AI is actually coming for your job. It came for mine.
AI is actually coming for your job. It came for mine.
If you are white collar then it's going to "disrupt" your field.
I work in tech. I got laid off last year. I wasn't at Alphabet or Amazon or anything. Much smaller company. But AI "optimization" has ravaged the tech industry and not just programmers. Admins, database specialists, network specialists, developers, you name it. Our job market is absolutely fucked.
In my county, a major metro area in the US (like, top 10) craigslist used to be the place to get real job postings. If it wasn't a recruiter then your odds of getting a callback from a job posting there is pretty high. There are plenty of postings for other fields like mechanics and tradesmen and so on. For the few tech categories: nothing in the last month. Zero postings. Not even recruiter ads. Literally nothing. It's a wasteland.
I've been told to "go back to school." I'll be 41 soon. I'm still paying off my computer science degree. It's worthless. What else should I go for? Accounting? HR? These are going to be taken by AI, too. Will it be a mistake? Sure. They don't care. They'll do it anyways.
When I got my degree my wife and I were homeless. We just got back out of the hole in the last 10 years. I was finally building savings. It'll be gone in 60 days. She was laid off on Friday. Her industry is in property finance. Another gutted industry. She has to change industries, too.
What is to be done?
I'm still trying to understand how actually replacing people with AI is supposed to work, because the quality of the outputs is still essentially trash. I do understand that in the short term capital prefers to swing its dick around to prove a point, and maybe that's all there is to it. However, I have a sneaking suspicion that AI hype is being used to cover for a very real economic slowdown that is actually driving the lack of job prospects and layoffs. Maybe capital is just hoping that AIs can do a good enough job to keep them floating until the recession is over.
As a teacher, I'm keenly aware of the fact that my future is not guaranteed at all. Particularly because I'm a language teacher, which is a field that, at least in my country, is mostly driven by marketing. I'm sure that someone will figure out a way to make an AI English tutor sound like a great, cost-effective idea, and then I'm screwed. I give it about four or five years.
I know that because I used to do plenty of side gigs as a translator as well, and these have simply dried up in the past year and a half or so. Like, literally zero jobs since the dawn of ChatGPT and the like.
I'm glad I used most of that side hustle money to buy myself a whole workshop's worth of woodworking tools, and my way out will be to make high-end furniture. I still need a couple years to really get good at it, but I reckon it'll be longer until an AI chatbot can run a piece of wood through a jointer.
They're replaceing backbone net and database people with AI? Lol good luck when shit breals and there's no one to call.
Look for operations jobs. A CS background is invaluable because IT either is less existant or gets du bed down to push broken updates. Human-Device Interface stuff. Utilities. They arent going to AI risk 10s of thousands of lives on AI pushing physical and chemical stuff that effects an entire community. You can use that degree for far more than what you were doing. They will train you too. Might have to work some odd hours but recession proof AI resistant jobsare out there and operations communities are aging out and need replacements.
You could always go the "consultant" route too and charge exeutives their first born for a power point presentation where you create a new acronym every couple years and tell them to tie their shoes.
If it were possible to do so, the company would sell what all businesses of its kind dream about selling, creating that which all our efforts were tacitly supposed to achieve: the ultimate product – Nothing. And for this product they would command the ultimate price – Everything. This market strategy would then go on until one day, among the world-wide ruins of derelict factories and warehouses and office buildings, there stood only a single, shining, windowless structure with no entrance and no exit. Inside would be – will be – only a dense network of computers calculating profits.
I'm hedging my bets on the natural sciences being safe, at least until the current AI bubble pops. Field work is too hostile, dynamic, and chaotic for a chatbot to hallucinate. Drones probably need another 20 years to do the most menial task I do with the same attention to detail and ability to navigate complex environments like that, while the identification apps I use barely get the genus right. With your beepboop magic you'd have a special skillset in that realm. At no point in my plant science education have I ever had to take a single programming-adjacent class but all of the research involves models and computerised systems. Someone makes a lot more money than I do designing those.
I realized that all white collar jobs are in jeopardy when I worked on a PC refresh. All the cool scripting and imaging stuff that made me feel like a super duper smarty pants are things that can be easily replaced by AI or otherwise automated while all the low-brow grunt work like slapping a fucking asset tag sticker on an appropriate spot or removing the HDs of old PC for shredding is not so easily replaceable.
I strongly urge everyone with CS or coding background to begin studying and practicing IT tech support skills as a backup in case dev jobs don't pan out and you want to pick a job that's at least tangentially related to programming. The go-to cert for entry level IT tech support are CompTIA certs, namely A+, Network+, and Security+. You don't have to actually get the certs (A+ alone is $250+), but your knowledge and skill should be at a point where if you do decide to find an IT tech support job, you can confidently pay the cert tax and walk out with an A+ cert without wasting time and money on retests. And trust me, your tech knowledge and skill are nowhere near as good as you think they are, and being a power userTM PC g*mer is completely inadequate for professional work.
At the end of the day, IT tech support is white collar work with blue collar characteristics, and the more your particular IT tech support field has those blue collar characteristics, the less it will be affected by AI. Printer guys won't have to worry about AI anytime soon (but they have to service those infernal machines known as printers). People who specialize on supporting CCTV equipment won't have to worry about AI either (but they'll have to service security cameras completely caked with bird shit).
I don't say this to undermine your point at all, but in my city at least craigslist used to be huge and is now not the go-to place for literally anything. for used junk for sale its all on facebook marketplace, apartments are a mix of housing specific sites and fb, cars are facebook and some craigslist still, job listings on there for anything besides odd jobs has been kind of a joke as long as I can remember. The big job listing sites are trash but everyone I know mostly either gets jobs through them (putting out a lot of applications) or through personal connections.
Which isnt to say the job market isnt fucked, I know a fresh grad struggling to find anything rn, but idk if CL should be your bellwether in 2024. I like it but other sites have kinda eaten its lunch it seems.
My bubble is relatively small but so far I've seen zero AI related job losses. Maybe its regional to some extent? Even here, I expect it will hit in the next year or two if the AI hype doesn't die down
crazy that this technology could be used to free humanity from wage slavery, but naturally, instead we've been put in a zero sum contest with the tech to drive down the cost of labor.
I've hated every job I've ever had and idk what I'll do when you just go to a McDonald's-style kiosk to sell your car, probably go back to making sandwiches and wishing I was dead the entire time
I’m in a similar boat. I was laid off last year from my white collar job and my responsibilities were doled out between several people using ChatGPT. It took me six months to find a new job, and it pays leas than what I made five years ago for the same title. I believe my layoff would have happened regardless of LLM use, but now companies have another reason to not hire someone with my skill set (translation and writing) because the robots can do it “well enough” (total dogshit)
Already at my new job they’re talking about “integrating AI” into my work and it just feels like the noose is tightening again
Massive sympathies comrade, that really honestly sucks. Not doubting you, but are you able to offer any more details?
As someone who works for a sizeable, multinational tech company, I've thus far witnessed absolutely zero disruption from AI to any teams anywhere in our company or my physical locality. There have been a couple attempts to replace services with AI, but they've been so unreliable that they've achieved nothing. Thus far its only been a tool akin to Google, requiring knowledgeable humans to use it, that occasionally helps code things up or parse data.
Fuck, if AI can take over my Desktop Support job where I have to haul shit around and physically replace (sometimes, heavy) equipment, then fuck it, AI can have it.
I can do some of what I do remotely but my boss and department specifically wants asses in seats. Our phone support group might be cooked though.
At 46, I'm too old for Desktop Support anyway. Truck driving sucks but maybe they need asses in seats too.
Some trades will be automated away as well. I could see stuff like finish carpentry, and cabinetry going the way of the dodo. Panels/doors/trim will be cut by CNC, then robots will assemble. At some point i could see AI created cabinets, passed to an automated CNC, assembled and painted by robots, then given to a crew of two dudes who do nothing but installs. Paint and basic, non complex sheetrocking/taping/floating could be done by robots powered by AI. Eventually, some aspects of framing, and roofing, and maybe even foundation work. Not fully robot/AI but augmented enough that you no longer need a crew of 6 or 8 to rock/tape/paint a newly constructed home; instead a crew of two, or maybe three humans, to do the complex angles and stuff a robot cannot manipulate and refill the drywall banjo or reload collated screws when the robot gets jammed. Architectural drawings will be done by AI. Blueprints will be done by AI. I could see AI becoming the architect eventually.
service plumbing or new construction plumbing is probably far off if ever. Electric service work, and new construction too. Tile/flooring, HVAC, and a couple others that are similar enough that they aren’t worth repeating.
AI is coming for all of us, more or less. Not just tech jobs.
As someone looking to go back to community college to pursue a new degree (did general studies during covid) so I can escape retail hell, this is pretty scary. I've considered some kind of tech major (like CIS), mainly because I doubt I have the ability or energy to pursue engineering at this point, and non-STEM degrees are considered memes. But it seems pretty dire right now. And it seems like everything is fucked. Maybe the bubble will pop eventually but it does feel like we've crossed an event horizon.
I hope things work out for you and your wife, comrade.
Sorry to hear that
So far in my tech bubble I haven't seen lay-offs explicitly due to AI, but there's been increasing usage of it to produce more content. So it's reducing the demand for contract writers and producers.
Tech does seem cooked at the moment, but I assume that's mostly due to no more free money.
I really wish Graeber was still here, I need the Bullshit Jobs vs AI synthesis.
For now, eventually they'll do as they did in retail, slowly revert back when they realize AI just can't adapt to all the scenarios they require it to, most importantly at the pricepoint they need (see the OG industrial revolution and machines, think there was a piece in vol 2 of capital) and lacks comprehension, it can pattern recognize all day but struggles with context. We lack the infrastructure for full much less partial automatization, computers require certain temps, humidity, electricity, etc, humans under capital do not, we're considered free to replace since very few places do any sort of training (expect you to come in fully trained for whatever the position is) vs what computers, networks and powerplants need to get going along with you must train AI for anything meaningful, and train it a lot.
Sure, we're at the point anyone can run LLMs on any standard gaming rigs from 10 years ago, but they're not that great, and it still requires all that infrastructure modern capital balks at upgrading or replacing, also a properly tuned network will btfo of any lone rig LLM with maybe a few exceptions, again thanks to capital (ex homebrew chatbot on a 4790k beats chatgpt3.5, but only because they want you to pay for all their outages thanks to our grid and internet being overcooked sad spaghetti).
For now? Survive, maybe try getting a more physical CS job, the pay isn't going to be great though, but software is getting the race to the floor treatment for some time. Or get into something being a system tenderer where AI is sort of messy legally, maybe medical, but I expect that to have some sort of really nasty crunch soon.
Is drug rehab white collar? Im a clinician in a residential treatment program
I'm gonna go back to school to learn how to be AI. I might get a job that way. As a software developer with a background in IT, that has been unemployed for 11 months, I get it.