Golf Ball Diver

Golf ball divers pull lost balls out of golf course ponds, then clean and resell them. A Bureau of Labor Statistics profile describes the work: two divers in scuba gear feel for balls by hand on the muddy bottom, because "the water is so black and murky that you have to dive by feel," while a third crew member works from the bank. CNN's 2025 profile of Jim Best, who dives the famous island-green pond at TPC Sawgrass, tells the same story: stirred-up silt cuts visibility, and he works from memory of the pond floor.

Nothing in the evidence shows AI doing this work. The only machine that competes with divers is an old one: a "roller" of metal discs pulled across the pond on a wire, which BLS says is faster than a dive crew but less thorough, and too small for some ponds. An earlier version of this entry mentioned underwater drones and automated ball sorting; we could not find a source for either, so we removed them.

BLS does not count golf ball divers on their own. It groups them with commercial divers, about 4,000 jobs, projected to grow 4.8% from 2025 to 2035, a little faster than the 3.5% average for all jobs. A 2025 Microsoft Research study of AI chatbot use ranked commercial divers 574th of 785 occupations for how much of their work AI can help with, in the bottom third. The real risks here are about income, not AI: BLS notes the work is often part-time and unsteady, and divers are paid by the ball.

We lower the score from 2 to 1. The reasons given for a 2 had no source, and what the evidence shows is physical work in conditions no AI tool reaches. What would change the score: robot pond harvesters that actually replace dive crews on golf courses.