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Ask HN: What career would you switch into if AI ate your profession?
71–80 of 94 posts
Re: Ask HN: What career would you switch into if AI ate your profession?
#72Top 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.
They work on text, but could ML/AI design SimCity 2000 in a way that is fun and enjoyable? or a game like Starcraft? (In the next 10-15 years, which is the scope of this Ask HN relative to me)
It might be able to make realistic text, even storylines, but I don't think ML/AI will be able to make GOOD games without significant guidance, especially things that 'break the mold' (Portal, Black & White, the first "Sim" game, the first RTS game)
Re: Ask HN: What career would you switch into if AI ate your profession?
#73Prison guard. With AI good enough to put programmers out of work, there's not much that is safe from its reach. So, until prison reform happens such that human guards are no longer needed, the market for prison guards will be healthy enough to make it until I decide to retire (or join the Butlerian Jihad myself).
Re: Ask HN: What career would you switch into if AI ate your profession?
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
As a current junior developer with ambitions to do high level work I have fear that the ladder will be pulled up by AI before I can get to that level. We will see though :)
Fear not, it will pull up the ladder as much as compilers did. Not at all
Re: Ask HN: What career would you switch into if AI ate your profession?
#75Re: Ask HN: What career would you switch into if AI ate your profession?
#76I'm in automation so when I'm out of a job, everyone is. That said, automation doesn't really eat professions - automation does tasks. Very few professions are composed of a wide variety of tasks. For example while we might at first glance think of truck driving as merely guiding a vehicle, in reality a truck driver does much more like loading and unloading cargo, handling paperwork at pickup and destination, checking for issues that would require maintenance, sitting with the vehicle so neither it nor the cargo are tampered with, etc. Automating a particular task may remove a bottleneck that allows individuals in the profession to be more productive, and thus the same amount of total work could be done in theory by a smaller labor force, but in nearly all cases it makes more sense to have the same size labor force do more work: it always takes a smaller percentage increase in sales to make as much money as a cost reduction could save, and costs can only be cut so far while there is no hard limit on growth.
Much more likely than automation taking over a profession is that automation changes the nature of a profession. For example with truck driving while there's much more to it than driving the truck, the ability to actually drive the truck has always been critical and thus things like the possession of a valid CDL limit the number of people who can enter the profession and keep wages pretty high. You automate trucks and you're still going to need lots of people to do logistics, but those people may not need a CDL and thus wages might be more similar to delivery van drivers. Other professions might see a less crisp change, for example I would expect as AI becomes better at technical things like diagnostics, bedside manner will become ever more important a metric for medical professionals and doctors who don't like that aspect of the profession will become steadily more dissatisfied.
Thus the best way to automation-proof your job isn't to do professions that are difficult to automate, but rather where automation would compliment your skills and let you do more of the parts you find fulfilling. For example I foresee AI revolutionizing many creative professions in the not too distant future like art and music by offering tools that eliminate much of the technical skill necessary to turn an idea into reality, allowing for artists to focus more on coming up with cool ideas. Similarly things like product development and marketing are going to be much more fun and be much more accessible, though they may not pay as well.
Re: Ask HN: What career would you switch into if AI ate your profession?
#77I'm a software dev and it would be depressing if AI took over.
The part I enjoy the most is solving a problem, which seems to require imagination and deep understanding of the problem, so there is some hope I can retire while still doing something similar.
Re: Ask HN: What career would you switch into if AI ate your profession?
#78I’d become a Yoga Instructor. I was certified as of a few years ago so I’d takes some classes again to renew my cert. Lotsa folks attend yoga classes for the personal connection. Not just the spirituality or fitness. That personal connection can’t be replicated by AI so I think it’s a good choice if AI starts coming for my programming job.
This is a good point, and something yoga classes should do a better job of. It seems like they don’t generally emphasize community when that’s what many are looking for.
Re: Ask HN: What career would you switch into if AI ate your profession?
#79Locksmith or electrician. If I had the cash, I'd just start a tree + algae + bsf farm.
BSF?
Re: Ask HN: What career would you switch into if AI ate your profession?
#80subsistence farming because at that point: fuck society