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.
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.
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.
