No Stupid Questions

Job security became a myth long before AI.

Some jobs will be very difficult to replace with AI. People who can do so will try to flock to those. Personally, I think the only peaceful way forward will require UBI. Without that, sharpen the guillotines.

'Job security' has been a myth for more than half a century. A career for mostnpeople is nothing more than a job that you're enmeshed in, and can't easily leave if you want to.

You write as if you had any job security in the pre-AI era...

Welcome back to blue collar, boys. Just keep it union so no one gets fucked on pay.

Despite all the AI and robotics, semi trucks will probably stay manned at least another 20 years, manual construction of houses and building will still be around for another 25 years, welders (non mass production) like building and piping will be around for quite some time, auto mechanics, and Healthcare workers, hvac techs, electricians, plumbers, construction, mailman, airline pilots (at least passenger airline), gun for hire, firefighter, police, emt/paramedic, and MORE.

There's a lot of jobs that aren't even close to being phased out. It's just that most of them involve you actually not sitting on your butt all day.

What is life but a lottery?

A lot of the drive towards AI is people thinking to save a quick buck, but longer term that places them in a very unsteady position themselves.

All products end up being for "shareholder value", and AI will be no different. Someone will find an enshittification vector and run with it.

Suddenly, that "quick buck" becomes a monthly subscription that costs more than the people fired. Company data is harvested and sold, customers are advertised out, the shittiness of the system becomes a company problem.

So we're either going to see a stark change away from the current shareholder value model (about as likely as world peace), or we're going to see a lot of CEO seppuku. Win win really.

A.I. is likely going to change the world as much as the printing press (at the very least, and possibly as much as the industrial revolution). I wouldn't call it a nothing fad. It is definitely shaking up my career (video production) already. And at least from my point of view, becoming a creative generalist is the best way to adapt. Work is going to become more about knowing a little to moderate amount about a whole lot of things, so that you can effectively orchestrate a hierarchy of AI agents. Deep specialization increasingly carries too much risk, and the A.I. are much better at some aspects of it than we typically are.

I think UBI will become a lot more plausible in the future.

That said, as a macro approach to the problem of job security and AI taking jobs, I see serious potential in worker co-ops which own the equipment and processes. As in the past, the problem isn't that technology is making something more efficient. The problem is a small subset of people benefiting from the technology while others struggle. If we own the business and democratically control decision making then we all can benefit. (And going beyond protecting our jobs we create more long term security and power)

The problem of course is how we get there from here. For myself, my current plan is to grind enough until I'm in a position to start a co-op (or join an existing one) and then focus on growth, bringing more people onboard, and expanding the benefits that the co-op can bring its members.

I value small co-ops like local grocery stores, that said to really move the dial in creating the world we want to see, I think we need to get big, and to be competitive in terms of product as well as pay compared to non-democratic major players. One co-op I'm excited about is Obran, which is a conglomerate that converts private owned businesses to co-ops. I'm also excited about platform co-ops like the drivers cooperative and Artisans cooperative.

Saying AI is a nothing fad makes you sound like a boomer in the late 90's and early 00's talking about the internet. It is definitely not a fad. It will affect 80% of all jobs on the planet over the next 10 years.

There are certain careers that can't be replaced by AI - anything that requires working with your hands will not be replaced by AI unless robots suddenly get invented. But if robots exist, then there's likely bigger things to worry about than your job.

I would look for non-routine jobs that require a lot of handiwork. Non-routine because it will be hard to replace with general, non-AI automation, and handiwork because AI is currently digital only.

Carpentry, plumbing, engineering, laboratory research, teaching all likely fall into the safe category

This is going to be a fucking painful transition - I daresay its going to be one of the most painful transitions in history... but the solution is social upheaval. I can't tell you when it will fire but I doubt we'll ever see 20% unemployment in developed countries so probably sometime when we're in the mid-teens. It's unlikely we're going to see a voluntary solution to wealth inequality so shit will get violent and it'll suck for everyone.

The AI revolution will take a while to come to fruition and it will require a lot of oversight initially, but we'll gradually scale back the oversight and concentrate a few areas of the economy into extremely few hands (sort of like what's happened with tech giants)... eventually we'll hit the breaking point and hopefully we'll come out the far side with an equitable post-scarcity economy. If you're lucky you'll be dead by then though because it's going to fucking suck but, inevitably, either the wealthy will lose or we'll go extinct.

The best reason to try is not based on the chance of success.

The best reason to try is that it hurts less than doing nothing.

When you’re active, life hurts less. This is the most rational reason I have found, in my 40 years of searching, for getting out of bed in the morning.

Finding motivation is a hard problem for me. The most consistent source I’ve found is the understanding that giving up does not bring relief. It brings hell.

I think in the next time it's mostly the unskilled and office jobs. I think we still have a shortage of skilled IT professionals and people who can do more than webdevelopment and write simple python scripts. And we also have a shortage of teachers, kindergarden teachers, people who care for the elderly, doctors, psychologists. And despite AI creeping into all the fields, I still see a career there for quite some time to come. Also I don't see an AI plumber anytime soon coming around and fixing your toilet. So I'd say handyman is a pretty safe bet.

But I'd say all the people making career decisions right now better factor that in. Joining a call center is probably not a sustainable decision any more. And some simple office or management jobs will become redundant soon. I just think big tech laying off IT professionals is more an artificially inflated bubble bursting, than AI being now able to code complex programs or do the job of an engineer.

It's not really a gamble. We know what AI can do. And there are lists with predictions which jobs can be automated. We can base our decisions on that and I've seen articles in the newspapers 10 years ago. They're not 100% accurate but a rough guide... For example we still have a shortage of train operators. And 10 years ago people said driving trains on rails is easy to automate and we shouldn't strive for that career anymore.

It'll likely get there. But by that time society will have changed substantially. We can watch Star Trek if we're talking about a post-scarcity future and all the hard work is done for us. We'd need universal income for that. Or we end up in a dystopia. But I think that's to uncertain to base decisions on.

In my field, I've seen how computers have changed work and I expect AI to just be a continuation of it. The people who generally get replaced are the skilled labor and the unskilled professionals. I expect that trend will continue as AI gets integrated into the field. Even then, there is still going to be a lot of work regarding verification.

You need people who actually know what is going on, and you need people to replace them when they get too old or senile. Because AI is being shoved everywhere, but it is basically a VC scam. Turn yourself into the solution to that one problem that AI can't solve.

4 Ps.

Pimps: operators of the gray and black market. Immune to automation since companies that can hire developers don't want to be involved.

Prostitutes: people who provide a service that clients do not want automated.

Professionals: highly educated, very skilled. Automation just makes them go faster.

Project Managers: people who deal with the gestalt of legal/political/technical/institutional debt. They can't be replaced since you can't yell at an AI and expect them to just "fix it already".

There is overlap. Live music and much of the service industry. But as a general rule you pick one of the four and you should be fine.

It's interesting that you say no one could have predicted this. Labor saving devices are not exactly new.