[HN Gopher] When Will AI Take Your Job?
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When Will AI Take Your Job?
Author : JSeymourATL
Score : 61 points
Date : 2023-03-26 22:02 UTC (58 minutes ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com)
| onion2k wrote:
| I think my job is reasonably safe simply because "AI" is never
| going to be as effective at it as "me + AI". Someone has to be
| there to understand the problem in human terms in order to know
| what to tell the AI to do. I've recently started pushing myself
| to take a more Systems Thinking approach to solving problems, and
| to start using AI in my work, precisely because I see this as a
| change that's coming. It is inevitable. I might as well embrace
| it.
|
| Also, and maybe this is selfish, I suspect fewer people are going
| to see tech as a good career option in the very long term (10+
| years). The experience I have now puts me ahead right now, but if
| there are fewer devs entering the industry in a decade it'll keep
| me in work for a long time. I'm think (hope!) I'm going to be OK.
|
| If I was a junior right now, or a student, I would see AI as a
| _much_ greater threat.
| eutectic wrote:
| "never" is a long time.
| dudul wrote:
| > "AI" is never going to be as effective at it as "me + AI"
|
| Yeah, but which one will be cheaper?
| theLiminator wrote:
| "AI" is never going to be as effective at it as "me + AI".
|
| That's what people said about chess ai.
| lisasays wrote:
| Not comparable - that's a very limited slice of AI we're
| talking about.
| User23 wrote:
| Has Magnus or a similarly good player ever played against an
| AI using an AI to assist him? That sounds like it could be
| interesting.
| williadc wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlsen%E2%80%93Niemann_contr
| o...
|
| This is not exactly what you asked, but it shows that high-
| level players are using AI to play better chess.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Chess is not a team sport.
| RyEgswuCsn wrote:
| As AI grows stronger, the "me" part is going to matter less and
| less.
|
| A "graduate + AI" might be nearly as effective as "you + AI",
| while being significantly more... cost-efficient.
| brandall10 wrote:
| I think the better question to ask in the here and now is - is
| 1 developer + AI as effective as 2 developers without? What
| about 3, 5, etc?
| retinaros wrote:
| well if they pay you for you and suddenly you are only 50% of
| the equation guess what will be your shareholder next move
| Vespasian wrote:
| Warning: speculation incoming.
|
| Yeah that's me. I'm hoping that if I keep up to speed as much
| as possible I'm employable for the next 20-30 years until
| (early) retirement.
|
| I started transitioning away from programming before that (for
| unrelated reasons) but I'm starting to think that it was a good
| call. If I am to become the COBOL guy of the future I'd
| consider that a win.
|
| We'll see I guess.
| luxurytent wrote:
| My hope (as a mid 30s developer) is that I can effectively use
| AI to become a Me+ version of myself, and this helps me level
| up my career enough that I appropriately ride the AI wave, pick
| the right engineering positions/companies, and am able to
| effectively retire in ~5-10 years.
|
| I really do feel that I have like 5 years left of my currently
| high income before I am making what my plumber friend makes.
| I'm OK with that, as I'll be out of the early child rearing
| years, but also, phew, it's scary!
| darod wrote:
| If AI is solving everything and ultimately phasing workers out,
| then what exactly would you be educating your kids in? Human's
| limiting factor is the time that it takes them to learn something
| (18-27 years of education depending on the field). What job would
| be worth striving for? They'd be training for jobs that a future
| AI would be trying to phase out. This whole article just
| described how most of the the highest paid workers (doctors,
| lawyers, driving, logistics, film, music, radio, etc etc) would
| be automated. I don't know what you'd need a person for at that
| point. Feels like a race to the bottom.
| cleandreams wrote:
| It's not just issues of tech and economics but perhaps more
| importantly, of power. If workers have political representation
| (power) than these productivity increases can feed into wage
| increases and hour reductions. A big if. In USA, workers are
| pretty powerless. That means it is most likely to result in
| massive waves of unemployment and political instability.
|
| When I first moved to the city in which I live there were NO
| homeless. That was in 1980. Since then the working class economy
| here crashed and the professionals took over. Now we step over
| bodies in the streets.
|
| I think it is likely that the AI wave will be this, but worse.
|
| BTW my last job was at an AI company as a high level tech
| contributor.
| kortilla wrote:
| >When I first moved to the city in which I live there were NO
| homeless. That was in 1980.
|
| The same people were still unemployed and on the fringe of
| society. They just used to be rounded up and put in mental
| institutions.
|
| The labor statistics are pretty clear that the 80s weren't a
| better time for employment.
|
| Visible homelessness you are referring to is generally a drug
| policy issue more than anything.
| colordrops wrote:
| There has to be a tipping point when enough jobs are done by
| machines that there are not enough wage earners to buy products
| and services created by these machines. At that point a choice
| must be made, to either take the machines and lock them behind
| secure walls to only be used by the privileged and leave
| everyone else to squalor, or to fundamentally change the
| structure of society where work and money are no longer core
| elements. I've got my bets on which one will occur.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Which one do you think will occur?
| colordrops wrote:
| I think the movie Elysium makes a decent prediction for a
| potential near term future.
| mc32 wrote:
| It looks like AI is more likely to render knowledge workers
| less valuable rather than making low skill workers less
| valuable.
|
| Now if you get AI + Robots (with dense energy) to work
| together, yeah we're all in trouble.
| siftrics wrote:
| I agree.
|
| I should be forced to pay to keep all the arithmetic workers
| employed, even though we now have calculators that make them
| obsolete.
|
| Why should arbitrary people be kept afloat in exchange for
| doing nothing?
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Okay, so, the year is 2036 and your second child has just
| celebrated her first birthday. The economy is humming,
| production of all goods and commodities are way up.
| Unfortunately, you and your spouse are both unemployed at the
| moment, because for any skill that you have to offer the
| labor market, a machine is already available that does the
| job better, faster, and more cheaply. Quicker fingers,
| stronger arms, faster legs, and now a mind.
|
| Your kid is hungry and your savings account is running low.
| What do you do?
| timeon wrote:
| > The main winners of these trends will be all of us consumers,
| with access to much better content. Also, the best creators, who
| will use these tools to generate lots of great content and rake
| in its benefits.
|
| Maybe yes. But I wonder. Take that example with disappearing
| local football leagues: what is impact for local communities?
| When everything is "centralized" to very best providers... Is
| best always best?
| kkielhofner wrote:
| Are you talking American Football or the "actually using your
| feet" one (Soccer to us)?
|
| Youth (American) Football is dying because the data on CTE and
| other debilitating injuries is clear and parents are less
| enthusiastic/willing to allow their kids to damage their
| brains.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Tanks may have made cavalry obsolete (was is tanks? I don't
| know), but they didn't make generals obsolete. When was there
| ever a military engagement that was described in terms of
| commanders facing off? It's been the story since the beginning of
| war.
|
| Likewise there are decision makers in civilian life. They decide
| all sorts of things, sometimes relying on people to implement
| their decisions, sometimes machines. Sometimes they use a machine
| to replace a lower level decision maker. But there's always a
| boss.
|
| This is what will determine whether your job is automated away.
| dwighttk wrote:
| In that first chart there is not a single test listed that people
| start at a job based on their performance on the test.
| lolinder wrote:
| I don't worry about AI automated away my job not because I don't
| think it's possible (though I do think it's much _much_ further
| out than the hype would suggest), but because an AI automating
| away software creation is the economic equivalent of nuclear war:
| it would irrevocably alter everything about the way the world is
| run and is therefore impossible to adequately prepare for on an
| individual basis.
|
| Most of us in software are automating other people's jobs: we
| learn and understand requirements and build things that make
| other people more productive or erase their jobs entirely. The
| rate of automation is right now limited in large part by the
| availability and cost of software engineers. If AGI can reduce
| that cost to ~0, then a _massive_ percentage of the economy would
| be wiped out in a matter of months. What is any individual
| software developer supposed to do to prepare for that scenario?
| kajumix wrote:
| If AI automates software creation, which automates everybody
| else's job, why does it follow that a "massive percentage of
| the economy would be wiped out?" What is so undesirable about
| productivity going up by a factor of a 100 or a 1000 and
| everyone living like an aristocrat, because machines do all the
| work? Why is full employment such an obsession?
| lolinder wrote:
| I didn't say it would be undesirable! Just that it would
| completely alter the world in ways that we _cannot_ prepare
| for on an individual basis.
|
| Ideally, we move to UBI and, as you say, everyone lives like
| an aristocrat. But we don't get there by trying to hedge
| against AI taking over our individual jobs.
| mostlysimilar wrote:
| Because the benefits of these tools are not distributed
| equally. The ultra wealthy will become even more wealthy and
| the unwashed masses will starve.
|
| Of course the ideal outcome is the Star Trek post-scarcity
| utopia. But humans are not currently incentivized in a way
| that I can see leading to that outcome in our lifetimes.
| docheinestages wrote:
| What exactly should people do if they're not employed?
| [deleted]
| thedonkeycometh wrote:
| [dead]
| ETH_start wrote:
| This got me thinking: as more of what can be produced with
| existing technology, is made trivial-to-produce through enhanced
| automation (e.g. AI), one area that will still require labor, and
| that people will still be willing to expend resources on to
| procure, is the creation of new technology.
|
| It would be in our interest to remove legal impediments to
| raising capital for new ventures, so that more of the labor freed
| up by automation of existing industries can be allocated to the
| creation of new industries.
|
| Such a world would see more kickstarters, equity crowdsales,
| crypto token sales and DAOs for collaborative creation, and more
| people employed in the ventures these capital raising projects
| fund.
| analog31 wrote:
| Oddly enough half of my job is learning to get answers (from the
| physical world), the other half finding out of those answers are
| true. So far no human has come close to threatening my job if
| they don't actually care about those things. So it will be when
| AI learns to care about the truth.
| impulser_ wrote:
| It's really feeling like AI is the new crypto. Majority of the
| people hyping up AI are directly benefited from the raise in AI.
| The same way the people that were hyping up crypto either ran
| blockchain, dapp, or were VC invested into it.
|
| I don't know the writer of this blog post, but I'm willing to bet
| he has posts about how crypto will replace the financial system.
| lolinder wrote:
| You'd win that bet:
| https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/about
|
| > I believe Bitcoin will replace gold, cryptocurrencies will
| replace fiat currencies, and smart contracts will upend how we
| deal with each other.
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aunchartedterritories....
| 8note wrote:
| There's an anti-productivity link round the front page that
| answers this well - the amount of useless work to be done is
| infinite, and growing productivity on useless work only lets you
| do more useless work.
|
| The more useless work ai is able to do, the more useless work
| will be asked of it. The ai doesn't have opinions about what it
| should be doing, so without people to push it into doing the
| right thing, it's going to be answering a lot of emails
| Temporary_31337 wrote:
| This, just like many other takes, confirms that there will be a
| short term boom in applying AI to everything. If you are in your
| 30s or 40s and surf this wave correctly, this may very well be
| the last job you will ever do. So my plan is to learn how to plug
| GPT to excel, databases etc and provide AI for the smaller
| companies that can't integrate AI like Salesforce and big
| companies like Azure Professional Services will not find them
| profitable enough to deal with.
| kkielhofner wrote:
| This is a good strategy.
|
| In the early days of widespread internet connectivity (dial-up)
| it generally went two ways:
|
| 1) You lived in a big city and AOL/Compuserve/Prodigy/etc was a
| local call. Practically everyone had it.
|
| 2) You lived "somewhere else" and some random guy you could pay
| had a T1 and a bunch of modems in a garage (this was me).
|
| Eventually it became worth it and technology advanced enough
| (with demand) for cable cos to deploy cable modems. At first
| only in dense metro areas, then slowly out to more rural areas.
|
| Point is - there's a TON of opportunity for "guy with a T1 and
| modems in a garage" in this space. There is a huge market of
| ignored and underserved
| businesses/customers/applications/integrations/etc that (like
| AOL/Cable Cos) the big AI guys don't care about (yet).
| robopsychology wrote:
| What do you mean by last job? As in making money off of this
| wave by lucrative contract gigs or an acquisition?
| nonbirithm wrote:
| Even if all the jobs creating CRUD apps are automated away,
| there will probably still be an interest in automating them
| even faster. LLMs are currently the state of the art
| technique for doing so, hence there will be a continual need
| for more AI engineers/researchers.
|
| And if something that performs better than current LLMs comes
| around, all those engineers will shift over to whatever field
| develops them.
| iamflimflam1 wrote:
| As in there won't be any more jobs for you to do...
| rnk wrote:
| I'd see it as a last job. In terms of you can do it for 20
| years and then retire. Not as jobs won't exist anymore.
| aarong11 wrote:
| Right now seems like the right time to be doing this for sure.
| There are also a lot of potential applications for GPT to be
| used to solve problems that were previously too expensive or
| infeasible to be done by humans at scale. It definitely doesn't
| hurt for you to hedge your bets and try to learn how the tech
| works at the bare minimum.
| rcpt wrote:
| Seems like landlord continues to be the only secure career path.
| colordrops wrote:
| Until an AI corners the real estate market.
| blhack wrote:
| Squarespace was supposed to take away the jobs of people who make
| websites, but it didn't. The same people who you used to hire to
| make a website for you are still doing that, but now they just
| use squarespace for it.
|
| I saw a recent quote for a _very_ basic, static website that was
| greater than $10k. This would be about a day of work to put
| together in squarespace.
|
| AI is not going to take away jobs, it's just going to make the
| people already doing them more efficient.
| prawn wrote:
| A few points on this from someone who's been building websites
| for 25 years (I started around when images were added to HTML)
| -
|
| The web designers don't hear from many of these previous
| prospects who now go straight to Squarespace.
|
| When people come to me for a Shopify site, it's usually because
| they've done all but the hardest 10%. Then they want to pay me
| a tiny amount to do the most unpredictable and difficult 10%.
| Usually something custom/difficult within the parts of the
| platform that are locked down.
|
| I've seen budgets from local brand-name companies go from $20k
| for a build to $2k.
|
| Often, the people charging $10k for a Squarespace site are
| justifying the majority of that with related services
| (copywriting, photography, content, marketing, etc). Many
| surviving web companies needed to become agencies. Shopify has
| some automated marketing options now. Copywriting is
| increasingly done with ChatGPT/similar.
|
| Don't get me wrong - this is all very liberating for the client
| side and a boon for platforms like Squarespace and Shopify, but
| don't underestimate the upheaval for web designers.
| Joeboy wrote:
| > AI is not going to take away jobs, it's just going to make
| the people already doing them more efficient
|
| In the same sort of way that wordprocessing just made typists
| more efficient.
| ModernMech wrote:
| Or if you want to make a more direct comparison, it's like
| high level languages and compilers making punch card writers
| more efficient.
| tyingq wrote:
| It's hard to predict. Consider bank tellers. ATMs initially
| allowed banks to run more local branches, resulting in more
| jobs. But now that ATMs, especially the ones inside, are VERY
| full function, the job numbers are reducing fast.
|
| https://www.vox.com/2017/5/8/15584268/eric-schmidt-alphabet-...
| lisasays wrote:
| _The job numbers are reducing fast._
|
| Are they? That piece is from 2017, and I still see bank
| tellers everywhere.
|
| It seems the increased efficiency of ATMs caused _some_
| reduction in the count of teller jobs - but their number has
| again stabilized.
|
| ATMs meanwhile seem pretty much maxed out with their current
| feature set.
| 13of40 wrote:
| Even that one's a little bit meta, since fewer people are
| using cash now.
| chrisan wrote:
| I don't think its because ATMs are so good/functional as much
| as it is people just don't use cash and deposite checks like
| they once did.
|
| > "because of industry consolidation and technological
| change,"
| nemo44x wrote:
| Right. But now Squarespace can integrate a prompt that has a
| conversation with you and build a site and continues to iterate
| on it until you're happy. This adds very little cost to
| Squarespace. Maybe it gets most people to 80%. The last 20%
| will be a service provided by a human.
| flax wrote:
| Then the last 20% was the only interesting part in the first
| place.
| colordrops wrote:
| Until gpt-5 shaves away 17% more, then gpt-6 erases that
| final 3%.
| spookybones wrote:
| Where do you see quotes like this?
| ehnto wrote:
| This is an interesting example, because they probably don't use
| squarespace for it as they are likely more effective with other
| types of tooling. Whilst squarespace is a great general purpose
| tool for people who don't know specialized tools, a specialist
| will be more effective with different tools.
|
| That's where I see the difference in AI as well. A specialist
| is probably faster using their own tooling rather than muddling
| through an AI interaction. But the AI gives non specialists the
| ability to muddle through tasks they can't do on their own, or
| don't have specialized knowledge for.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| What I find interesting is what professions are concerned about
| AI. For the most part they appear to be better paying white
| collar need-a-college-degree type of jobs. Tech, copywriters,
| marketing, designers, lawyers, accountants, etc. All feeling the
| heat.
|
| The person pumping gas? Cutting hair? Janitors? Nurses? They, for
| now, seem to be immune.
|
| As a side note, anecdotally, productive gains have a ceiling.
| Sure Copilot and ChatGPT free me up to focus on the heavy
| lifting. But my brain can't run that relentlessly all day. It
| seems to need to catch its breath.
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