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What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves

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Re: What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves

#111

Post by asdff »

chromacity wrote: post #35
striped_hash wrote: post #4

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 tr…

The prevailing sentiment on HN is that AI will make coders 10x more productive, but that we'll all keep our jobs and salaries, with the possible exception of people who don't embrace AI quickly enough. But let me ask you this: has AI made life easier for illustrators, book authors, or musicians? They were affected by the technology earlier on. If they don't embrace AI, they face increased competition from cheaply-mad…

The thing is, for most artists outside say in commercial work where AI is a great risk to jobs, they are judged by the finery of their craft, not rate of output. How many clients are there who say "we don't care how long it takes for you to come up with the solution, we just want it beautiful and representative of your style."

Re: What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves

#112

Post by skirmish »

xp84 wrote: post #51
Loughla wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is the physical aspect of the trades. The design for wiring can be (and already has been) automated, but you physically need an electrician on site to pull the wires. So I can see a hollowing out of the engineers, but not the actual electricians. That being said, the absolute focus on trades from the fed right now just reeks of the wild pendulum swing. It used to be 'go to college to get a good job' th…

Indeed. If you squint a little, it kind of looks like the machines are trying to shift to a world where we are just meat puppets to do the tricky stuff there aren't robotics for (yet). :(

Cory Doctorow's "The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI" [1] agrees with you:

" a reverse centaur is machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine."

[1] https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-12-05...

Re: What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves

#113

Post by asdff »

nprateem wrote: post #108
jongjong wrote: post #28

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,…

And yet someone has to actually tell the AI what to create. There's just no avoiding this. Anyway before this AI doomerism can become reality AI first needs the breakthrough of genuine understanding to stop making stupid mistakes. Imitation will always remain imitation. There must be eg an understanding of casualty and reasoning on the same level as we have, not the useless "You're absolutely right" you get now when…

>And yet someone has to actually tell the AI what to create. There's just no avoiding this.

Yes there is, just stop creating. Or take a page from biology, and use random mutation and natural selection to iterate on useful novel functions.

Honestly, once AI takes all the jobs, game over, why iterate anything else. Planet captured. Humanity hunted down to the last bands of troglodytes holding out in the wilderness. It would be strongly against their interest to just assume we'd starve quietly.

Re: What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves

#114

Post by alvah »

justonepost2 wrote: post #84
ctoth wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What should kids be aiming for according to you? Computer Scientist? Biologist? Finance? Construction? Can you sit down with an unfamiliar domain and develop enough genuine curiosity to get good at it, without a syllabus or a credential dangling in front of you? The kids who'll do well in a world where the field-to-security mapping keeps shifting are the ones who can self-direct — not the ones who picked the right…

> Although full disclosure I'm short humans and very long paperclips. What a ludicrous world we live in where this is a socially acceptable view to hold.

What a ludicrous reply, to suggest it should be "socially unacceptable" to believe the Paperclip Maximizer thought experiment might reveal a scenario that is bad for humans overall.

Re: What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves

#115

Post by fragmede »

acdha wrote: post #79
chromacity wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The prevailing sentiment on HN is that AI will make coders 10x more productive, but that we'll all keep our jobs and salaries, with the possible exception of people who don't embrace AI quickly enough. But let me ask you this: has AI made life easier for illustrators, book authors, or musicians? They were affected by the technology earlier on. If they don't embrace AI, they face increased competition from cheaply-mad…

It’s also not exactly a secret that the executive class resents having to pay high-income workers and is champing at the bit for layoffs. Even if you fully embrace AI, they want white collar jobs to look more like call center work with high surveillance, less autonomy, and constant reminders of replaceability. Most people saw through that “our people are our greatest asset” talk before, but they’re not even trying an…

We just need to be bold enough to take risks and replace the executive class with an AI agent that's been trained on Machiavelli and the Wealth of Nations and all of the rest of the written word to write the layoff letter in corpo speak anyway. Waiting for the AI bot that gets paid $10mm/year to be a CEO.

Re: What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves

#116

Post by wolvoleo »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #107
theteapot wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno. I trained as a software engineer, pivoted to civil laborer. I just can't see a robot doing 90% of the stuff I do anytime soon. Same goes for plumber, electrician, ... even most mobile plant operations. As a supplement around the edges, sure. But replace? Not in the near term. And that's not even considering the safety certification moats around skilled labor roles.

I'm think event photography is another. It's one thing to use AI to touch up photos, but in the end, you probably still want photos that match your memories and good photography still has an element of taste and creativity.

Yeah I think with all the AI slop around, people are going to value 'real' a lot more.

Re: What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves

#117

Post by tdeck »

alex43578 wrote: post #69
sb057 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See also: public school teachers. You either need to be insanely passionate or incredibly stupid to take ~$55k/year for long hours as an educator that is also a babysitter. And insanely passionate teachers are in short supply.

Long hours? Teachers work the same hours or less than other adults per “New Measures of Teachers’ Work Hours and Implications for Wage Comparisons” by West. “Teachers work an average of 34.5 hours per week on an annual basis (38.0 hours per week during the school year and 21.5 hours per week during the summer months).” That’s leaving out the benefits of incredibly strong union protections, it being a state job with m…

There's no way these numbers can be correct. My school was 8 am to 3 PM, that's 35 hours a week right there for full time teachers. But teachers spend many more hours outside the class preparing lessons, grading work, and following up on things. If you even spend a week teaching something you quickly realize how much extra prep work goes into it.

Re: What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves

#119

Post by AnthonyMouse »

alex43578 wrote: post #32
denkmoon wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having an industry’s labour supplied only by those inherently passionate about it is a great way to crush wages and working conditions. Look at what companies like Blizzard get away with because their employees just want to make video games at their favourite dev studio. While they’re a pain in the ass sometimes, I welcome the devs who are only here for the cash.

This is totally leaving out the supply and demand aspect. People like the idea of making games more than working on the plumbing of some accounts payable software, so Blizzard can pay less and treat worse than NicheBoringFinanceCo.

Let's consider how this could play out:

If you need a lot of low quality code in a hurry, AI can definitely do that for you now. The path to making money by writing mediocre code for people who don't really care that much is going to look like managing a network of bots that constantly spit out a huge volume of code that kind of mostly works and if it sometimes doesn't then whatever. The people in it for the money can probably make a decent amount in the "high volume low quality" space.

Then there's the code that needs to actually work, or have some thought put into it. Consider the process of writing IETF RFCs. Can you get an LLM to spit out English text that conforms to their formatting? Absolutely you can. Is the RFC it emits going to be something you'll want to have the whole world trying to implement as a standard? Not likely. So the people doing that are going to be doing it something closer to the old way.

Re: What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves

#120

Post by NegativeLatency »

chromacity wrote: post #35
striped_hash wrote: post #4

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 tr…

The prevailing sentiment on HN is that AI will make coders 10x more productive, but that we'll all keep our jobs and salaries, with the possible exception of people who don't embrace AI quickly enough. But let me ask you this: has AI made life easier for illustrators, book authors, or musicians? They were affected by the technology earlier on. If they don't embrace AI, they face increased competition from cheaply-mad…

Automation worked out great for domestic manufacturing in the US /s
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