Ask Lemmy

Cashier & Customer Service. Who are Karens gonna yell at without us?! Society would collapse immediatly.

Software developer. Some software would break down immediately, some would break down over time.

We don't know when everything will have broken down. That's where the fun lies 😈

Corporate IT manager

I'm not sure anyone would notice

It wouldn't be more than a few days. You all don't realize what I do for you. I'm out there every night fighting the night man. Bringing in the day man. I am the fighter of the night man, ahhhhhhaaaayhaahhaaa, champion of the sun, master of karate and friendship for everyone.

within a few hours. water and wastewater don't treat themselves. water would stop coning out of taps. wastewater would back up into people's homes and without a way to deal with it the environment would go to shit.

damn this makes me feel like i might be doing something important. i should be paid more

Food service? Dead within days...

Admin paper pushers coordinate so others can have frictionless meetings. Most likely all meetings will be awful, and initiatives will not have approvals so fraud will propagate quickly

How exact are we getting? I'm an "assistant term professor", but I'm not an associate or tenure-track position, nor am I an adjunct. So i imagine if just people in my middling position disappeared, we might be fine, a bunch of adjuncts get a raise and a stable job, universities might have to reduce admissions or pack their classes, but we'd probably be fine in the long run. If all college professors disappeared, though, society might collapse. Suddenly you have millions of college students with incomplete educations who need to go somewhere. The brain drain on the world would be immense, and with the death of university-led research, we'd probably enter a dystopian future where all new research is being done by corporations.

Industrial project engineer. Consequences of losing those jobs? No more new production plants and maintenance forces would quickly get overwhelmed trying to handle upgrades on top of routine maintenance. Profits would plummet. Plants would shut down.

As an addiction therapist, I think it would be a long time. As a nurse, about 6 hours before the number would start rising awfully quick.

Risk Analyst. Literally nothing would change except quite a few people would be pretty happy they don't badgered to fill out incident memos

Graphic designer. AI is getting pretty crazy so you all could be just fine. AI will make you what you want but will it make you what you need? Just sayin.

the work will be done for people with slightly different job titles? there is a lot of different titles that are mostly the same

Biomed. I fix medical equipment.

Just gonna let that one sit.

I don't even want to imagine a world without associate editors.

Paramedic. A lot of people would die at home or on the streets. Many hospitals would be overwhelmed with patients that can't leave. Nursing homes would have to actualy take care of and treat people for once. Drunk collage kids will be allowed to go home peacefully. Police will not be able to pass off uncooperative people to hospitals for a psych evaluation as easy.

For real though, it would not be fun for the world.

Would be nice if we where treated and paid like we matter.

If it's just paramedics and not EMTs then it won't be as bad. People will still die though.

Senior software engineer. Lots of bugs and mistakes from juniors and associates. Good luck lol.

Embedded software designer, so a lot of stuff I worked on in my life might stop functioning for whatever reason, small stuff like Nest thermostat you can replace with mechanical ones, etc. Aerotech stuffs might be more problematic... but planes and helis were flying in the 50s without software

I'm the political advisor to a politician....

You don't want to know

People would die as X-rays and medical devices stop working. The power and communication grids would go down. Everyone's financial and personal data would be compromised. No one can make any purchases, because credit carding systems stop working. Cash is no longer accepted because no one knows how to do the math to make change anymore. Humanity would be in a stone age in less than 3 days.

IT helps desk.

I am an teacher at a daycare. Short-term, lots of parents will have to drop out of the workforce to take care of their own children. The economic effects of this will be subtle but extensive. I suspect that in the americas this will be ignored, in Europe this will provoke the writing of policies to help parents, and in Asian countries this might just reinforce traditional gender norms very strongly. I dont know how this wouo

I'm physically disabled. So the medical industry would collapse, but it might fix the medical industry too.

I could best be described as an "emergency draftsman". And potential damage could be far reaching in scale.

I work for a company that, among other things, makes replacement parts for things like power plants, chemical plants, any large industrial installation. In many cases, the thing that breaks is a one of a kind part, or something last manufactured in the 1960's, or some other thing that you aren't going to be able to just go buy a replacement. So what happens is someone will occasionally drop a broken something or other on my desk, and I have to figure out what it used to look like, then make a 3d model and a drawing of the part so it can be reproduced.