be totally screwed.
Sadly, given the current political climate of my state, this may very well happen.