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Seven Ways to Avoid Losing Your Job to AI

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11–17 of 17 posts

Re: Seven Ways to Avoid Losing Your Job to AI

#11
# In many situations, people prefer to deal with other humans. Just because we're social animals, and a machine isn't it. Sure, jobs may still be cut in such sectors. But people won't be automated away there. Just roles changing.

# I'm sure we'll find many 'niches' where AI powered robots or humanoids could replace humans, but it's just not effective. Or desired. Or fun. Soccer-playing humanoids, anyone? I suspect the novelty will quickly wear off.

# Society will have to redefine the meaning of "job" in relation to "obtain basic necessities for life". Throughout history & across the world, these 2 are strongly coupled. But going forward, it may be wise to loosen that coupling. Think UBI and the like. The robots are there to serve us!

Re: Seven Ways to Avoid Losing Your Job to AI

#12

# In many situations, people prefer to deal with other humans . Just because we're social animals, and a machine isn't it. Sure, jobs may still be cut in such sectors. But people won't be automated away there. Just roles changing. # I'm sure we'll find many 'niches' where AI powered robots or humanoids could replace humans, but it's just not effective. Or desired. Or fun. Soccer-playing humanoids, anyone? I suspect t…

#1 is a thing that is constantly under appreciated by AI theorists. For example - it's been possible to have waiter-free restaurants and bartender-free bars for decades. From the automation perspective, why do these professions even exist?

It turns out that people generally like ordering food from other people. I don't see AI changing that much.

Re: Seven Ways to Avoid Losing Your Job to AI

#13

The easiest thing IMO is probably to just pick a career path that isn’t reducible to a person doing something on a computer. If I were 20 again and picking future-proof careers, personally I think I’d go into sailing / ships or become a chef. Neither are easy jobs and the income is less than working in tech, but I don’t see Claude replacing ship captains or head chefs anytime in the next fifty years.

Both careers have notoriously bad work life balance. My father was a head chef and later restaurateur and had a very messy personal life because he worked many holidays and often 7 days a week, 14 hours a day. Not saying it can’t be better than that, but there has to be better options.

Re: Seven Ways to Avoid Losing Your Job to AI

#14
post #4

Make yourself indispensable.

Kinda funny how the last programmers who'll get replaced are the guys taking calls from people who don't understand what they're saying, yoloing scripts, live editing shit in prod and all the other shit that the "pure engineers" doing greenfield development more or less sneered at over the years.

Re: Seven Ways to Avoid Losing Your Job to AI

#15

# In many situations, people prefer to deal with other humans . Just because we're social animals, and a machine isn't it. Sure, jobs may still be cut in such sectors. But people won't be automated away there. Just roles changing. # I'm sure we'll find many 'niches' where AI powered robots or humanoids could replace humans, but it's just not effective. Or desired. Or fun. Soccer-playing humanoids, anyone? I suspect t…

#1 is a thing that is constantly under appreciated by AI theorists. For example - it's been possible to have waiter-free restaurants and bartender-free bars for decades. From the automation perspective, why do these professions even exist? It turns out that people generally like ordering food from other people. I don't see AI changing that much.

There are also legal obstacles when alcohol is involved.

If you look at restaurants where alcohol isn’t served like fast food, they are rapidly eliminating human interaction with the customer whenever possible.

Re: Seven Ways to Avoid Losing Your Job to AI

#16

The easiest thing IMO is probably to just pick a career path that isn’t reducible to a person doing something on a computer. If I were 20 again and picking future-proof careers, personally I think I’d go into sailing / ships or become a chef. Neither are easy jobs and the income is less than working in tech, but I don’t see Claude replacing ship captains or head chefs anytime in the next fifty years.

Who exactly will you be a chef to, when all the high income jobs with disposal are automated? There are only so many oligarchs to cook for

Re: Seven Ways to Avoid Losing Your Job to AI

#17

The easiest thing IMO is probably to just pick a career path that isn’t reducible to a person doing something on a computer. If I were 20 again and picking future-proof careers, personally I think I’d go into sailing / ships or become a chef. Neither are easy jobs and the income is less than working in tech, but I don’t see Claude replacing ship captains or head chefs anytime in the next fifty years.

>>I don’t see Claude replacing ship captains or head chefs anytime in >>the next fifty years. The nature of AI is that it can do any role. "Autonomous cargo ship" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_cargo_ship "Robotic kitchen with AI cooks and serves 120 meals an hour without human help" - https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/autonomous-ai-...

That second one has been tried numerous times, the first being 60 years ago:

https://hackaday.com/2015/06/09/retrotechtacular-automatic-f...

We're still waiting.

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