With the lastest news of AI layoffs, I’m struggling to understand how the idea of a career still holds. If careers themselves effectively become gambles like lottery tickets, how do we maintain drive and hopes in the longterm endgame of our struggles?
I know AI as an honest utility is itself a lie to some extent, but this only aids my argument further. People’s career struggles are panning out to be valueless because of a nothing-fad that no one could have predicted.
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
It turns out gen AI is good at training virtual robots, which can then be embodied in robots like this guy. There’s a $16,000 Chinese version of that robot that’s a bit smaller. There’s a robot dog that GPT4 trained to balance on a beach ball, and the NVIDIA pen twirling training. I guess what I’m saying is… robots exist.
See what Hackworth said about the robots, also, there are multiple ongoing projects that hope to change the existing construction processes enough that android-style robots won’t be necessary. 3d printing houses, for example.
The jobs that will be safe longest are those that are both physical and unpredictable/non-standardizable.
Never going to happen in the US or Canada. Oh sure the rest of the world will but not those two countries. The culture of construction work can’t adapt. It’s amazing to me when I see stuff go up in South East Asia vs the US/Canada.
South East Asia: standardized parts, 3 shifts, army of workers, about half of which are women, things just move.
US/Canada: custom everything nothing connects right, 1 shift, all large white males, things take forever.