With the lastest news of AI layoffs, I’m struggling to understand how the idea of a career still holds. If careers themselves effectively become gambles like lottery tickets, how do we maintain drive and hopes in the longterm endgame of our struggles?
I know AI as an honest utility is itself a lie to some extent, but this only aids my argument further. People’s career struggles are panning out to be valueless because of a nothing-fad that no one could have predicted.
Job security became a myth long before AI.
The only person who won’t fire you is you.
Someone’s never had a depressive episode.
You are very wrong about that, but I still never fired me. 🤷♂️
UPDATE: Downvoted for admitting that I, too, have battled severe clinical depression. Well done.
I want to know who goes around giving a single downvote to entirely personal and uncontroversial comments. Happens to almost every single one of my comments. I’d rather have five or ten downvotes than just one. I dunno, I know I shouldn’t let it bother me, but it does.
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4 Ps.
Pimps: operators of the gray and black market. Immune to automation since companies that can hire developers don’t want to be involved.
Prostitutes: people who provide a service that clients do not want automated.
Professionals: highly educated, very skilled. Automation just makes them go faster.
Project Managers: people who deal with the gestalt of legal/political/technical/institutional debt. They can’t be replaced since you can’t yell at an AI and expect them to just “fix it already”.
There is overlap. Live music and much of the service industry. But as a general rule you pick one of the four and you should be fine.
It’s interesting that you say no one could have predicted this. Labor saving devices are not exactly new.
The best reason to try is not based on the chance of success.
The best reason to try is that it hurts less than doing nothing.
When you’re active, life hurts less. This is the most rational reason I have found, in my 40 years of searching, for getting out of bed in the morning.
Finding motivation is a hard problem for me. The most consistent source I’ve found is the understanding that giving up does not bring relief. It brings hell.
How do you avoid the feeling of superficiality? That’s what I struggle with most. It just doesn’t really seem to matter.
Stop doom scrolling for one.
There are certain careers that can’t be replaced by AI - anything that requires working with your hands will not be replaced by AI unless robots suddenly get invented. But if robots exist, then there’s likely bigger things to worry about than your job.
I would look for non-routine jobs that require a lot of handiwork. Non-routine because it will be hard to replace with general, non-AI automation, and handiwork because AI is currently digital only.
Carpentry, plumbing, engineering, laboratory research, teaching all likely fall into the safe category
See what Hackworth said about the robots, also, there are multiple ongoing projects that hope to change the existing construction processes enough that android-style robots won’t be necessary. 3d printing houses, for example.
The jobs that will be safe longest are those that are both physical and unpredictable/non-standardizable.
multiple ongoing projects that hope to change the existing construction processes enough that android-style robots won’t be necessary. 3d printing houses, for example.
Never going to happen in the US or Canada. Oh sure the rest of the world will but not those two countries. The culture of construction work can’t adapt. It’s amazing to me when I see stuff go up in South East Asia vs the US/Canada.
South East Asia: standardized parts, 3 shifts, army of workers, about half of which are women, things just move.
US/Canada: custom everything nothing connects right, 1 shift, all large white males, things take forever.
What is life but a lottery?
A lot of the drive towards AI is people thinking to save a quick buck, but longer term that places them in a very unsteady position themselves.
All products end up being for “shareholder value”, and AI will be no different. Someone will find an enshittification vector and run with it.
Suddenly, that “quick buck” becomes a monthly subscription that costs more than the people fired. Company data is harvested and sold, customers are advertised out, the shittiness of the system becomes a company problem.
So we’re either going to see a stark change away from the current shareholder value model (about as likely as world peace), or we’re going to see a lot of CEO seppuku. Win win really.
I think google’s recent AI strokes, like them advising you to jump of a bridge, are a great example of companies panicking to innovate, to not be left behind. In the meantime they forget to check their implementations, their products and their quality. They’ll slowly dwindle, transform inyo something unrecognizable, but all through their downfall, they’ll continue making money for the shareholders.
Saying AI is a nothing fad makes you sound like a boomer in the late 90’s and early 00’s talking about the internet. It is definitely not a fad. It will affect 80% of all jobs on the planet over the next 10 years.
Many of those boomers retired comfortably without ever learning the slightest bit of computer literacy. Even now, plenty of jobs require little-to-none.
Furthermore, we are in the “dotcom bubble” stage of “AI”. The people least knowledgeable about it are the ones throwing billions of dollars at whoever claims to “use AI” for literally anything. We are on, (or maybe for those of us who are paying attention, right after), the Peak of Inflated Expectations.
Remember when 5-ish years ago all anyone would talk about in the tech space is how being a truck driver would be an obsolete job in the near future? I remember.
