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?
As a teacher, I’m keenly aware of the fact that my future is not guaranteed at all. Particularly because I’m a language teacher, which is a field that, at least in my country, is mostly driven by marketing. I’m sure that someone will figure out a way to make an AI English tutor sound like a great, cost-effective idea, and then I’m screwed. I give it about four or five years.
I know that because I used to do plenty of side gigs as a translator as well, and these have simply dried up in the past year and a half or so. Like, literally zero jobs since the dawn of ChatGPT and the like.
I’m glad I used most of that side hustle money to buy myself a whole workshop’s worth of woodworking tools, and my way out will be to make high-end furniture. I still need a couple years to really get good at it, but I reckon it’ll be longer until an AI chatbot can run a piece of wood through a jointer.
Ouch, that is ROUGH. AI language tutoring is one of the elements they showcased in some of the recent new release stuff for AI. Going to school to learn a language was already a hard sell because language is mostly acquired and not learned in traditional ways. Glad you saw the writing and switched your specialty.
Learn to mine coal.
Sadly cobalt miners in Africa have better job security than your average college degree holder in America. Many have that job their entire lives.
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.
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.
how the fuck would AI do philosophy or interpretive science without a human perspective
Also I don’t think manual labor is at risk in the foreseeable future at all, the automation of it requires infrastructure which capitalists seem notoriously averse to building. There would have to be actual public funding for robot tracks and mounting points and shit
I guess they could make a bunch of cars with robots mounted to them but I think that creates a recursive demand for mechanical labor due to the ever so slightly flawed nature of AI outputs
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’m still trying to understand how actually replacing people with AI is supposed to work, because the quality of the outputs is still essentially trash. I do understand that in the short term capital prefers to swing its dick around to prove a point, and maybe that’s all there is to it. However, I have a sneaking suspicion that AI hype is being used to cover for a very real economic slowdown that is actually driving the lack of job prospects and layoffs. Maybe capital is just hoping that AIs can do a good enough job to keep them floating until the recession is over.
Here’s my theory, AI will work well enough, just long enough, that companies will get used to not having to pay people. When shit starts breaking to the point they realize AI doesn’t really work, they’ll be too kush with their high stock prices and will be desperate to not go back and so will refuse to hire back people who can fix and and let the whole thing burn rather than concede they actually need skilled people. By then their pedophile fallout bunker will be done and they’ll all just fly to New Zealand and leave us to die.
