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What Young Workers Are Doing to AI-Proof Themselves

What Young Workers Are Doing to AI-Proof Themselves

wallflower

Comments (153)

  • cpach
  • galaxyLogic
    So a lot of people might lose their jobs because of AI, right? But the same amount of economic output, probably more, will be produced because of AI. By whom will that output then be consumed? If people don't have jobs they don't have money to buy and therefore ... prices will have to come down!Society as a whole will be better off because there is more output, better quality output. Then it's for us to vote in a government that shares the fruits of AI with everybody, by way of progressive taxation. Government, use the taxes you collect to give us free food. We don't need 5-star restaurants, just healthy food. We can do this, in a democracy.
  • anthuswilliams
    Summary of article: in an uncertain job market, some young people are going into blue collar trades. Others are starting startups. Others are powering through. Journalist says some words about "AI" being the cause of all this uncertainty.
  • striped_hash
    I don’t think kids should be insulating from AI. The examples in this article suggest for example that some people are dropping out of college and going into trade schools. I get that society needs electricians and construction workers and new software graduates are finding it difficult to get jobs. But having had a moderately successful career building software, I tend to think there is a lot of scope for the $40 trillion white collar economy to be disrupted (re-imagined/made more efficient), so still see potential for software engineering demand to stay high over the next decade as the true ramifications of AI plays out. Am I biased/coping? Is this moving faster? Slower? - What should kids be aiming for according to you? Computer Scientist? Biologist? Finance? Construction?
  • lasky
    Other forces that contribute to the "AI is taking our jobs" narrative:- Layoffs due to insufficient demand in uncertain economic times- Companies selling AI need to claim "we are so great with AI we don't need as many people." Layoffs unlock AI budgets.- It justifies all the capital allocation into AI.- Companies in the AI industry shock the government into learned helplessness, so they can write policy that is on their terms.What am I missing?
  • cal_dent
    I still don't understand the logic that any job is safe from ai (if it lives up to expectations). Sure, it might not be directly impacted by ai but why is there this expectation that the excess labour from those directly impacted doesnt act to suppress the earning power of other jobs?Especially considering that the implication is that humans just become a pair of hands with opposable thumbs?. Take the electrician in the article, sure its a skilled job but the barrier into it drops massively imo if you can just take a picture of whatever issue is at hand and ai spits out what is needed, no?
  • margorczynski
    The "go into trades" thing has two major flaws:1) The supply of work will skyrocket when everyone will flock there for work2) Demand will plummet as the white collar people who bought these services will loose their jobs and incomeAnd of course if robotics will get solved to an acceptable degree most of those jobs will also get mostly automated.
  • bryanrasmussen
    I've been seeing a lot of ads on buses in the area (Copenhagen, Denmark) which suggest trade schools because AI won't be taking your job.
  • anon
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  • ilaksh
    There is no such thing as an AI-proof career.Look at recent output from leading edge humanoid robotics projects like 1X/Neo, Figure 03, Skild AI. Also see open published work like MimicDroid, HDMI, GenMimic, Humanoid-Union Dataset, RoboMirror, Being-H0Figure 03:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-31-KBBuXMhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUTzuhkDG3w1X Neo:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lS_z60kjVEkSkild AIhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRmjBdKKLsc (Learning by Watching Human Videos)Mimichttps://youtu.be/_LkBFL5m1WU?si=Qvgb7vkpG_KCAJdNThere is a ton of very useful recent progress with imitation learning and related datasets. There is also some work on learning from large scale video like Youtube.We are months away from the ChatGPT moment in humanoid robotics where a project launch or demo makes people finally realize that they are general purpose.The only way we could have AI proof careers is if humanoid robotics were to completely stop progressing. Since it's been advancing very rapidly, that makes no sense.
  • whatever1
    Specialized shoemakers lost their jobs to generic shoe factory workers but there is more shoe consumption than ever before in history.LLMs like manufacturing will multiply the coding throughput. Likely the mythical 10x swe will not be as valuable, but the work expectation from anyone in the field will just multiply.
  • jongjong
    Disturbingly, AI is set to replace essentially any position that is useful, to the extent that it is useful and somehow some people still think they should adapt themselves to the system instead of working to adapt the system to them!Basically all that would be left of desk jobs would be those which have unfair legal powers (including via licenses and credentials) or are pure accountability plays. Like politicians, lawyers, aircraft pilots, corporate accountants... And those jobs will suck because people will be accountable for work that is not their own.These jobs won't require any skills because most people may be able to go through their entire career without doing any work. But they will get paid a lot just for having being selected for their position... While other people who may be more skilled than them might be broke and homeless.
  • h4kunamata
    They are doing nothing!!1) No matter the age, they are using said AI to replace human2) Within workplace, they are using AI to do their work so they are learning nothing3) That is it, people are using AI to replace their own work rather than improve it, people are driving themselves out of work.
  • stephen_cagle
    I'm somewhat skeptical of this "enter the trades" movement. Actually, I am more skeptical of that statement than I am of LLM's replacing white collar work in general. I think parts of coding are being replaced quickly because they are the parts that don't require discernment. Trades likely contain just as many automatable and just as many discernment parts as white collar work. At this moment in history, the automatable parts are being automated in the knowledge based world. People think the physical world is somehow different, but with world models (along the full spectrum of what that means) the physical world will be just as trainable as the knowledge based world.tldr; Just like knowledge work, most trade stuff is probably mostly repeated (i.e. very trainable) task with a small amount of taste and discernment applied. The repeated will be trainable, the discernment may be trainable. I don't think the physical world is necessarily any safer than the knowledge world.
  • ramesh31
    I'll say invest totally in domain knowledge now. The value of knowing how to invert a binary tree from memory has dropped to approximately zero. Web development as we knew it for the past 20 years is completely dead as an entry level trade. The power is shifting to people with useful knowledge and expertise that isn't about twiddling bits.
  • twinpost_rules
    [dead]
  • Imustaskforhelp
    I am not quite sure with the controversy at archive.ph/(today) but If this may help anybody, I have used single-file to download from archive.ph and uploaded it to githubhttps://serjaimelannister.github.io/wsj-article/and I have also uploaded the github link on archive.org for persistence/archival purposes.https://web.archive.org/web/20260322213950/https://serjaimel...I hope that this might help some people and I have another friendly suggestion to please donate to archive.org :-)
  • abcde666777
    > People fear that programming is dead.> People stop learning programming.> Programmers become scarce.> Programmers become valuable again.Maybe it's wishful thinking but I'm not going to be surprised if it plays out like this. In some sense the reverse happened over the last couple of decades - everyone and their mother got into IT and the industry became saturated.