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Ask HN: What career would you switch into if AI ate your profession?
51–60 of 94 posts
Re: Ask HN: What career would you switch into if AI ate your profession?
#52Hate to be a downer, but the likely outcome is that a lot of us would get angry, depressed, and addicted. This future is a hypothetical for our industry, but it's happened before with other industries, so we have some precedent to look to. The "don't worry, you'll learn new skills and switch careers" promise has been tried, too. Results have been mixed at best.
Re: Ask HN: What career would you switch into if AI ate your profession?
#53It's kind of amazing that we've created a world where it's plausible a lot of our jobs could become automated and this is a bad thing . We really fucked up lol. Anyway I don't have any other economically valuable skills and I'm not willing to go back to cooking. I'd try to join a monastery if any would have me. If not I'll just be homeless again until the people who still have jobs finally work up the courage to exec…
Yeah, growing up, my understanding of “the plan” that we would end up writing poetry and dance in farandoles in orchards while the machines slaves away our work.
That plan got cancelled I think.
Re: Ask HN: What career would you switch into if AI ate your profession?
#54If every job of IT-Security is obsolete (including exploit dev, reverse engineering, pentesting) I would prefer a job in drug discovery preferably as a bioinformatician. I can't believe AI is able to find cures against every kind of cancer (even if I wish).
IMO, AI-driven development will increase the need for security work:
increased throughput * (training on insecure code - competent human review)
Re: Ask HN: What career would you switch into if AI ate your profession?
#55Top picks: Game development -- AI will eventually be guidable to write code, but it likely won't have "imagination" in the next decade (and I am not worried about my finances after that) Beer making -- Similarly, AI likely won't understand taste for quite some time Woodworking -- When everything is mass produced by automation, I suspect people will want unique, custom, hand-made things more. Edit: Fix format, clarify…
> but it likely won't have "imagination" in the next decade
I find GPT models to perform very well on this task. ChatGPT is the best right now but even small models like GPT J 6B are good.
Re: Ask HN: What career would you switch into if AI ate your profession?
#56I’d become a burner technician for boilers. You have to be technically minded so there are some barriers to entry, and it’s basically critical infrastructure so there’s some security. They also get paid well.
Re: Ask HN: What career would you switch into if AI ate your profession?
#57Top picks: Game development -- AI will eventually be guidable to write code, but it likely won't have "imagination" in the next decade (and I am not worried about my finances after that) Beer making -- Similarly, AI likely won't understand taste for quite some time Woodworking -- When everything is mass produced by automation, I suspect people will want unique, custom, hand-made things more. Edit: Fix format, clarify…
Game development is an interesting one. Looking at the bulk of recent triple-A titles, most of those feel so unimaginative and secondary that I can only assume AI already took over that field. :)
Re: Ask HN: What career would you switch into if AI ate your profession?
#58Top picks: Game development -- AI will eventually be guidable to write code, but it likely won't have "imagination" in the next decade (and I am not worried about my finances after that) Beer making -- Similarly, AI likely won't understand taste for quite some time Woodworking -- When everything is mass produced by automation, I suspect people will want unique, custom, hand-made things more. Edit: Fix format, clarify…
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Re: Ask HN: What career would you switch into if AI ate your profession?
#59The career I’m already moving towards – technical leadership. Swap programmers with AI and the really fun part of designing and building software systems remains the same. Honestly the work is very similar. Much of what I do these days is conveying ideas to fuzzy intelligences, getting their feedback and suggestions, iterating, and making sure the final product is coherent, does what it says, and fits the longer term…
Fair. But I would be weary of the swap also swapping the compensation down.
Not that it really matter on the long run in the context of that question
Re: Ask HN: What career would you switch into if AI ate your profession?
#60The career I’m already moving towards – technical leadership. Swap programmers with AI and the really fun part of designing and building software systems remains the same. Honestly the work is very similar. Much of what I do these days is conveying ideas to fuzzy intelligences, getting their feedback and suggestions, iterating, and making sure the final product is coherent, does what it says, and fits the longer term…
Fair. But I would be weary of the swap also swapping the compensation down. Not that it really matter on the long run in the context of that question
I found this article insightful: https://milkyeggs.com/?p=303
When the internet empowered more people to do the lawyers’ grunt work, compensation became bimodal. There is more value in being on the high end, but less on doing the grunt work.
I think that’s gonna happen with other professions. Including ours (engineering). If you’re doing grunt work – be afraid. If you’re doing high level work – rejoice, it’s about to get easier.
You see this same effect in design for example. An art/design director’s job is about to get easier. The designer making the 5000th billboard for $Brand based on a style guide … could be tough.