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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

#81

Post by notesinthefield »

boringg wrote: post #66
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.

I bet a lot of teachers look at what devs do and think that its also insane to sit in front of computer all day, in a no boundary job, working on something you really don't care about and is potentially really bad for civilization only to make money off and lose your sense of self.

My spouse has expressed this nearly verbatim after transitioning out of a 16 year career in middle and grade school education to medical curriculum development. It was hell on her mental health but at least there was a clear motivation and purpose for being there.

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

#82

Post by mylifeandtimes »

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…

Wait-- I think you are confusing "teachers" with "police officers".

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

#83

Post by nullstyle »

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…

“ benefits of incredibly strong union protections”

Lol, try saying that to an alaskan teachers face and watch yourself get slapped for the absurdity of the claim.

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

#84

Post by justonepost2 »

ctoth wrote: post #44
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…

> 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.

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

#85

Post by dwohnitmok »

alex43578 wrote: post #67
Archonical wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent comment is describing supply and demand. If Blizzard attracts a larger supply of workers who will accept lower pay and worse conditions because they intrinsically want the job, Blizzard gains leverage. That is exactly why studios like Blizzard can get away with more than “NicheBoringFinanceCo.”

If an “industry’s labour [is] supplied only by those inherently passionate about it” the post says it would “crush wages and working conditions”. That runs completely counter to the basics of supply and demand in a perfect competition market. It would be market with far fewer (labor) suppliers, who could therefore command a higher wage, not lower.

You are only looking at supply. Neither supply nor demand by themselves adequately describe prices (even in supply-demand 101 theory; in practice of course it gets significantly more complicated than just supply and demand). There are fields with few suppliers where supply is extremely cheap and fields with few suppliers where supply is extremely expensive.

Is the number of suppliers low because demand is also low or is the number of suppliers low because demand is high but supply is constrained?

A field that previously had a supply of labor in it "for the money" who all leave is indicative of the former scenario not the latter.

That does not lead to higher wages. That leads to low wages.

(There are a variety of reasons why this story is too simple and why I remain uncertain about developer salaries in the short term)

There is a broader question of whether having people who are in it for the money leave independently "causes" wages to go down (e.g. if you were to replace all such people with people "purely in it for the passion"). My suspicion is yes. Mainly because wage markets are somewhat inefficient, there are always mild cartel-like/cooperative effects in any market, people in it for passion tend to undersell labor and the people in it for the money are much less likely to undersell their labor and this spills over beneficially to the former.

Note that this broader question is simply unanswerable assuming perfect competition, i.e. a supply-demand 101 perspective (which is why it doesn't make sense to posit "perfect competition" for this question).

It posits durable behavioral differences among suppliers that are not determined purely by supply and demand which do not update reliably in the face of pricing. This is equivalent to market friction and hence fundamentally contradicts an assumption of perfect competition.

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

#86

Post by jasondigitized »

magic_hamster wrote: post #14
crop_rotation wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Domain knowledge as in non public aspects of the work you/ your workplace does. The AI tools are very good at whatever is public but very clueless about proprietary domains .Let's say you make CRUD apps about some confidential domain. Now the CRUD skills might be commodity but the confidential domain is even more important.

As long as there's internal documentation, which virtually every serious shop has, it can be processed and combined with AI. There are startups selling this product already. I've seen first hand some very narrowly focused domain knowledge becoming more accessible when you can ask the chatbot and the thing is right . It works. Come to think of it, domain knowledge should be an LLMs strong suit as long as you can provi…

Documentation rarely reflects how anything is actually done, referred to by good business analysts as 'shadow functions'.

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

#87

Post by icehawk »

alex43578 wrote: post #67
Archonical wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent comment is describing supply and demand. If Blizzard attracts a larger supply of workers who will accept lower pay and worse conditions because they intrinsically want the job, Blizzard gains leverage. That is exactly why studios like Blizzard can get away with more than “NicheBoringFinanceCo.”

If an “industry’s labour [is] supplied only by those inherently passionate about it” the post says it would “crush wages and working conditions”. That runs completely counter to the basics of supply and demand in a perfect competition market. It would be market with far fewer (labor) suppliers, who could therefore command a higher wage, not lower.

Except that there are a LOT of people that want to work in video games (which is the supply) which then depresses the price (wages)

All of my developer friends in the gaming industry have had far worse working conditions then what I've had.

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

#88

Post by alex43578 »

nullstyle wrote: post #83
alex43578 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

“ benefits of incredibly strong union protections” Lol, try saying that to an alaskan teachers face and watch yourself get slapped for the absurdity of the claim.

The Alaskan teacher's union is ranked 15th overall in the US [1]. I'm betting they're just fine, and that any issues are more general "Alaska-problems" than anything specific to teaching, unions, etc.

https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/research/how-strong-ar...

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

#89

Post by terminalshort »

alex43578 wrote: post #67
Archonical wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent comment is describing supply and demand. If Blizzard attracts a larger supply of workers who will accept lower pay and worse conditions because they intrinsically want the job, Blizzard gains leverage. That is exactly why studios like Blizzard can get away with more than “NicheBoringFinanceCo.”

If an “industry’s labour [is] supplied only by those inherently passionate about it” the post says it would “crush wages and working conditions”. That runs completely counter to the basics of supply and demand in a perfect competition market. It would be market with far fewer (labor) suppliers, who could therefore command a higher wage, not lower.

To use your example of someone working on the plumbing of an accounts payable system, who is passionate about that? The supply is near zero. That, like most jobs, is going to need to be done entirely by people who are just doing it for the money, and there is nothing wrong with that.

Your example runs counter to the laws of supply and demand too. You understand that wages will rise when supply is restricted, but you don't want to accept that supply will respond to the price signal in the form of more people entering that job market.

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

#90

Post by ilaksh »

There is no such thing as an AI-proof career.

Look at recent output from leading edge humanoid robotics projects like 1X/Neo, Figure 03, Skild AI. Also see open published work like MimicDroid, HDMI, GenMimic, Humanoid-Union Dataset, RoboMirror, Being-H0

Figure 03:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-31-KBBuXM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUTzuhkDG3w

1X Neo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lS_z60kjVEk

Skild AI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRmjBdKKLsc (Learning by Watching Human Videos)

Mimic

https://youtu.be/_LkBFL5m1WU?si=Qvgb7vkpG_KCAJdN

There is a ton of very useful recent progress with imitation learning and related datasets. There is also some work on learning from large scale video like Youtube.

We are months away from the ChatGPT moment in humanoid robotics where a project launch or demo makes people finally realize that they are general purpose.

The only way we could have AI proof careers is if humanoid robotics were to completely stop progressing. Since it's been advancing very rapidly, that makes no sense.

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