this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2024
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Tldr pandemic and not AI
One single factor is never the source of a problem. It can be both things causing this.
Technology changes too fast today to plan for a 30 year career doing the same thing in a constantly changing world. Anyone with the skillet should take this as a beacon and pivot, whether keeping the skills fresh and branching out into new ventures with them (i.e. spend some time thinking, get a few peers, make a new product or service to sell to others instead of being cheap labour for someone else's idea), or dropping the skills for another one that isn't likely to get pulled out from under your feet suddenly.
I think we'll need plumbers for a while still, and you can make over $100k/year never touching a shitty pipe.
Anyone who knows anything about software development is not scared by some article with journalists who kniw nothing writing about "AI"
Anyone who knows anything about labour relations knows that AI is a front line worker replacement. You aren't killing all jobs, but how about you tell me the % of workers in the field that won't be needed to create blocks of code which people get to review moving forward.
Theyll change the whole workflow on you if it saves them money.
that's a very low percentage, I have been using Github's copilot for a year, it's a decent productivity tool, it can do stuff like save me the time of googling how to sort an array, because I rarely do it and always forget the exact syntax, and just offer me the solution, so saves a few minutes, stuff like that, but Software Engineers are literally always developing tools to increase productivity a developer now can do more in a day than a developer 15 years ago, for example for Frontend I reckon REact/Angular/Vue did more for productivity than Copilot ever will.
and that's how the world moves forward, we have been increasing productivity of workers, and it's not a bad thing, this "AI" is just another tool to use for that.
the issue is to call this thing AI, chatGPT and the like are Large Language Models, basically calculators for words, so instead of inputting numbers you input words and it spits out something at you, is it correct ? who the fuck knows, the "AI" for sure does not, it has no intelligence, no concept of things, no creativity, it's not a replacement for humans it's a tool, like a calculator.
Fully agree that this is a tool to use. But new tools eliminate jobs throughout human history. ICE eliminated a ton of blacksmithing jobs when you didn't need so many horseshoes. Excavators eliminated groups of workers physically digging ditches.
Progress is good, it helps society, but it has a danger to leave behind the people which helped to create the system that eliminated their need. There needs to be a safety net or a transitional plan for these people to ensure we all continue to succeed. That doesn't really exist in our current capitalist environment.
Plumbers and welders don't make that money, that's just something people say on the internet..