The map of work
Every profession placed by how hard it is to enter and how well it resists automation. Bubble size is pay. Click any one to open it.
Top-right is the rare corner: hard to enter, hard to automate.
By field
Medicine & Life
Work that keeps bodies and minds alive — the longest training and the oldest oaths.
6 professions →
🏛️Law & Public Service
The professions a society builds to govern, judge and protect itself.
6 professions →
⚙️Engineering & Technology
Building the machines and systems the modern world runs on.
6 professions →
🔬Science & Research
Jobs whose product is knowledge nobody had yesterday.
6 professions →
🎨Arts & Creation
Making the things people choose to look at, read, hear and live inside.
6 professions →
📈Business & Finance
Allocating capital, attention and risk — and being measured on the result.
6 professions →
📚Education & Humanities
Carrying knowledge across generations and languages.
6 professions →
⚒️Craft & Trade
Trades where the hand still decides the outcome.
6 professions →
🧭Frontier & Field
Work that happens where it is cold, high, deep, far or unmapped.
6 professions →
🎥Media & Performance
Professions performed in public, judged in public.
6 professions →
Start here
Which profession fits you?
Twelve questions, sixty professions. Your priorities on pay, security, autonomy and impact reorder the list — not a personality test with a single right answer.
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Find jobs by major
What each university subject actually opens — dozens of majors mapped to every profession they lead into.
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Trades that vanished
Jobs erased by machines, laws, materials or taste — and the surviving professions that absorbed their work.
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Compare professions
Put up to six jobs side by side on pay, entry barrier, autonomy, demand, impact and resistance to AI.
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Across every profession
Jobs AI cannot take
All sixty professions ranked by how much of the work resists automation — and the reasoning behind each score.
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The history of work
Every profession on this site, placed on one timeline from the first named architect to the newest job on earth.
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What to study for which job
University majors mapped to the professions they actually lead into, ranked by how many doors each one opens.
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What every profession pays
The sixty jobs ranked by peak earnings, with the figure each one reaches at the top of its ladder.
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Trades that vanished
The jobs that automation, regulation and fashion erased — and which surviving profession absorbed them.
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Compare professions
Put up to six jobs side by side on pay, entry barrier, autonomy, demand, impact and resistance to AI.
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Browse every profession
Search, filter and sort all sixty professions.
🩺 Medicine & Life
Surgeon
The physician who operates to cure, from Sushruta's ancient rhinoplasty to today's robotic operating rooms, still alone with the decision at the table.
AI-resistant 92 🩺Physician
Diagnoses illness and manages health for years afterward through examination and evidence, not a single operation — medicine's generalist and long-term guide.
AI-resistant 67 💉Nurse
Healthcare's largest profession: from Scutari's lamp to the ICU monitor, the person who is still at the bedside when everyone else has gone home.
AI-resistant 91 💊Pharmacist
The medicines expert behind every prescription — from Baghdad's first drug shops and the apothecary's mortar to morphine, artemisinin and the modern dispensary.
AI-resistant 58 🐾Veterinarian
Treats patients from goldfish to horses that cannot describe a symptom, and carries the legal power to end their suffering by euthanasia.
AI-resistant 78 🧠Psychiatrist
Diagnoses and treats mental illness through medication and therapy, one of medicine's only specialties with legal authority to detain a patient in crisis.
AI-resistant 73🏛️ Law & Public Service
Lawyer
Advises clients, drafts the documents that bind them, and argues their case when it reaches court — carrying personal legal liability if the advice is wrong.
AI-resistant 58 ⚖️Judge
The person societies trust to decide: from Hammurabi's stele to AI-scored bail hearings, the hardest disputes still end in front of one accountable human.
AI-resistant 90 🕊️Diplomat
From ancient royal envoys and Venice's resident ambassadors to the Congress of Vienna and the UN, still negotiating peace one careful sentence at a time.
AI-resistant 78 🚓Police Officer
The sworn officer who patrols, investigates and keeps the peace, from Vidocq's undercover detectives and Peel's 1829 constables to today's contested public trust.
AI-resistant 66 🚒Firefighter
The trade that runs toward what everyone else flees — from Rome's vigiles and Edo's matoi bearers to today's wildfire crews and 24-hour rescue shifts.
AI-resistant 90 📋Civil Servant
Government's permanent, exam-selected staff who administer law and deliver public services — the machinery that keeps running as elected officials come and go.
AI-resistant 42⚙️ Engineering & Technology
Software Engineer
Writes, tests and maintains the code that runs modern life — and is one of the first professions watching AI automate its own daily work.
AI-resistant 35 🤖AI Researcher
Designs and tests the algorithms behind machine intelligence, in a field now racing to automate a growing share of its own research process.
AI-resistant 50 🛰️Aerospace Engineer
Designs, analyzes and certifies the aircraft, rockets and spacecraft that leave the ground, working to safety margins that leave no room for guessing.
AI-resistant 74 🌉Civil Engineer
The profession that turns rivers, rock and gravity into bridges, roads and clean water — civilization's quiet load-bearing trade since Imhotep.
AI-resistant 72 🔌Semiconductor Engineer
Designs and fabricates the transistors inside every computer, phone and weapon, using machines precise enough that only a few factories on Earth can run them.
AI-resistant 60 🦾Robotics Engineer
Designs the machines that sense, decide and act in the physical world, where the hard problem was never intelligence but the world itself.
AI-resistant 65🔬 Science & Research
Physicist
Derives and tests the mathematical laws governing matter, energy, space and time, from a lone chalkboard to a 3,000-author particle-collider paper.
AI-resistant 65 🧬Biologist
The scientist who studies life itself, from Linnaeus naming species by hand to editing genomes with CRISPR, still testing every idea against a living organism.
AI-resistant 64 🧪Chemist
The scientist who makes and measures matter itself — from Tapputi's Babylonian perfume still to today's robot laboratories, still the one who decides what the spectrum means.
AI-resistant 70 📊Data Scientist
Finds patterns and builds predictive models from data — a 2008 job title built on three centuries of counting, testing and visualizing evidence.
AI-resistant 38 🔭Astronomer
The scientist who measures the universe, from Babylonian clay tablets to space telescopes, still deciding which flicker in the data is a discovery.
AI-resistant 70 🧮Mathematician
From Babylonian scribes to Fields medalists and AI-assisted proof: the profession that turns hard questions into permanent certainty, one theorem at a time.
AI-resistant 70🎨 Arts & Creation
Architect
Designs buildings that must stand, meet code, please a client and cost the right amount — then carries legal responsibility if they don't.
AI-resistant 78 🎬Film Director
Turns a screenplay into a finished film by deciding every shot, performance and cut, then persuades a producer, a studio and an audience the vision was worth the budget.
AI-resistant 73 ✍️Novelist
The maker of book-length fiction, from Murasaki Shikibu's Heian court to the Kindle's self-publishing flood — a trade with no license, no ladder and no retirement age.
AI-resistant 62 🎻Musician
Spends years mastering an instrument or voice, then earns a living from performances, recordings and teaching in a market streaming has broadened but paid less for.
AI-resistant 60 🖌️Painter
The oldest image-making trade on record — from 45,000-year-old cave walls to the contemporary studio, still practiced one brushstroke at a time.
AI-resistant 74 🎮Game Designer
The architect of play — the person who decides what a game asks of its players, from Senet's ancient board to Tetris and today's three-billion-player industry.
AI-resistant 65📈 Business & Finance
Entrepreneur
The person who starts the company — spotting the gap, bearing the risk and answering for payroll, from Assyrian caravan financiers to venture-backed founders.
AI-resistant 88 💹Investment Banker
The dealmaker who prices companies and moves capital — a trade running from Medici Florence to today's pitch decks, paid for trust when billions change hands.
AI-resistant 42 🧾Accountant
The keeper of the books: heir to a craft so old it invented writing itself, now negotiating with the software built to automate it.
AI-resistant 35 📣Marketer
The professional who creates demand — from Pompeii's painted walls and P&G's 1931 brand-man memo to the auction-driven feeds of the digital era.
AI-resistant 38 🗺️Product Manager
Decides what a company should build next, and why — turning customer needs, business goals and engineering limits into one shared plan nobody else fully owns.
AI-resistant 50 💱Economist
The scholar of scarcity — from Adam Smith's pin factory to the central-bank decision room, still asked to predict what no model fully captures.
AI-resistant 62📚 Education & Humanities
Professor
The scholar paid to profess a subject in public — twenty-five centuries of teaching and discovery, from Plato's grove to the tenure track and the AI tutor.
AI-resistant 76 🏫Teacher
The world's largest profession: from Sumerian tablet houses to AI-era classrooms, one adult tasked with turning thirty strangers into a room that learns.
AI-resistant 78 📜Historian
The trained interrogator of the past — from Herodotus and Sima Qian to the digital archive, turning fragile documents into checkable accounts of what happened.
AI-resistant 70 🧩Psychologist
The scientist of mind and behavior, from Wundt's 1879 Leipzig laboratory to the therapy room — trained to hear what a person cannot yet say themselves.
AI-resistant 82 🌐Translator
The profession that carries meaning between languages — from the Septuagint and Jerome's Vulgate to Toledo, Nuremberg's booths and the machine-translation age.
AI-resistant 28 📖Librarian
The keeper and guide of recorded knowledge, from Nineveh's clay tablets to the e-lending fight — organizing what humanity knows so that anyone can find it.
AI-resistant 55⚒️ Craft & Trade
Chef
The professional who commands a kitchen brigade under nightly pressure, from Escoffier's Paris to Osaka's sushi counters and Lima's ceviche bars.
AI-resistant 78 🪚Carpenter
The builder in wood — a trade older than Homo sapiens, still measuring twice and cutting once from Nara's ancient temples to Norway's timber towers.
AI-resistant 88 ⌚Watchmaker
The craftsman who builds and revives the tiny machine on the wrist — a trade that survived the quartz crisis and now has more work than trained hands.
AI-resistant 80 🧵Tailor
The craftsman who cuts cloth to one particular human body — a trade the sewing machine industrialized, ready-to-wear shrank, and no machine has finished replacing.
AI-resistant 78 🍷Sommelier
From cupbearers who tasted a king's wine to blind-tasting floor professionals: how the sommelier turned pouring into one of hospitality's most exacting crafts.
AI-resistant 72 🔥Blacksmith
The trade that made every other trade's tools — from Hittite iron and guild forges to the artist-blacksmiths who brought the anvil back in the twenty-first century.
AI-resistant 82🧭 Frontier & Field
Pilot
The professional flyer who turns weather, machinery and 200 lives into a routine arrival — a craft rebuilt after every crash that taught it something.
AI-resistant 72 👨🚀Astronaut
The rarest job on Earth is practiced off it: roughly 700 people have ever held it, from Gagarin's 108 minutes to year-long tours on the space station.
AI-resistant 74 ⚓Ship Captain
The last absolute command: one licensed master answerable for ship, crew and cargo, from Zheng He's treasure fleets to today's container giants.
AI-resistant 65 🌾Farmer
The profession that made every other one possible — feeding the world for eleven millennia, from the first Fertile Crescent wheat to autonomous tractors.
AI-resistant 72 🏺Archaeologist
The scientist who reads human history out of the ground, one unrepeatable layer at a time — from Nabonidus's temple trenches to LiDAR and ancient DNA.
AI-resistant 78 🏔️Mountain Guide
The certified professional who leads strangers up — and above all back down — the world's great mountains, a trade Chamonix organized in 1821.
AI-resistant 88🎥 Media & Performance
Journalist
The witness who finds out what is happening and tells the public — from Rome's Acta Diurna to the Panama Papers, still asking questions power would rather skip.
AI-resistant 58 📷Photographer
The person paid to decide what a moment looks like — from Niépce's eight-hour exposure in 1826 to two trillion pictures a year, most taken by everyone else.
AI-resistant 55 🏅Athlete
The body as a career: from Olympia's crowned victors to today's global stars, a short, brutal, winner-take-most profession watched by billions.
AI-resistant 88 🎭Actor
From Thespis stepping out of the Athenian chorus to the self-tape era: the professional pretender whose work is to make invented people feel true, take after take.
AI-resistant 70 🕹️Esports Pro
From a Stanford lab's 1972 Spacewar tournament to sold-out stadium finals — the youngest, shortest and most-watched playing career in modern sport.
AI-resistant 74 🎞️Animator
The artist who decides what happens between the drawings — from Reynaud's hand-painted Paris projections to a Latvian Oscar winner made in free software.
AI-resistant 56