There is always room at the top, and there may always be room for humans at the top of any career. Assume (this is a tough ask, I know) that you are NOT one of those people.
What is your fallback job? What skills do you have or would like to acquire that might keep you going? Bicycle mechanic? Teach music to children? Woodworking/carpentry? (Living off your stock options or investments does not count)
At that point, the economy cannot be sustained by armies of home carpenters and bicycle repair artisans. The money will all drain away to whichever gigacorp now literally owns all the AI workers. Society either fails and most of us die, or it evolves and (most) everyone lives.
Bleak take, yeah, but it's a pretty fucking bleak scenario.
That said, don't have one. By the time it catches up with me either society has come up with a game plan or we're all fucked.
Specifically, it seems to me that the amount of training data available is what matters & that's very unevenly distributed between jobs.
But painting can earn a really good amount of money. Once you know what you're doing, you can make $3-5k in ~2-5 days, but it's a hustle, and you may not always have clients.
It took 2 years of rejection and then 2 years of fine tuning, for about 10 hours per week on average. Then it took a lot of psychology courses + extracurricular psychology courses and relationships to understand that part well enough so that I can be in a loving relationship that will last.
I sometimes talk about this and speak with HN'ers about it from time to time whenever I have some free time and someone is curious about my advice. I think I've helped at least one person a bit on here. So that's good to know :)
But when AI comes, I'd probably focus on this as AI can't fully touch this business. I don't see a robot going out to a club to help train a person's social skills for instance. But who knows, maybe I'm wrong, maybe AI will surprise me.
It'd be a hell of a ride though, because I'm not sure if I could make this business sustainable (if anyone wants to help me with that, let me know! My email is in my profile).
Society deserves more love, romance and connectedness.
But more likely, still within tech: pivot to IT or security or some other Thing within tech. All of it's still fascinating to me and I could get down with anything, just happened to fall into code.
Building software is about solving problems, if software goes away I'll just solve problems in another domain.
Figured I'd post since seeing changes in responses over time can be interesting (if any of the typical responses have changed at least).
If my financial situation won’t be enough, I like to think that things would be so bad that not even keeping a job would have helped.
That said, the best "job" I ever had was volunteering at the Jewish Community Center while in college. It was forever ago, but I speak Russian and was able to help Ukrainian immigrants (right after the cold war ended) who couldn’t speak English: go to the doctor, grocery store, help translate documents, get a driver’s license, help their kids learn English more quickly, and generally just be someone they could call to ask questions at any time.
If I found myself suddenly jobless, I’d look to do something like that again. Or maybe even go abroad and get a job teaching English as a second language. I’ve personally found it to be an absolutely great way to break down cultural divides.
A few years ago, everyone kept talking about how they were inspired by tim ferriss and rich dad poor dad to quit their jobs and become entrepreneurs. Now people are talking about how they miss having jobs.
People were automating businesses on less then. If you have something with the capabilities of putting someone out of a job, then what about being a solopreneur? Without a large team to feed, you don't need the big markets; you can do niches like say, fitness for diabetics, and all kinds of crazy features you couldn't do 5 years ago like calculate glycemic load from a photo of a hot dog.
I would probably not start a business due to lacking initial capital, and not having a fallback option for that failure. And I don't have even clue what to do which is not immediately bankrupt.
But if I can't do that, maybe I'll be a pastry chef instead.
By 2015, it had already become a commodity where there were plenty who were “good enough”. If you compare the median wages in most non west coast cities, they haven’t kept up with inflation. I started moving up to more architectural and then customer facing strategic consulting that and sales will be the last thing that AI will take over and before AI, that could be outsourced or commoditized.
But if you are just a mid level ticket taker - regardless of title - you are screwed.
Yes, my ultimate plan B is to move to Costa Rica or Panama City with the savings I already have. My wife and I are already planning to stay there during the American winters starting next year.
If not... Some kind of teaching or tutoring.
Or some kind of related “experiences” business even though I’ve never done it before.
If that's the case, I'm probably doomed. At 36 that's scary.
In the near or distant future, we’ll step away from screens and return to eras of pure imagination—new needs will arise to fill the spaces that our work hours once occupied.
Creators will compete for attention on social media. The best time to launch a brand was ten years ago; the second-best time is now.
You must stake your claim before the explosion of AI and the surge of human leisure reshapes the landscape entirely.
What LLM will eventually do is hide more and more levers away inside of black boxes. They won't take away my job so much as make it impossible to perform.
For my fallback plan, I'm over 50 and w/o health ins. My first serious medical incident will likely end me. I expect career-ending LLMs to arrive sometime after that.
Why would they hire me over a teenager or someone slightly older? Because I’ve proven for 20+ years that I’ll show up and do the work. I’ve already figured out that I can “survive” on minimum wage. My house is paid for. My truck is paid for. I put “survive” in quotes in hopes that I don’t have cancer diagnosed or some kind of heart disease and need long term medical care.
Essentially, make tools for others in my position that are going to try selling pottery or soap until they can hopefully turn it into a full time thing.
I could see myself doing teaching also. Or just become a barista or cook, but I'm not sure I can handle standing for that long at a time anymore, the front of one of my thighs starts tingling and bothering me (when walking it doesn't really have a problem, it's mainly when I stand mostly in place, like when I'm cooking).
I wouldn't mind doing some sort of research but I've don't have any experience with that, outside of research projects in college a couple of decades ago.
I'd guess something else driving/piloting some kind of vehicle that isn't as saturated.
I really have no idea what it is like, but numerous cabin view videos are so mesmerizing to watch. There is something magnificent in the combination of machine's power and operator's ability to control it.
Sure some jobs may go.
But ultimately there will certainly be new jobs created by AI that in turn will make an abundant future for all of us.
But tha doesn’t mean I have hopes that the collective outrage and demand for care will bring something up that’s a good or good enough outcome. In this post truth world and authoritarianism reining all over and all around and increasing demand for the right wing politics and policies all over the world doesn’t leave much to be hoped.
In short - we are fucked, or rather we will be fucked. Will start with IT (services) jobs. The employment bloodbath I mean.
Always wanted to learn carpentry. Demand will be soaring one way or another.
been thinking about this a lot lately and realized the skills that made me good at building products, breaking down complex problems, explaining things clearly, helping people think through decisions… those transfer really well to education.
I actually did that early in my career (2013/14/15), wrote content on frontend tech like bootstrap for sites like sitepoint. published multiple books which helped me get my o1 visa :D
there's something appealing about work that's fundamentally about humans helping other humans grow. way harder for AI to replace the relationship part of learning
been mentoring junior devs and it's honestly the most fulfilling work i do. if tech gets fully automated, at least i'd be doing something that actually feels meaningful
quite how they expect capitalism or liberal democracy to survive this scenario I don't understand
there will be mass unrest long before it gets to this point
This generally speaking accounts for somewhere between 60-70% of all the jobs out there in the US right now, those jobs called white collar jobs.
For the sake of argument, let me ask you these questions, and upon you answering, I think the answers will become clear and the majority will understand that we are in a crisis where no one is responding because our politicians are asleep at the wheel, our communications have been compromised, and people individually having been paralyzed unable to respond in unity to even save themselves. The politicians are front-of-line blocking to extract value from their positions.
> Is there anywhere that can absorb 60-70% of the jobs in an economy? That is a much simpler to answer question, no there are not.
People have finite time, they must exchange that time for money to buy food. This under austrian and other economics is called capital formation, though its usually referred to the excess above and beyond what we use individually; AI forces time labor value to 0, destroying this. There are limits to exchange where exchange will not happen (Adam Smith). The neglect towards this limitation follows a standard Demand vs. Need misconception that most people have. Demand includes only those that have the resources to make a successful equitable exchange. Need includes all the people who do not. The two are not the same. What do you do with the people who need food but lack ability either physically, or mentally? Not all people are capable of work in all areas. If there is nothing to trade, without food they die. You also don't have children without sufficient resources, and the population dies from aging out too.
> Is there any way to discriminate and know upfront who is skilled and competent, and who is not?
There are costs that any business must exceed in profit, but even more importantly, there are costs that are borne by those seeking employment unpaid, that are finite. What happens when they can't differentiate between legitimate employers and dead drop shredders that lead you on (ghost positions/candidates). This is a communication channel that becomes jammed. Is there any way to exceed Shannon's Limit on noisy channels? No.
There is currently no way to differentiate a signal so you get the same action in communications networks as you get with RNA interference in cellular networks. Matches don't happen, and the effective pool shrinks with the best/brightest/competent moving to areas that are not disrupted (brain drain).
> Is there any way in a sequential pipeline structure (career development) when nothing goes in, for something to come out?
What happens to professions where there is no economic benefit to specializing into that skill set?
You have to invest first upfront with no return; who will choose to do that with a guaranteed loss baked into the choice. What happens to Chemists, Engineers, Doctors, Researchers... the professions needed to sustain our current society.
> When production is disrupted, what happens under systems based in money printing (deficit spending).
Generally speaking, you get inflation to the point of helicopter money. Simultaneously the firm unable to compete against an unconstrained money-printer will go out of business, sieving the money and resources into fewer hands, right up until a critical point where the less money in circulation forces deflation. When growth can no longer move forward, you get a huge crash. When that money printing continued for 3 generations, and you equally have a generation incapable of going back because the knowledge and experience based on the principles that underpinned everything was lost and not passed on.
With no path forward, no medium of exchange, no production is possible, and this is what is called in some circles, Socio-economic collapse.
Without modern supply chains, we can't produce the food to feed ourselves at current population levels. The process of extraction of resources destroyed the natural sustaining flows (Catton). Globally, the planet may only sustain 2Bn people in total following such a die off, assuming MAD doesn't make the environment uninhabitable.
The people who became wealthy will die off during that phase change, because they became wealthy through parasitism, and the inherent value of things largely disappear when you have no one whom you can trade with.
The only people who may have a shot of surviving are the ones who prepared ahead of time (potentially breaking laws that are intended to disarm and make helpless). Basically those who can both ruthlessly defend their resources, and produce everything they need independently from scratch.
I don't know a single person today that can do this in its entirety. Even for the basics, you rely on material dependencies processed with high-tech processes, procedures, and professions; that individuals largely cannot do themselves. The details matter, where many single points of failure (SPOFs) means there's a high likelihood you don't survive. This is the structural problem with centralization.
The same thing I do now, but different: support. Everything ~burns~ breaks
A plus is that this gives enough free time and energy during the late afternoon and evening hours to do interesting tech work.