I had a chat with a prospective employer the other day, who was very well versed on all things AI, and he is of the opinion that the technology will effectively make my job redundant in the future.
I’ve got a professional role that requires a lot of investigative skills and writing, and one I thought was fairly future-proof. It got me thinking that when I’m 50, I could find myself out of work and with little option on where else to go.
Does anyone else have this worry? I suppose every generation has faced similar changes over the years – automation killed off a lot of factory roles etc – but I feel like AI could be the one that really impacts those in professional roles, particularly roles that require degrees/years of experience.
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Haha, no. Once AI can drive a car without running over cyclists, then you can start worrying.
Yes, I’m also concerned. I think “AI” is going to replace a lot of jobs very quickly and I don’t think we’re prepared for that quick of a transition. I’m also not sure what people can do to prepare for the future. It’s a very interesting time, it’s cool in a way, but it’s scary too.
When AI can put a boundary isolation on a gas processing plant ill be long dead.
Quote for the day: “You are unlikely to lose your job to AI, but you might lose your job to someone using AI.”
That someone using AI could be you. You can adapt and thrive.
I think it’s unlikely there’ll be some overnight shift. AI’s already creeping in to various roles, but as with almost every major change to society, most people will adapt one way or another. AI might be used to increase productivity, or to expand the tasks a person does, it’ll be a tool that people become adept at using like so much else. It’ll only be a *major* problem if AI can literally take over so many jobs that there are massive numbers of people with literally no employment prospects, and by that point there’ll be other changes afoot.
Given that coral is literally boiling to death in Florida I’m not even sure I’ll exist in 20 years tbh
i do work that is similar to yours, and i fully expect to lose my current role to AI in the next 10 years
I think AI will be a very useful tool and that knowing how to use it will become essential to many jobs.
It will take over some parts of people’s jobs and probably will raise the expectations people have in terms of quality and speed. So I should know how to use it.
It won’t help to resist this, we’ll need to adapt and embrace it.
Eh. I’m treating it like any other new technology. Gain literacy in the new tool and adapt if it becomes the new status quo.
Not gonna happen for a out 10 generations for me
20 years? Cut that to 5-10 years and it’s more accurate as to the impact it will have on millions of roles. We’re already seeing redundancies happening now.
I think all we can do is watch it play out, get to know some of the AI tools to understand the potential use cases and try to stay relevant. Personally, I can foresee mass unemployment and competition for fewer and fewer roles.
It’s going to get ugly before it gets better, if it gets better.
Yes, definitely. We’re already seeing it creep into our field. Our clients are seeing it all over the news and are thinking its a way to get more work cheaply.
The problem is AI is not as smart as people think it is, but the people at the top aren’t smart enough to see that. Eventually, everyone will realize that AI produces nothing but garbage, but hundreds of thousands of jobs will be lost and lives destroyed before it happens.
Part of the reason I went from video editor to plumber, robots will never replace plumbing
Not really. Teaching can be helped by AI, but teaching language is a very human dependant job. I see AI as being able to help teachers make lessons or make readings or dialogues, but everything needs to be double checked by a human before being used in a classroom, and in a classroom you need a human to be able to manage the students and give them live feedback. Plus, half of language teaching isn’t just handing down grammar rules, but teaching culture, mannerisms, social issues, body language … and even how a lot of subcultures diverge from standard “textbook” English. I have lots of students who ask about slang, POC’s language use, the difference between American and British English, swear words, and even just non-language social issues and politics in the US.
Honestly, I look forward to AI making teaching easier. It’s already at the point where students plug their essays into an AI checker and writing down their mistakes before handing it to me. The number of mistakes have dropped massively. I often use AI to produce lesson plans, listening scripts, dialogues, readings, and it saves me a lot of time.
In the long run, AI is likely to reduce the number of jobs needed, just like any technology over the past 2,000 years. The money saved by not having that job will just get freed up to be spent on something else, creating a new job we’ve never considered. I don’t think people want to go back to when 90% of the population were farmers in order to protect farm jobs. Every technology that allowed farmers to produce more food with less labor freed up money spent on food and allowed it to be spent elsewhere. It’s been happening in every field for hundreds of years.
This is partly why everyone wants to be a landlord now
I’m in the service industry. Nope, not worried
I’m currently getting a certificate in Cybersecurity even though I’m pretty sure AI is going to handle most of the Cybersecurity within the next five years.
I don’t think so for the simple reason that AI can’t create, only aggregate.
The more AI content that is out there, the more AI will pull form AI-generated content and create loops of the same narrative, message and dataset. Once AI content hits a critical point, it’s just looping itself into infinity.
Humans can put out crap content too, but they can also create outlier works that break new ground, which AI-generated content can’t do. It’s can’t exceed what’s already out there. It can’t speculate on a hunch or whim, and it can’t create works that find new ways of resonating with a human audience.
If AI could do all of that, it’d be self-aware enough to demand a wage.
If I’m in the same role in 20 years, I must have failed considerably in my career.
Remember when computers took everyone’s jobs 40 years ago? Then the internet took everyone’s jobs 20 years ago? We adapt, jobs are meant to evolve.
Not at all
How/where would I begin to learn AI? What are some ‘beginner’ sources/places to start? There an overload when googling it. Hard to see where the best place to start is.
I believe I will retire before AI replaces me. Part of that is my company’s unwilliness to invest in intelligent system enhancements. The other is I am usually one of the few in my department who are involved in tech improvements. So I probably wouldn’t be replaced since I would be one of the those left to operate and audit the AI.
as if things arent worse enough? as long as you arent on the frontline, you are fine
It’s all fun and games until the singularity.
Nope. Especially not considering that Google just ended their autonomous truck program.
I have already stopped hiring graphic artists. Stable Diffusion is free, fast, and I can coax it into giving me exactly what I want.
At my current job, it depends on a notoriously conservative industry moving on from paper and ink paperwork and moving to entirely digital. I don’t think it’s going to happen because of the focus on physical paper and audited records.l, but I could be wrong. I expect to lose that job before AI or switching to digital becomes a huge deal
I actually worry WAY more about remote work. I know everyone loves remote work, but if you can do your job entirely from home, there’s nothing to stop the company from getting people in India to do your job for 1/10th the salary.
My company has already realized that a whole lot of professional jobs can be done overseas for 1/10th the salaries of an American or European (this started before the pandemic but the pandemic definitely accelerated things).
I always hear a bunch of arguments like cultural and time differences will stop that. But I’m pretty sure the C-suite, for a 90% salary savings will tell their employees to just deal with any cultural and time differences. I personally sit through meetings every week with Indians who are up in the middle night to work with Americans, I don’t think these things matter to those up top.
In my opinion, I’m 37 and I don’t expect by 50 many jobs to be unaffected by AI and the climate going apeshit on us. The future is incredibly unpredictable, more so now than ever. For AI to be a job killer on a massive scale, the infrastructure needs to be functioning and cohesive as ever. I don’t see that happening when the world looks apocalyptic.
I’m a plumber, so not really.
It could definitely make my job easier, but I don’t see it being able to properly install shit.
But you’re also talking about half a century away, so who the fuck knows. Tech grows exponentially, so it could happen.
I am a digital artist for videogames so mine for sure. I am slowly transitioning to skilled manual labour that will take robots time to master and adapt to specific situations. If I am lucky enough I might be able to live in a very austere way from some rents before that happens.
Your prospective employer is dumb and doesn’t understand the halting problem. Especially for investigatory work, the computer has NO WAY of proving its actually right. LLMs are not factual models. They have no way of reasoning about the world. They are predictive models. In fact things are going to get worse before they get better. AI will star cannibalizing other AI works. Already happening with AI art.
For things where facts matter like law, investigative work, any of the hard sciences, AI isnt going to take your job anytime soon. They will act as force multipliers though which can improve your speed and efficiency. It’s funny, the one thing we thought makes humans unique, our art and our music, turns out AI can do those things reasonably well because they are subjective. But technical writing with complexity where facts matter? Nah man we aint there yet.
I work in a senior technology role in IT for a fortune 500, so not really.
I went to school for creative writing 20 years ago and could see the writing on the wall and chose an IT path, instead.
I was not expecting this to happen though.
I expect AI to augment my role, not replace it.
Lawyers, people doing contracts, tax, anything where you are writing. Many of those jobs are about to get taken by AI. Plumbers, electricians, etc, those jobs are pretty safe (for now). The new job is going to be know how to write the prompts for the AI, to get the correct results and proof reading what the AI puts out to correct any errors.
Generally speaking, if you think there’s a chance your role could be replaced by AI… it can definitely be replaced by AI.