AGI will commoditize the skills of the owning class. To some extent it will also commoditize entire classes of productive capital that previously required well-run corporations to operate. Solve for the equilibrium.
You have so much time to figure things out. The average person in this thread is probably 1.5-2x your age. I wouldn’t stress too much. AI is an amazing tool. Just use it to make hay while the sun shines, and if it puts you out of work and automates away all other alternatives, then you’ll be witnessing the greatest economic shift in human history. Productivity will become easier than ever, before it becomes automatic and boundless. I’m not cynical enough to believe the average person won’t benefit, much less educated people in STEM like you.
I'm in the same boat (except I wasn't "stuck," I was climbing, but I wanted to do something else), and my post articulates logic that I am using myself :) I recently cold-messaged someone in a startup in one of those industries, and they were surprisingly willing to carve out an opportunity for me. He's the person who would be my boss and just needs to get approval from the CEO. Even if that doesn't work out, I've learned the following lesson in various ways over the past few months: just applying to jobs isn't enough if you don't have specific applicable experience. That should be common sense, but somehow I had fooled myself into thinking otherwise before. Career switching is a complete grind. That's why it's so important to join a growing industry, do great work, and hopefully never have to switch again.
I welcome comments from someone who successfully reset their career after at least 5-10 years of working.
If you turn the boat around in the next 5 years, you will hopefully have another 30 years of a flourishing career, more than the entire career of some prodigies who perished young. This assumes a projected retirement of 70 years old. What is particularly exciting is that new industries are starting to form, and any one of us can be pioneers in those industries (fintech, VR, AR, AI, automated vehicles, drones, robotic process automation, Edge Cloud, etc...).