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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

#91

Post by terminalshort »

Loughla wrote: post #19
stephen_cagle wrote: post #8

I'm somewhat skeptical of this "enter the trades" movement. Actually, I am more skeptical of that statement than I am of LLM's replacing white collar work in general. I think parts of coding are being replaced quickly because they are the parts that don't require discernment. Trades likely contain just as many automatable and just as many discernment parts as white collar work. At this moment in history, the automata…

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…

Yeah, things change. What do you propose to do about that? The only people who lose are the ones who can't accept that they may need to change careers to make more money.

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

#92

Post by hyperadvanced »

Thanemate wrote: post #24
time0ut wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Optimistically, I hope it filters out the people who were only interested in it for the money. When I was in school, decades ago now, very few people went into CS compared to other majors. Everyone I knew going into it did it because they loved it. I would have done it regardless of the career opportunities because I want to build stuff. Interviewing candidates over the years since then, my experience has been there…

>Optimistically, I hope it filters out the people who were only interested in it for the money. I hope not, because we don't need software developers to be "starving artist 2.0". And on that note: I vividly remember people staying away from the video game development industry because it was deemed "passion industry", and that had a really negative connotation of long working hours for asymmetrical return, and more. I…

Seems… improbable. There will certainly be less of us, but the fact remains that nobody wants to debug this shite vibecoded apps companies are pushing, and some simply are not able because of skill atrophy and perverse incentives to use AI at the cost of stability.

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

#93

Post by rogerrogerr »

ilaksh wrote: post #90

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:…

AI-proof is probably the wrong way to look at it, but there is substantial advantage in being in one of the _last_ to be automated industries. Social safety nets and such are probably set up by the time the robots come for the last jobs.

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

#94

Post by viccis »

Hasslequest wrote: post #25
time0ut wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Optimistically, I hope it filters out the people who were only interested in it for the money. When I was in school, decades ago now, very few people went into CS compared to other majors. Everyone I knew going into it did it because they loved it. I would have done it regardless of the career opportunities because I want to build stuff. Interviewing candidates over the years since then, my experience has been there…

Brother, we need to eat. You don't need to go to college to learn about some topic, you can pirate textbooks. You need to go to college to get a piece of paper saying you did. If you were passionate about computer programming, you can do it in your free time while you flip burgers or do whatever you need to survive

>You need to go to college to get a piece of paper saying you did. If you were passionate about computer programming, you can do it in your free time while you flip burgers or do whatever you need to survive

This is a naive view of the average (or even above average) person's approach to learning, as well as an overly cynical read on the intellectually motivating atmosphere that comes from earnestly engaging in an academic environment.

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

#95

Post by bilbo0s »

rogerrogerr wrote: post #93
ilaksh wrote: post #90

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:…

AI-proof is probably the wrong way to look at it, but there is substantial advantage in being in one of the _last_ to be automated industries. Social safety nets and such are probably set up by the time the robots come for the last jobs.

>Social safety nets and such are probably set up by the time the robots come for the last jobs.

What makes you think "Social safety nets" will be the solution the élites land on?

If we were to wargame out different scenarios, we'd likely find there are a lot of potential solutions to the problem of large masses of people who are not useful to the cause of productivity in your society.

Giving non-élites a social safety net is actually one of the most resource intensive solutions. Not saying our oligarchs would not choose that solution. Just pointing out that it would severely impact their bottom lines. More than almost any other solution in fact.

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

#96

Post by GorbachevyChase »

cal_dent wrote: post #48

I still don't understand the logic that any job is safe from ai (if it lives up to expectations). Sure, it might not be directly impacted by ai but why is there this expectation that the excess labour from those directly impacted doesnt act to suppress the earning power of other jobs? Especially considering that the implication is that humans just become a pair of hands with opposable thumbs?. Take the electrician in…

I don’t think we have any way of knowing what will happen. We’re in such an age of abundance now that it’s possible to make a living fighting with your girlfriends in Salt Lake City. Graphite block warehouse owners in China can be celebrities in the US. The influencer economy would have seems unthinkable and absurd in the 90s. What will be normal 30 years from now will probably seem just as bizarre. I’d like to think we will be colonizing other worlds, but it will probably be just more service economy excess like pet therapy and Uber-for-friendship.

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

#97

Post by eucyclos »

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?

If it's my kid? Starting their own Enterprise. Between 'good enough' knowledge work getting cheaper and the bureaucracy that made entrepreneurship less attractive over the last decades being either trimmed or automatable, we may be looking at a golden age of new business formation. There's an old saying, "genius is one percent inspiration and ninety nine percent perspiration". If ai shifts that to just 2 and 98, it'll unlock massive demand for a certain kind of mind.

How to teach that I'm still pondering. One idea that occurs to me, is that a human will always be needed to ask the right questions and have good taste, but I don't know how to teach those. They can probably only be educated, which in my mind is distinct from teaching. A different idea I have is that an entrepreneur needs three skills: they need to identify a problem, implement a solution, and get paid for it. Those skills probably can be taught, so I'd try to ensure they get early reps in all three.

If I knew how to connect those two ideas I think I'd have a decent curriculum. Anyone have suggestions for that?

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

#98

Post by saltyoldman »

adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #73
saltyoldman wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're coping. Everyone wants a remote software job. These are dead. If you want something in software, it will need to be robotics or space related and you'll drive to a location to do it. If you want to be in a remote, small town, get into construction and become a builder with their own GC license in a few years. Then charge people 400k to build that little dream cottage with 2 guys (you and a team mate) twice a y…

Wha do you mean these are dead? I work a remote software job and it ain't going anywhere from what I can see.

I could have elaborated, but long term this line of work is dead. Will there be software engineers in 20 years? Can't tell you, but it won't be in the millions like it is now. Will those people KNOW a programming language? probably not. At some point the sheer amount of capabilities of agents will just keep going up and us humans are still writing buggy code. Waymo just declared that it's drivers are something like 13x better than human drivers... Agentic has only been around for what, 1 years maybe 2 if you count closed betas.

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

#99

Post by stephen_cagle »

rootusrootus wrote: post #71
array_key_first wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Robots are expensive, software is not. I can instantly duplicate software 1 million times and run it in parallel, I can't just produce 1 million robots. Physical world is always harder. Even if we get robots who can, say, build roads start to end, there is still a HUGE gap between that and it actually being used. There is a hard floor, too. Robots are made of physical things, physical things have scarcity, and there'…

> Robots are expensive People are not, though, and all the folks who are no longer necessary in knowledge work are available for physical work.

Dark thoughts... Imagine a future where most human beings are just overseered by an LLM and we are just wearing AR work glasses. Barely aware of what (physical) work we are doing as we overlay our hands within the projections of our AR glasses. Every task is decomposed into a set of small physical steps, you don't even think about what you are trying to actually accomplish, just follow the steps one at a time. I wonder if an entire fast food restaurant could be run in this fashion? No managers, no shift supervisors, just a skeleton crew doing one step of a task at a time.

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

#100

Post by bitwize »

rogerrogerr wrote: post #93
ilaksh wrote: post #90

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:…

AI-proof is probably the wrong way to look at it, but there is substantial advantage in being in one of the _last_ to be automated industries. Social safety nets and such are probably set up by the time the robots come for the last jobs.

The Canadian social safety net has big enough holes that rather than incur the costs as a first resort, the Canadian government has taken to passing out "are you aware of your options regarding MAID?" pamphlets to decidedly non-terminal patients.

There's only one way to AI-proof yourself: become enormously rich and join the Davos class.

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