Ask HN: What career would you switch into if AI ate your profession? If by some miracle/disaster AI automated away a non-trivial percent of your profession over the next decade or so, what career would you switch into to take you through retirement? |
Ask HN: What career would you switch into if AI ate your profession? If by some miracle/disaster AI automated away a non-trivial percent of your profession over the next decade or so, what career would you switch into to take you through retirement? |
I have to assume we won't be letting them fly blind
Game development -- AI will eventually be guidable to write code, but it likely won't have "imagination" in the next decade (and I am not worried about my finances after that)
Beer making -- Similarly, AI likely won't understand taste for quite some time
Woodworking -- When everything is mass produced by automation, I suspect people will want unique, custom, hand-made things more.
Edit: Fix format, clarify statement on next decade :-)
Funnily enough I’ve used AI in my woodworking to generate novel coffee table designs, write product descriptions for Etsy listings, and generate a logo.
Might be wishful thinking, presumably you can give it taste reviews from people along with chemical makeup and can predict chemical mixtures that will rank highly on taste.
No need for AI. T-test (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student%27s_t-test) was invented more than a century ago to improve beer quality.
If you can have the idea it can generate the output. You can probably prompt it to have ideas too.
I find GPT models to perform very well on this task. ChatGPT is the best right now but even small models like GPT J 6B are good.
It might be able to make realistic text, even storylines, but I don't think ML/AI will be able to make GOOD games without significant guidance, especially things that 'break the mold' (Portal, Black & White, the first "Sim" game, the first RTS game)
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/685736-modern-elevators-are...
We have a fancy new tool. Let's play!
Lotsa folks attend yoga classes for the personal connection. Not just the spirituality or fitness. That personal connection can’t be replicated by AI so I think it’s a good choice if AI starts coming for my programming job.
Anyway I don't have any other economically valuable skills and I'm not willing to go back to cooking. I'd try to join a monastery if any would have me. If not I'll just be homeless again until the people who still have jobs finally work up the courage to execute those without.
Agreed, we were promised self-driving cars and Tesla bots to do our house hores, instead what is really waiting is the dire prospect of being un or underemplyed as so many have been in other developed economies after sustained financial crisis: most of the World is mirroring what Japan has become after the bubble economy.
> Anyway I don't have any other economically valuable skills and I'm not willing to go back to cooking. I'd try to join a monastery if any would have me. If not I'll just be homeless again until the people who still have jobs finally work up the courage to execute those without.
Don't go back to cooking if you value your sanity and respect(ed) your craft, COVID destroyed any level of competence and soaring food costs coupled with untrained and unmotivated staff have choked the life of many of my chef friends: I went on a few stages to see for myself when I was home for the holidays in the US as the tech layoffs were in starting gather steam ahead of Xmas and new years in '22, and while I got work on the line on the spot I refused them for the same reasons: everything is being McDonal'ized in order to compete for market share where corps run things due to thier access to larger budgets, loans and outside investment that allow them to amoratize costs (and even run at a loss with franchise models) so cuisine is not even a post-thought.
This has made me want to see this entire Industry collapse.
Personally, I'm a Machine Learning student in university so I guess I'll be training the algos to take your jobs if this actually happens?
That plan got cancelled I think.
Honestly the work is very similar. Much of what I do these days is conveying ideas to fuzzy intelligences, getting their feedback and suggestions, iterating, and making sure the final product is coherent, does what it says, and fits the longer term vision.
Turns out you can get a lot more done by keeping 5 people on track than you can by banging code on a keyboard.
Not that it really matter on the long run in the context of that question
When the internet empowered more people to do the lawyers’ grunt work, compensation became bimodal. There is more value in being on the high end, but less on doing the grunt work.
I think that’s gonna happen with other professions. Including ours (engineering). If you’re doing grunt work – be afraid. If you’re doing high level work – rejoice, it’s about to get easier.
You see this same effect in design for example. An art/design director’s job is about to get easier. The designer making the 5000th billboard for $Brand based on a style guide … could be tough.
increased throughput * (training on insecure code - competent human review)
AlphaFold already has you beat.
Much more likely than automation taking over a profession is that automation changes the nature of a profession. For example with truck driving while there's much more to it than driving the truck, the ability to actually drive the truck has always been critical and thus things like the possession of a valid CDL limit the number of people who can enter the profession and keep wages pretty high. You automate trucks and you're still going to need lots of people to do logistics, but those people may not need a CDL and thus wages might be more similar to delivery van drivers. Other professions might see a less crisp change, for example I would expect as AI becomes better at technical things like diagnostics, bedside manner will become ever more important a metric for medical professionals and doctors who don't like that aspect of the profession will become steadily more dissatisfied.
Thus the best way to automation-proof your job isn't to do professions that are difficult to automate, but rather where automation would compliment your skills and let you do more of the parts you find fulfilling. For example I foresee AI revolutionizing many creative professions in the not too distant future like art and music by offering tools that eliminate much of the technical skill necessary to turn an idea into reality, allowing for artists to focus more on coming up with cool ideas. Similarly things like product development and marketing are going to be much more fun and be much more accessible, though they may not pay as well.
Watching them work though, I think I would want to start doing proper medicine. I’m extremely jealous of medical professions - I wish I could meaningfully contribute.
Also, installers seem to make little money, whereas sales staff make shitloads. So there's probably something to that if you really thought about it.
Source; We're having solar installed. Without federal and state incentives/tax breaks, the break-even point on the max system our rural cooperative will let us put up is around 30 years, with incentives, it's around 5.
Artisanal Gears? ;-)
I'd like to make a small machine that turns out gear hobs. I'd also like to figure out how to skive bevel gears, which is impossible at present, because the pitch of the tooth varies across its face.
In a field that is supposedly easy to automate (accounting) but senior enough that I'm essentially just doing crisis management on novel situations and project management.
This is what happened to farming, the textile industry, manufacturing etc.
It’s not that anyone thinks that an AI would be able to develop a game or an app from scratch but how many people it would displace by automating things from code generation to UI design and art assets creation.
We still have farmers, however their farms tend to be much larger and there are far fewer farmhands than there were 50 years ago let alone 100 or 150 before the Industrial Revolution kicked into high gear.
Ironically the productivity of AI/ML is quite likely going to open the door for many people the tech part of the tech community was quite often dismissive off - as in “I’m a big picture type of person and I can instinctively know how good looks like but I lack the knowledge to make my dream a reality”.
Whilst plenty of people that think they are like that often fall quite far from that even those who don’t like the Jobs of the world tend to be quite divisive individuals that too many people tend to dismiss as charlatans that failed upwards.
Overall I don’t think that an apocalypse is coming down at least not yet, however I don’t actually mind the fact that there might be more opportunity for people who really want to focus on the problem rather than people who just seem to know what the solution is or should be and find a problem that fits it.
And if AI can get to a spot where it can actually help people iterate solutions in a rapid and cheap manner it can really change how a lot of industries operate.
Also ironically a lot of other far less glorious IT professions are probably safe, old school sysadmins and infrastructure folks seem to be able to demand far higher wages than ever before which is what happens when 9 out of 10 new people in “IT” these days know how to package a hello world app that has 4GB of Node.JS dependencies and write the helm charts and TF deployment code which probably has more lines than the original Windows NT kernel but can’t calculate a subnet mask or know what MAC address is…
A lot of excellent memory are associated with bakery. Late at night / super early. Bringing croissant to a new girl that spend the night. Tea with grandma…. You name it.
And joke aside, in France a village goes to another category when the last boulangerie close.
Their is bread in the US, you find good bakery. But the posh and exclusive aspect of it ruins it for me. I’m not driving 15min to buy a 4$ baguettes.
And yes. It’s a taxing job. You are out of synch with normal people. Right now baker are suffering greatly from increased energy prices. I hope we put them on full life support of cash if needed. That’s worth it.
1. Micro brew or craft brewing of some kind, Or at the very least an obsession with beer
2. Swing dancing
3. Frisbee golf
4. Cooking
As an engineer myself my hobbies don't intersect unfortunately:
1. Juggling and card manipulation
2. Sparta running training
3. Piano composition
4. Aviation
Even if AI wrote most of the code, who check for completeness and is on prod support ?
I’m not 100% convinced that legal grunt work translate to software grunt work ( I don’t know about real engineering)
It may, but 20 years in that industry make me think that a legal PDF compiling jurisprudence is easier to “maintain” than any sizeable system.
That being said : it the AI output perfect, flawless and 100% up services, you don’t need human to know how the sausage is made. ( until it broke )
Question for you : what is engineering grunt work ? I’m not sure where I stand at this point. Working in giant structure make you feel like a cog, but I’m far removed from my earlier year problematic.