If you are white collar then it’s going to “disrupt” your field.
I work in tech. I got laid off last year. I wasn’t at Alphabet or Amazon or anything. Much smaller company. But AI “optimization” has ravaged the tech industry and not just programmers. Admins, database specialists, network specialists, developers, you name it. Our job market is absolutely fucked.
In my county, a major metro area in the US (like, top 10) craigslist used to be the place to get real job postings. If it wasn’t a recruiter then your odds of getting a callback from a job posting there is pretty high. There are plenty of postings for other fields like mechanics and tradesmen and so on. For the few tech categories: nothing in the last month. Zero postings. Not even recruiter ads. Literally nothing. It’s a wasteland.
I’ve been told to “go back to school.” I’ll be 41 soon. I’m still paying off my computer science degree. It’s worthless. What else should I go for? Accounting? HR? These are going to be taken by AI, too. Will it be a mistake? Sure. They don’t care. They’ll do it anyways.
When I got my degree my wife and I were homeless. We just got back out of the hole in the last 10 years. I was finally building savings. It’ll be gone in 60 days. She was laid off on Friday. Her industry is in property finance. Another gutted industry. She has to change industries, too.
What is to be done?
I’m hedging my bets on the natural sciences being safe, at least until the current AI bubble pops. Field work is too hostile, dynamic, and chaotic for a chatbot to hallucinate. Drones probably need another 20 years to do the most menial task I do with the same attention to detail and ability to navigate complex environments like that, while the identification apps I use barely get the genus right. With your beepboop magic you’d have a special skillset in that realm. At no point in my plant science education have I ever had to take a single programming-adjacent class but all of the research involves models and computerised systems. Someone makes a lot more money than I do designing those.
Right now anything related to being out and doing manual labor is safe for at least another 20 years. It isn’t just a matter of the AI tech but the robotic tech to make it work. Then it needs to be versatile and cheap enough to replace humans. Those are three big hurdles for it to cross. AI for software and digital work right now is easy to replace workers with because the infrastructure is there and the cost is trivial.
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You think the average person is going to notice or care that philosophy is being done by AI? Listen to assholes like Jordan Peterson talk about nihilism or post modernism. Dude claims to be educated in this stuff and has no fucking idea what he’s talking about and people eat it up.
I literally changed my second major to specifically go into engineering that focuses on manufacturing and robotics because while AI can make some aspects of the job simpler, the physical design and modeling of products still requires engineers to physically test the machines and make corrections, there is waaaaay too much specification. You may be able make things abit quicker, but it is incredibly unlikely that these modeling softwares will ever be data sold to general AI because their whole business model is monopolizing that data and guarding it.
It will never make me as much money as tech in it’s hey-day and will never buy a house to be able to move to wherever the factories physically are, because manufacturing is still an unstable job field at the best of times (thanks capitalist mode of production).
They will try to replace us with robots, but I don’t think the profitability model is there for it for a true follow-through investment in the U.S… besides, who will buy the product if we have no money for it?
Good luck, it’s fucking tough out there.
A friend makes GOOD money doing manufacturing design. Mostly it’s for the military. His company is the one where if you need a particular part that is no longer made with tight tolerances you can send him the part and he’ll CAD out a file and get it setup for manufacturing at some sort of scale. He’s really good at it. Makes big money, I would say triple digits… well over if I were to guess but I’m not rude so I don’t pry.
If it’s for the military then it’s not “good” money, it’s evil money and he’s selling his soul to buy himself a spot in Hell. Saying this as someone with a background in engineering, I consider those who engineer the weapons of war complicit in murder and genocide.