Society as a whole will be better off because there is more output, better quality output. Then it's for us to vote in a government that shares the fruits of AI with everybody, by way of progressive taxation. Government, use the taxes you collect to give us free food. We don't need 5-star restaurants, just healthy food. We can do this, in a democracy.

The people best suited for implementing and interfacing with LLMs at the moment are still SWEs and at least for the time being AI is actually probably a job creator for SWEs rather than the other way around. This might change.

And Claude has been invaluable for me to fix trade-related things at home, even complex ones. It actually outdid a locksmith!

The most resilient career is probably nursing. Medicine maybe too, not because it's not technically possible but because doctor lobbies are incredibly strong. Healthcare is the largest employer in most states now and with an aging population that's probably where much of the surplus will go and it's a profession that has really meagre productivity gains (cost disease). So nursing might be the answer.

1) The supply of work will skyrocket when everyone will flock there for work

2) Demand will plummet as the white collar people who bought these services will loose their jobs and income

And of course if robotics will get solved to an acceptable degree most of those jobs will also get mostly automated.

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, lawyers, aircraft pilots, corporate accountants... And those jobs will suck because people will be accountable for work that is not their own.

These jobs won't require any skills because most people may be able to go through their entire career without doing any work. But they will get paid a lot just for having being selected for their position... While other people who may be more skilled than them might be broke and homeless.

Especially considering that the implication is that humans just become a pair of hands with opposable thumbs?. Take the electrician in the article, sure its a skilled job but the barrier into it drops massively imo if you can just take a picture of whatever issue is at hand and ai spits out what is needed, no?

I wanted to go into tech or commercial aviation as a kid. After COVID I got a reality check on aviation, so decided to aim for SWE. The plan was to study Maths, CompSci and Physics in my country's equivalent of HS, then aim for Physics/CS at uni.

In Spring 2022 (about 6 months before the release of ChatGPT) I realised where things were headed and decided to go into entertainment tech instead, after already completing my first year of college. I'd been volunteering at a music venue as a technician for a few years and it seemed like a good pivot. I dropped out, went to an arts college and studied production, then got a job as a technician at a theatre. After a few false-starts and a while of freelancing as a photographer/technician, I got offered a few full-time positions, ended up taking one in Event AV (events meaning industry expos like CES) - great pay, growing industry, and not really under threat from AI. Everything that can go online has gone online already, but it turns out that businesspeople still like meeting up in-person. I still get to work with awesome technology, but I'm on my feet and working with my hands too. It's different. I'm probably making less money than I would have made in tech 5-10 years ago, but I'm making more money than a few of my friends straight out of CS degrees now.

A lot of my friends are still studying CS, Media, Arts, Languages, and I am glad to be in the position I'm in. I think AI is decimating the value of a degree, and the HE landscape will change a lot in the next decade.

Time will tell if it was a good move, but I think it'll be a while before an LLM can fly panels or coil cable. I'm happy for now.

Companies do this all the time. A CEO's job is to convince investors that their company stands to win in whatever the current hot trend is. During bitcoin's crazy run in like 2022 or whatever, a ton of tech companies were hopping on the bandwagon and branding themselves as a blockchain company. Look at Block/Square. The current trend is that AI is hot and the economy isn't. Therefore, it's beneficial to the stock price to tell your investors that you're laying off 50% of your staff because you're AI-powered. Just look at Block/Square. My experience has been that most companies have an incredibly patchwork implementation of AI, and that most of the work that they do (particularly larger companies) isn't made more efficient by using AI.

In a few years, there will be some new hotness, and all companies will be saying that the DNA of their company is whatever that is.

As for the current uncertainty in the job market, when you randomly have 50% tariffs slapped on goods you need and can't readily find available in the US for the same price and find that 20% of the world's oil supply is cut off, you tend to not want to invest in the future. Talking about AI is cheap. Tariffs are expensive.

"So soon as the handling of this tool becomes the work of a machine, then, with the use-value, the exchange-value too, of the workman’s labour-power vanishes; the workman becomes unsaleable, like paper money thrown out of currency by legal enactment. That portion of the working-class, thus by machinery rendered superfluous, i.e., no longer immediately necessary for the self-expansion of capital, either goes to the wall in the unequal contest of the old handicrafts and manufactures with machinery, or else floods all the more easily accessible branches of industry, swamps the labour-market, and sinks the price of labour-power below its value."[0]

[0]: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm

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.

- Layoffs due to insufficient demand in uncertain economic times

- Companies selling AI need to claim "we are so great with AI we don't need as many people." Layoffs unlock AI budgets.

- It justifies all the capital allocation into AI.

- Companies in the AI industry shock the government into learned helplessness, so they can write policy that is on their terms.

What am I missing?

We need lots of firefighters on call when landowners do control burns for example. It's a short window.

I started wearing a tool belt for work before I even finished high school. I worked in various skilled trades until I was 38 years old. I made some decent money sometimes, but not often.

Here is the part that people forget to tell you when they give you that advice: learning a skilled trade only pays off if you A) join a union or B) work for yourself.

This is especially true in the Southern US. You can be the best carpenter, electrician, plumber, etc in town, but you won't have healthcare, retirement PTO, you won't be treated like a human unless you join a union (good luck with that in the South) or work for yourself by either being a contractor or starting a company and hiring others to work for you.

However, if someone is truly determine to work in the trades, I always recommend they become a welder. A competent welder can clear $200k+ per year with nothing but a pick up truck with a service bed and their welding equipment and generators.

But other than that, I advise people to avoid the skilled trades unless they can join a union.

https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

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Me: dropped out of grad school, eventually becoming an electrician (IBEW). Decades as handyman doing various sideworks (my own "startup"?). Retired my own residential electrical contractor license (during Covid), good riddance [1]. Forty-something "you're still young!" #yeahOK

Also me: have worked part-time, as-needed, for three family startups (one as lowly eng.tech, other two in hardware manufacture/assembly [3d-manufacturing & EV energy management].

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I incurred severe student loan (&c) debt, wasting years both in college (IMHO: don't go, unless it's for an accredited engineering degree[0]) ...and wrecklessly pissing away my twenties drunk-and-stupid (anxiety from being -$235k in-the-hole, then).

When most of my electrician brothers were getting their first $80k pickuptrucks, I was trudging myself out of debt. A decade ago, I became worth $0.00.

[0] Seriously, if you're in college right now: read this again. Whether you want to be a PE, or doctor/lawyer, a B.E. will become an ultimate fallback (and incredible methods of viewing worldly interactions of fundamentals problem solving). To a certain clientele ($$$), that undergraduate in engineering will justify increased billingrates (not as much as MD/JD/MBA, but would still enhance even these).

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And my body has paid the price of blue collar drudgeries, despite other extremely-fortunate (&unexpected!) windfalls. I've had a handful of weeks in my life where serious consideration has been given to will I ever run/walk again...

Just as I've begun a quest to transition into something less physical (i.e. I dream of desk/office of my own, outside my messy home "office"), this brilliant genAI stuff comes along... and I'm just so glad past blue collar work has allowed me goodénuf savings, even perhaps a few more years of wandering around lost (like most-everybody else increasingly is).

[1] Last advice: you need to find niche tradework — just being a "residential electrician" is increasingly impossible to maintain, with competition from both legal, not, and tech workers. Be the guy (e.g.) that installs (just) meters or lighting or hottubs — or whatever — but don't be the oneguy that does everything (==bankrupt, sooner than not).

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Life is good, even on a Monday morning. Who the hell knows anymore...

> People stop learning programming.

> Programmers become scarce.

> Programmers become valuable again.

Maybe it's wishful thinking but I'm not going to be surprised if it plays out like this. In some sense the reverse happened over the last couple of decades - everyone and their mother got into IT and the industry became saturated.

1) No matter the age, they are using said AI to replace human

2) Within workplace, they are using AI to do their work so they are learning nothing

3) That is it, people are using AI to replace their own work rather than improve it, people are driving themselves out of work.

Neither of the strategies in the article here scales.

LLMs like manufacturing will multiply the coding throughput. Likely the mythical 10x swe will not be as valuable, but the work expectation from anyone in the field will just multiply.

tldr; Just like knowledge work, most trade stuff is probably mostly repeated (i.e. very trainable) task with a small amount of taste and discernment applied. The repeated will be trainable, the discernment may be trainable. I don't think the physical world is necessarily any safer than the knowledge world.

Only doing things is competitive.

https://serjaimelannister.github.io/wsj-article/

and I have also uploaded the github link on archive.org for persistence/archival purposes.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260322213950/https://serjaimel...

I hope that this might help some people and I have another friendly suggestion to please donate to archive.org :-)