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?
if i understood the capital correctly (i probably didnt) this will only lead to diminishing profits as all competition slowly adopts it unless they can keep a monopoly.
either way ai can’t replace human workers that well yet, they will royally fuck up and we will somehow pay the price for it.
i think its on the second volume, cant remember the chapter.
the logic is that you can’t scam a machine into working for cheaper, they need a set amount of maintenance and money to stay running or else you run into problems.
humans can be scammed and convinced to work all day for barely any money. if you want to profit from a machine you jack your prices up or plummet quality, but you are still scamming humans at the other end anyway.
For now, eventually they’ll do as they did in retail, slowly revert back when they realize AI just can’t adapt to all the scenarios they require it to, most importantly at the pricepoint they need (see the OG industrial revolution and machines, think there was a piece in vol 2 of capital) and lacks comprehension, it can pattern recognize all day but struggles with context. We lack the infrastructure for full much less partial automatization, computers require certain temps, humidity, electricity, etc, humans under capital do not, we’re considered free to replace since very few places do any sort of training (expect you to come in fully trained for whatever the position is) vs what computers, networks and powerplants need to get going along with you must train AI for anything meaningful, and train it a lot.
Sure, we’re at the point anyone can run LLMs on any standard gaming rigs from 10 years ago, but they’re not that great, and it still requires all that infrastructure modern capital balks at upgrading or replacing, also a properly tuned network will btfo of any lone rig LLM with maybe a few exceptions, again thanks to capital (ex homebrew chatbot on a 4790k beats chatgpt3.5, but only because they want you to pay for all their outages thanks to our grid and internet being overcooked sad spaghetti).
For now? Survive, maybe try getting a more physical CS job, the pay isn’t going to be great though, but software is getting the race to the floor treatment for some time. Or get into something being a system tenderer where AI is sort of messy legally, maybe medical, but I expect that to have some sort of really nasty crunch soon.
Massive sympathies comrade, that really honestly sucks. Not doubting you, but are you able to offer any more details?
As someone who works for a sizeable, multinational tech company, I’ve thus far witnessed absolutely zero disruption from AI to any teams anywhere in our company or my physical locality. There have been a couple attempts to replace services with AI, but they’ve been so unreliable that they’ve achieved nothing. Thus far its only been a tool akin to Google, requiring knowledgeable humans to use it, that occasionally helps code things up or parse data.
A large part of what I did was customer support for proprietary software. Over the years we’ve used systems to build a database of solutions to issues in our software. Now our company has an AI assistance helper using that database to assist customers. There are still live support agents to help when it comes to patient data plus our jobs had us doing a bunch of backend server and database management stuff. It didn’t eliminate all jobs in that department. It streamlined the labor enough to allow for layoffs. The other people on my team were all local and I was the only remote member. 15+ years at that company.
I realized that all white collar jobs are in jeopardy when I worked on a PC refresh. All the cool scripting and imaging stuff that made me feel like a super duper smarty pants are things that can be easily replaced by AI or otherwise automated while all the low-brow grunt work like slapping a fucking asset tag sticker on an appropriate spot or removing the HDs of old PC for shredding is not so easily replaceable.
I strongly urge everyone with CS or coding background to begin studying and practicing IT tech support skills as a backup in case dev jobs don’t pan out and you want to pick a job that’s at least tangentially related to programming. The go-to cert for entry level IT tech support are CompTIA certs, namely A+, Network+, and Security+. You don’t have to actually get the certs (A+ alone is $250+), but your knowledge and skill should be at a point where if you do decide to find an IT tech support job, you can confidently pay the cert tax and walk out with an A+ cert without wasting time and money on retests. And trust me, your tech knowledge and skill are nowhere near as good as you think they are, and being a power userTM PC g*mer is completely inadequate for professional work.
At the end of the day, IT tech support is white collar work with blue collar characteristics, and the more your particular IT tech support field has those blue collar characteristics, the less it will be affected by AI. Printer guys won’t have to worry about AI anytime soon (but they have to service those infernal machines known as printers). People who specialize on supporting CCTV equipment won’t have to worry about AI either (but they’ll have to service security cameras completely caked with bird shit).
The job I got laid off of was software support (I worked for a medical software company), as well as some database management, server management, using AWS to spin up servers and set them up, and other miscellaneous things. We got calls from clients. It was a big mixed bag. So yeah, I think anything involving physical labor is better shielded against AI for sure. If your job can be done remotely entirely you are in trouble.
As AIs get less novel real-world data to use, significant AI collapse will be real in our time. They are fundamentally reliant on human experience, so yeah, as fewer humans do the job, the quality will dive.
