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AI is wiping out entry-level jobs

fortune.com

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Re: AI is wiping out entry-level jobs

#81

Post by jaredcwhite »

kuerbel wrote: post #10

"At its core, the goal of education is to prepare individuals for employment and advancement" No. It should help a person develop into a free, thoughtful, well-rounded human being. Training narrowly for current market demands can become obsolete quickly. The question should not be: Should education have economic value? But rather: Should economic value be the highest or only value of education? Of course, engineering…

The level of pushback you're receiving to this honestly makes me weep for the society we find ourselves in.

I grew up expecting the future would be much like what Captain Jean-Luc Picard described in First Contact: "The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity."

Somehow, that vision of the future seems farther away than ever. We're actively becoming LESS Federation, more Ferengi. That's not a world which holds any appeal for me.

Re: AI is wiping out entry-level jobs

#82

Post by Gud »

simonsarris wrote: post #74
Gud wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should that not be the goal for everyone, rich and poor? And why are so few rich and so many poor?

Because how you spend your time is different when you need to work for a living and when you do not. If that's not transparent, this can't really be discussed. Spending 4 years and $300,000 is "fine" if you have a trust fund and "extremely stupid without a return-on-investment" if you don't.

Uhm, why does the individual pay $300,000, sounds extremely backwards?

That’s not a fact everywhere.

Re: AI is wiping out entry-level jobs

#83

Post by kuerbel »

jaredcwhite wrote: post #81
kuerbel wrote: post #10

"At its core, the goal of education is to prepare individuals for employment and advancement" No. It should help a person develop into a free, thoughtful, well-rounded human being. Training narrowly for current market demands can become obsolete quickly. The question should not be: Should education have economic value? But rather: Should economic value be the highest or only value of education? Of course, engineering…

The level of pushback you're receiving to this honestly makes me weep for the society we find ourselves in. I grew up expecting the future would be much like what Captain Jean-Luc Picard described in First Contact: "The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity." Somehow, that vision of the future seems farther away than ever. We're activel…

I also got quite a few upvotes and agreeable comments. So it's not all black :)

Remember that in Star Trek, before the starfleet, there was the eugenics war/third world war/great war. Maybe we could skip that one.

Re: AI is wiping out entry-level jobs

#84

Post by red-iron-pine »

phyzix5761 wrote: post #28
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever gets them clicks

Exactly, this is the real purpose of news and media. They are for-profit businesses. If anyone treats any of them as neutral altruist sources of real information then they're deluding themselves.

"remember the Maine"

Re: AI is wiping out entry-level jobs

#85

Post by Anvoker »

Gud wrote: post #65
visarga wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No. It should help a person develop into a free, thoughtful, well-rounded human being. That was the goal maybe in the past when only rich people could afford an education.

Why should that not be the goal for everyone, rich and poor? And why are so few rich and so many poor?

Because the poor will suffer tremendously if they are ill equipped for the job market. If we want to have education have a strong humanistic focus then we should start by changing society in other places. Or we'll get unemployed and suffering well rounded human beings.

Regardless, at the moment education does not seem to be doing great on either the humanistic or "pragmatic" axis.

Re: AI is wiping out entry-level jobs

#86

Post by NickC25 »

jmyeet wrote: post #7

We've been through this before. The GFC in 2008 wiped out entry-level jobs for millenials who did everything "right" (or, at least, what they were told to do) by going to college and accumulating student debt [1]. Those graduates ended up doing lower-paid and often non-career jobs like service works. The cliche in the early 2010s was college grads being baristas for a reason. Those jobs never came back. And it's esse…

>It's going to get worse. What people should really understand that there's, so far, only one product for AI and that is labor displacement and wage suppression when we already have historically low savings rate (ie a buffer) [2] and an affordability crisis that is also only going to get worse. How do we have a functioning economy if nobody has any money?

Not only that, wages have stagnated for a few decades, interest rates have been through the floor so nobody can make any money in savings, inflation through the roof, people with billions aren't paying taxes....

We don't have a functioning economy. Our stock market is being kept afloat by AI CAPEX. We have useless politicans afraid of asking trillionaire corporations and centibillionaires to pay their fair share. This country is dying.

Re: AI is wiping out entry-level jobs

#87

Post by hollerith »

rayiner wrote: post #68
Cerium wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main focus of education as a taxpayer supported activity is about the perpetuation of the state. The fact that a healthy state relies on a healthy economy is a constraint that helps shape the aims of public education. Other constraints are about culture, values, and understanding the government to the degree that the government can count on having a future generation of legislature. One of my favorites on this to…

Whose culture, whose values, and whose understanding of the government? You’re describing the function of public education in a place like China, or the U.S. before the 1960s. Yeah, the Puritans invented public schools to make sure students learned the bible. But it’s not 1635 anymore. In a multicultural society, school only has an economic function.

I would have guessed that a very large fraction of the US's decisionmakers still want education to prepare young people for citizenship, not just labor-force participation.

Re: AI is wiping out entry-level jobs

#88

Post by rayiner »

hollerith wrote: post #87
rayiner wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whose culture, whose values, and whose understanding of the government? You’re describing the function of public education in a place like China, or the U.S. before the 1960s. Yeah, the Puritans invented public schools to make sure students learned the bible. But it’s not 1635 anymore. In a multicultural society, school only has an economic function.

I would have guessed that a very large fraction of the US's decisionmakers still want education to prepare young people for citizenship, not just labor-force participation.

“Citizenship” is an empty label that we use out of habit. It’s not attached to any substantive concepts that schools can meaningfully socialize into children. Where “citizenship” is a paper label and defined mainly in terms of economic relations and pop culture references, what “preparation” is there for schools to do?

I’m reminded of Joe Biden delivering a word salad response to a similar question: https://www.c-span.org/clip/white-house-event/user-clip-bide.... This isn’t a criticism of Biden. There’s not a meaningful answer.

Re: AI is wiping out entry-level jobs

#89

Post by hollerith »

rayiner wrote: post #88
hollerith wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would have guessed that a very large fraction of the US's decisionmakers still want education to prepare young people for citizenship, not just labor-force participation.

“Citizenship” is an empty label that we use out of habit. It’s not attached to any substantive concepts that schools can meaningfully socialize into children. Where “citizenship” is a paper label and defined mainly in terms of economic relations and pop culture references, what “preparation” is there for schools to do? I’m reminded of Joe Biden delivering a word salad response to a similar question: https://www.c-spa…

If instead of "prepare young people for citizenship", I had written, "teach young people things useful for maintaining and improving their community and their country", would your reply be essentially the same?

Re: AI is wiping out entry-level jobs

#90

Post by spwa4 »

zingababba wrote: post #72
spwa4 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This 100x. It's like outsourcing call-centers to the third world. Did that improve service? Is there anyone at all daring to make that claim? It did not. It was slightly cheaper. Not even that much. AI is like that. It gives a much worse service, even to the companies that are buying it, at a slightly lower cost.

No one has any idea what the cost will be. It seems like at the moment every sector is removing barriers to at least accelerated adoption of an entirely new technique ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techne ). The Mythos spook is starting to mobilize any org that had either still been on the fence or more heavily regulated. Look at how quickly the thinking around agentic governance is progressing, it is a reflection o…

The problem with AI in European companies, I can predict. The reason call centers suck:

1) no real information given to the people answering the phone

2) insufficient system access given, often only the ability to send emails to the chatbot on the site, which are then ignored for days

3) if ANY money is involved, whatsoever, there's 5 levels of approval that take 3 days each

This is not something that can be fixed with better intelligence or ...

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