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 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.
This post by Ed Zitron is pretty cogent to me - AI is the last next big thing for tech in its desperate search for continued hyper growth. Tech is essentially cooked, at this point - or at least, the familiar Silicon Valley of the last 10 years.
There are plenty of comparisons of Nvidia’s valuation to that of Cisco during the dotcom boom. I remain convinced that some of the biggest tech names of the last decade are going to disappear over the next decade (Uber, DoorDash, et al). We’re in a very transitional time and things are going to change drastically, imo
honestly smartphones were the last next big thing, everything since 2008 has been desperate flailing. apps got better sure because of course they would but tech hasnt been able to recapture that.
AI is the last next big thing
And then there is solar panels and spaceflight.
But after that, yeah, probably that’s the end of it.
Solar panels are not at all similar to these artificial tech booms. They are a real physical product serving a vital purpose with an actually growing market that reflects the real world. What a weird comparison.
I mean it’s barely a cover. People were predicting a slowdown in white collar jobs soon in spring of 2022. It was a weird time because the job market was still hot, but the covid era demand that created a lot of tech jobs clearly receded. Layoffs started like that fall. I remember someone leaving my company for amazon and amazon axed the entire division like a week later. Like I think people forget fear of a recession, one disproportionately hitting white collar workers, and tech layoffs predate even chatgpt 3.
Edit: every management update we received that year was about a recession, potential layoffs, and becase I worked in marketing how to deal with client expectations because almost every one of them had dropping revenues relative to 2020 and 2021.
Well, it’s two fold.
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Most jobs don’t actually need a super highly technical human being for all the tasks they need to perform. So much of IT and tech work is tedium and monotonous. Same shit every day. So you don’t need super highly advanced AI to do it. Just something that is good enough. Sadly, in my experience the average tech worker isn’t super bright anyways. I hate to sound ableist but it’s the truth. They get the job done and deserve a good livable wage but they aren’t inventing the new faster wireless charger… they are struggling to get a router setup only slightly less than your average zoomer at home. If they are lucky they have a step by step guide someone else wrote that has been revised through trial and error by other techs.
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For the rest of it, yeah the AI will make mistakes and be bad. But companies will still keep a senior tech on salary to oversee this and also just grin and bear it when it does go haywire. If it doesn’t cost them more money than what they made by the layoffs then it was a worthy sacrifice. Capitalist “innovation” doesn’t have to be good it just has to be good enough.
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.
Its gotta be some evil delulu shit. AI is just not that good. There could be some improvements still, but its way to early to be rationally betting on it like this. I’m sure they are eager to retaliate against unionization and shit. Blame it on the recession, get bailed out, and hire us back at way lower salaries. Though idk where the US is going to get that money this time around.
If the answer is “become an LLM expert” I’m gonna scream
this is what I see my coworkers leaning towards. Thus far I’ve basically not touched one. I think I’d sooner become a bus driver, or a hermit in the woods.
its too bad the rest of his manifesto beyond the first line is borderline incomprehensible, ideologically.
that first line though. shit goes hard.
edit: just realized the first line of a manifesto is probably the only one people will remember. “a specter is haunting Europe…” and “the industrial revolution and its consequences…” are probably too of the most memorable lines of any political text i can remember.
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.
Maybe failing to become a teacher was a good thing for me after all. At least I don’t have to deal with the prospects of a disintegrating job market. Plus all the political hostility from the state.
I wonder when they’ll penetrate food service jobs though?
I would have liked being a teacher or professor, as I understood the profession pre-cellphones, but CS had shinier career options, plus more introvert appeal, and almost every day since acquiring my degree, there is a new horror story about how bad teachers are treated, meanwhile, I’ve had weeks where 99% of my job was goofying off instead of doing real work and I still get a raise.
I guess I fell in with the wrong group of nerds, lol. I never did sort out my own issues with introversion (undiagnosed autism?), so in some ways I’m happy I didn’t waste more time right away trying to learn to swim by being thrown in the deep end. Maybe some day I’ll go back to school. There is a labor shortage in that area after all.
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.
It’s going to be wild asking for help and then having the other person respond with “as an AI language model” because they learned their apologies from the supervision-free AI tutor
I’m just a few years older than you, and the thought of retraining is about as terrifying as going to war. I don’t have the energy to do night classes anymore. Also the learn to code people need to self crit right now.
Yeah right now by the time you learn to code effectively and efficiently AI will be doing it better than most people who have been in the field for years. It still sucks today but this will change rapidly. 1 developer who can use AI well will be able to do the job of 5 coders in two years. I have no doubt about that.
I’ve done professional coding, and I also doubt. AI will be very helpful, but people still fail to recognise that there are necessary human elements in a coding chain, because feedback loops, understanding the full context of requirements, going back for clarification on certain elements where we recognise there’ll be ambiguity, anticipating shortfalls, factoring in wider societal conditions etc. will always be necessary to do a good job of it, and AI is a very long way from being able to do those things because it requires a much fuller and continuously updated understanding of human existence.
I don’t doubt AI will (and does) improve the amount coders can output, or let people code up small projects themselves. But this is also true of the continuous development of modern coding languages and tools, Python is almost natural english, and we don’t have to do stuff like write trash collectors in assembly anymore.
That’s the key here. You’ll never be able to get the smart human who knows what’s going on out of the loop, at least not with LLM-based ‘AI’, but it will be a very useful tool. Rather than a senior developer reading and fixing the code of half a dozen juniors, he’ll write half a dozen AI prompts and then fix the code they inevitably screw up. This won’t work for low-level or performant code, but for most of what people are working on it will work well enough. All the people learning to code now are fucked, but senior people with experience should be ok. The problem will come when they all retire in 20-30 years and software has been a dead-end job no one wants to get into for a generation.
Learn to mine coal.
