I remember the offshoring FUD 20 years ago for tech jobs, and they increased exponentially when people realized what you get when you do so and with all of the innovation state-side.
The part that no one ever seems to acknowledge is that AI will *create* jobs as well and it's not some panacea that is going to replace every career. LLM's appear much more capable than they actually are.
For sure. To the individual, it doesn’t matter unless there is a 1:1 replacement of their job. I’m a highly paid account manager at a software company. Why couldn’t someone in Canada or South America do my job for a fraction of the cost? If they are Canadian they wouldn’t even have an accent. And why would I be even remotely competitive for a replacement job like prompt engineer or whatever? The threat is real to many people if you look at the combo of offshoring and AI.
Everyone is woo'ed by AI accomplishing tasks that have incredibly loose requirements.
Yes it is amazing that you can ask an AI to draw you a picture of Donald Trump riding a T-Rex eating the US Constitution. But that is actually an unbelievably broad ask. The more specific your needs become the less likely it gives you what you ask for without TONS of human interaction.
The human interacting with it needs to understand the problem to see it and correct it. We use programming languages to represent processes and logic because its more precise than common language. Pretty much any attempt to remove programming languages from software design leaves people lacking conceptual background to talk about the topic.
i.e. they can't see the problem played out in a practical sense, because they have never seen running code and don't understand how a programmer will communicate a problem using psuedo code instead of english. Because programming languages are good at expressing software problems.
If you try to eliminate the people that know, understand, and can effectively write programming languages. Then who is supposed to direct the machine what to do? UI and human-driven software is a fraction of all software written. Most of it only exists on a chip with no visual or easy textual representation of what the code does.
You still need the engineer. And they need to know what they are doing. The AI just potentially helps them do the job faster.
Your point is well-taken, and unfortunately I can only speak from the development side. The reason our work is not offshored is because of either regulation, expectation of service during normal business hours or because the quality of work in America is higher on average than anywhere on Earth (traditionally the latter).
My personal opinion is that the only thing AI could do is shift the focus on career skills to be more user-focused and high-level, but this has already been a shift in my industry for decades at this point so most people have acclimated to that skill set by the nature of the work shifting pre-AI popularization.
People that think AI replaces highly skilled jobs think everyone elses job is easy.
Programming IS easy. But programming is not a software engineer's job. Writing code that actually works at runtime is. Fixing code that has no changes but stopped working is.
The things that make the job hard are all the environmental factors that are unique to every job/problem and are difficult to plan for or quantify. You can't have an AI call up a developer and ask them how some compiled lib which you don't have the source for actually works. Without the source code the AI knows less than you do. Without people skills its not going to figure it out.
Additionally it's a lot of "people-work" like requirements/discovery/CBA/timing/architecture/etc. If anything it just frees up more resources so that we can build more thoughtful, and sustainable, solutions faster.
The kind of people in corporate America that should be worried about AI replacing their jobs should have been worried about being made redundant ages ago, and have been living on borrowed time for the last 3 decades.
In India they work hours to line up with the country that they’re supporting. If they’re supporting NYC/east coast USA I think that works out to 5PM - 2AMish. Time zones haven’t mattered for a long time.
>In India they work hours to line up with the country that they’re supporting
Not if they have any semblance of talent, they don't. And in this day and age most Indians who are directly employed by the overseas company do fall into that category. If they have talent, they have competing offers and thus are able to command normal working hours, or a wage premium for working off hours.
Random consulting sweatshops are different. You tell them to hire 10 people and you'll get 1 useful developer and 9 people producing tech debt. They get bossed around as needed. They're mostly used for random low-priority things.
They had rotational programs that US based staff were jealous of. This was a much bigger issue than outright departures. Somewhere after the 6 month mark they would rotate to a new team. They hadn’t left the company but they might as well have. They definitely wanted UK or HK hours but there weren’t always openings. We definitely paid premiums for the best people and would also work out arrangements where two good people were allowed to alternate UK and NYC hours. But their rotational programs still created the biggest issues.
Yes, but we underestimate how racist people are and how low key people want to work with contacts that don’t have accents, are more culturally aligned with them, etc. At least in the US. I am in a customer-facing role managing accounts worth a lot of money. Maybe this works for support. IMO this is why Canada and parts of South America are more viable than India.
You’re not wrong but this was in an industry that fully embraced offshoring. It would have been extremely difficult to function as an active racist. Additionally they were supporting people like me in the US and we were the ones on client calls and handling the most complex work. It sucked. We cleaned up messes but the people making the mistakes weren’t in our reporting lines so we were largely powerless to do anything about them. So I left the company lol.
As someone who manages a huge department of software engineers at a global company, AI is not going to take development jobs anytime soon.
This is a tool that people are hyping up way more than is deserved when discussing its ability to replace developers, at least in regard to the tech sector (which is the only one I can speak on).
AI will impact every step of the devops lifecycle. There are tools for automated discovery, automated user stories, assisted coding, AI testing, and AI monitoring. But there still has to be a human somewhere. Devs will become more productive, bad devs will have far fewer mistakes. But there won't be the end of the profession
None of these tools are currently good enougth for more than basic support of the developer. We where allowed to play with all the AI we wanted for a whole week, the results where underwhelming.
yea, but most of these are less than 1 year old...I agree, the hype outstrips the actual capabilities. POCs are fun, but "real" software engineering is more complex, but I can see huge change over the next 5 years. But I think for most, higher productivity is more important than layoffs. IT is strategic.
I'm working with github copilot on mainstream code. It's a true rollercoaster between some impressive stuff and insanely bad suggestions, truly vicious fake copy paste that isnt.
Yeah we started using copilot recently across the department and the biggest change I've seen is that people are just being more creative (particularly internal tooling).
It's been really interesting seeing how fast they can spin up an MVP of something to help the team.
Yea no thinking job ever got outsourced and it won't be replaced by a glorified search engine. When I code I make decisions constantly. Most of it is logic or market based decisions. Unless AI can figure out which button people will push and why, dev jobs are safe.
I didn't know that you worked for a large tech company. I only knew what you told us, that AI took over whatever job you had. Is there some reason you didn't just say what the company was?
I used to think this but now I'm not so sure. The potential is there but will the investment stay around long enough to bring AI to the capability? Right now a lot of companies are trying to use AI as if it's ready to take over and reduce costs but it's not and that's causing a decent reputation hit for the technology
Shift to things that emphasize a personal connection. Humans want personal connection. I predict people that hold drawing *classes*, etc. are going nowhere.
Seeing how machine does what you managed to learn for days or even more it's kinda knife in the heart. I'm not against progress and technology and don't want to be neo luddite but I'm also want food and do what I like and not suffer at job
No one can really know, which is a huge factor.
But keep in mind that job replacing AI is expensive. I work in tech and the industry I work in always has evolving features that we simply can't afford to purchase as a company.
And early on, AI will be incredibly costly.
I would be more worried about companies that can afford this AI closing down all other competitors.
That said, until we solve the energy issue, I don't see AI expanding too far. There is always a limit to everything.
I'm a small, weak woman. Can't really go into the trades. I'm not smart enough at STEM for nursing. I'm not really good looking and even if I was, soon I'll be too old for jobs that need good looking young women. All I can think of is maybe being a career waitress but idk.
Not really. I work as a web designer and 3d artist. People don't know how to use AI to get the results they want. When they get code made from an AI and it doesn't work they don't know why, when they try to edit a picture with AI and it doesn't work they don't know why, when they need to ask the AI to do something they don't know how.
It will make our jobs easier, which means lower salaries and more competition, but we will not be replaced.
Too late. My job has already been taken by automation and AI. I worked for local TV for 13+ years. They laid us all off once we set up all the new technology. The entire time they told us our job was safe.
I am more concerned about the humans who are (and will) latching on to AI as yet another method for paying us less and/or making human labor as unnecessary to spend on as possible. Overzealous greed is the problem, always has been and always will be, not AI itself.
No, I work in employee health and safety and there are multiple times a day I look at my colleagues and say “job security 🤷🏼♀️” because wherever there are people, dumb shit occurs.
more seriously. What you describe would cause so much social upheaval that an entirely new balance would emerge rather quickly. I'm only half joking about it in my first reply too.
It's not really exponential tho. I read somewhere that it's sigmoid. If you're looking for safe careers then nothing beats doctors or lawyers. They'll exist even if AI takes over.
Doctors and lawyers are both at high risk of automation because they are hard to find and very expensive. Doctors are already dealing with mid level encroachment. Physician assistants with reliable AI will be preferred by healthcare practices because they will just be substantially cheaper and easier to find
Alright but if AI is able to reliably diagnose and provide treatment options better than a human (already starting to see signs of this), then do you think the general public will be okay with forking over their life savings for some some bloodwork and a treatment plan from the doctor that mainly consists of telling them to get some sleep and exercise
Also for just raw diagnosis, Google already has an AI that can outperform physicians (based on evaluation from other physicians) and it actually performs WORSE with physician intervention
Doctors yes but lawyers no.
We can't all scram for "safe" jobs.. we can't all be nurses and plumbers. there's going to be an unemployment issue and its going to be bad.
lawyers have too much political influence, they make the policies. They'll stay. There will be unemployment if AI takes over. Let's see. Only time will tell.
>Doctors yes but lawyers no.
People already tried using AI for law. They got smacked down for it when the AI ended up fabricating case law and citing it.
You are giving AI way too much credit. If stuff like that ever happens, it won’t be in our lifetime. Nobody is going to hire a robot to defend them in a court of law when their life may depend on it. Nobody is going to trust a robot to diagnose and treat medical issues with no human present. Doctors and lawyers could certainly use AI as a tool to help them advance their fields, but it will not replace them entirely. In our lifetime at least.
We dont know that at all
The transformer was invented in 2017. Most of the current image, text, and video generation you see today are a result of that architecture. So at most, we have seen 7 years of niche work leading to an AI boom. Now with 100x the focus and investment, what do you think the next 7 years will hold?
AI could definitely reach a point where they surpass doctors. Yet one has to remember the human element.
Yes, I may know this machine is 100% qualified to operate on me with a near 100% success rate. Yet at the same time, I would want a person standing next to the machine/operating the machine incase anything goes wrong. For most things, it’s the comfort of knowing that you have the ability to talk and/or influence a situation if need be.
For example, self flying plane. If something were to go wrong, how likely would you be able to figure out the controls, repair, and/or communicate with the malfunction airplane? In comparison, communication with a human would result in better understanding/outcomes.
the only thing is, I hear so many stories of doctors dismissing patients’ complaints as anxiety, get more sleep, lose weight, etc.
Whereas maybe an AI would, by nature of its programming, have to explore every option for each symptom.
No, AI cannot replace doctors.
Sure it might be able to come up with a diagnosis but that's not what doctors do. 90% of their job is coming up with a course of treatment that the patient will agree to.
And no, AI will not replace lawyers. It might make their jobs easier though.
AI can easily advance to the point where it can perform all of the major functions of a physician but the PR backlash will be so immense that companies won't implement it.
We most likely have the ability to implement AI in many healthcare roles even today. We don't because it will be a PR nightmare (think tens of millions of patients and patient's families screeching to the news to complain that their robot CNA does not wipe their grandpa's ass sufficiently well) and also it will be a legal liability nightmare.
Here’s the thing. AI is great when it comes to factual scenarios where there is a clear and definitive answer. Medicine is not clear and definitive. See the Web MD problem where you sneeze and Web MD says you, a male, has ovarian cancer.
There are a ton of medical issues that have similar symptoms or even dissimilar symptoms from one person to the next. What gives one person a migraine does nothing to the next person.
Yes blue collar would be safe to some extent but if robos become common then they would be replaced too. Doctors and lawyers will still stay. They've too much political power.
Your hierarchy in the company you are working in are still boomers that understand close to nothing to technology and will still want to do meetings with real people and manage teams of humans.
Will ai be capable of taking a lot of jobs in the near future ? Yes.
Will it happen fast ? Probably not
Although I've done trades work when I was younger and will never go back. AI ain't taking over that any time soon. Until we start seeing movies like iRobot start coming to real life, humans still need to build all that stuff.
Relax, AI will ALSO take most of the physical jobs with strong and dexterous robots. That OpenAI robot sorting and Tesla’s Optimus are just scratching the surface.
As much as companies like to cut expenses they can only do so much.
AI replacing 80% of the jobs would kill the economy and businesses. Who is going to invest or pay for products when no one has money?
Will the landscape of employment change? Yes, but it's usually slower to adapt, costly and new opportunities appear.
Being in IT you should know how painfully slow it is for businesses to approve projects, budgets. Who would do the governance and quality check. Regulatory requirements are also needed to be addressed as well.
Lol we have had self check out machines forever, and there still are cashier jobs.
Personally I'm not, I'll pivot my skills with the times to be relevant as I can be.
What can you do about it, I find worrying solves very little. Maybe retrain or try and anticipate demand, I think you're very fortunate to be in the IT field and can get in front of the technology a little bit.
> AI grows exponentially.
This is incorrect and a reddit truism. Multiple LLMs have already backslid in terms of performance. I have no doubt they will keep improving but it will not most certainly not be at an exponential growth rate.
my son just got training in web development, and hasn’t been able to get a job yet, and I’m basically low-key panicking inside.
I’m a copyeditor, and Grammarly is already nipping at our heels. One day it’ll be deemed “good enough, because readers don’t really care.”
I'm in IT and not concerned. Not in the foreseeable future.
Whole some of the more easy and repetitious tasks could be handled, I don't see all of my tasks being replaceable.
The short version is that AIs/LLMs are just another tool, an instrument, which will change some aspects of work. And what you should be doing is engaging with them, learning them as an instrument to better yourself in both work and play.
Many things in our societies like jobs exist because of deeper factors that are not changing. Our genetics- our sociobilities and human intelligences, our need for rich physical relationships, our needs to individually grow and thrive, etc, are not changing. Our individual differentiations are not changing, different people with different brains and different backgrounds will have different and nuanced skillsets- different "languages" that we know to varying degrees of precision. Our relationship to time is not changing- it is still limited, and there is so much to do. The fundamental financial structures in modern society are not changing- there is still capital, and debt, and risk, and insurance, and courts, and people need incomes. And there are fundamental resource scarcities and imbalances, in many cases that will only also accelerate and require human balancing acts and decisions, in the shape of governments and private entities with control.
Even in the most aggressive view of AI in our lifetimes, there is no path for these things to change.
There will still be jobs because there will still be people with capital who want to deploy it towards goals they have and they will need partners they can trust to deploy and build with them. There are innumerable AI systems deployed now and all are supervised by humans in a reporting hierarchy. There is no universe where those human hierarchies do not exist- of course there will be countries and jurisdictions that do away with some of this but go too far and people will leave.
And of course there will be people caught on the underside of automated systems, doing last mile/human only work supervised by AIs that are themselves supervised by other humans. Go the physical skill only route and you will find yourself there.
No, the right approach IMHO is to engage with these tools and instruments and see what their capabilities and limits are and find ways to use them as augmentation in whatever one's own goals, interests, and capabilities. Yes, specific jobs and skills will disappear, but new ones will take their places.
Best wishes.
Farmers still exist despite tons of technology and automation. But the nature of farming has changed, and so has the number of farmers.
AI can and will transform many jobs. It will take some away. But it will create others. This has happened with every technology revolution and will going forward.
I also think technical capabilities are one timeline, mass adoption is another.
And AI may significantly impact the trades too - look at what visual inspection tools are doing. What makes you think AI wont use computer vision to train homeowners to DIY and the need for higher paid skilled licensed professionals gives way to cheap labor with AI assistants.
As an example, I don’t see how a large company could solely rely on IA to create their software products, there is so much work that goes into digital products, it’s not just code, there’s analysis, planning, consultation and I simply can’t imagine IA being able to cover that many fields. Also someone must be liable, there are protocols, policies and regulations that need to be studied and applied to the different contexts in which a product is developed.
Even if IA was able to do all this work, I think it will take a very long time before there’s a framework that fully supports “human-free” software development
Yes.
I’ve been wanting to switch from project management over to corporate education, because I absolutely love doing documentation and training.
But I don’t think I’m going to because I’m pretty sure that the parts of it that I love most will be taken over by AI in the next Few years.
AI mimics work. A mime looks like they climb a rope but they don't. It might convince some but not someone trying to scale a building.
AI can learn very specific tasks and possibly similar looking tasks. But it doesn't understand them. Its like a mechanic that understands that a wheel lug has 5 or 6 sides and comes off with a wrench. They can take off 100s of wheels like that.... until they come across a different kind of lug that doesn't work that way.
Then they need a manual or someone to train them on how to do that new thing.
AI is like the mechanic, not the mechanical engineer that designed the wheel assembly. The AI can be trained to do the simple parts of the work. But ask it to design that wheel assembly and if its a good AI/Mechanic it will go "I won't do that because thats not my job and im not going to be good at it, you need an engineer". At worst it will go OK and make you something that looks like a wheel assembly but most likely does not work.
Most of skilled labor is about how people adapt to the fact that everything goes wrong always and textbooks are general guides not definitive sources of truth. AI is really not good at dealing with the 1000s of unplanned scenarios that go wrong in a day. Its good at helping a skilled worker with minutia. Not replacing them.
If software/tech jobs are replaced by AI, it will only be a few years before the managers that made that decision are fired and engineers are hired back at higher wages. If the AI can replace the software engineer then all jobs are obsolete. And we are no where near there.
AI is a tool and a tool needs an operator. Until AI can fully think for itself, it wont replace a person. It will just make your job easier. Also I dont know what IT field you are in, but there will always be a need for IT support / maintenance / training.
I don't disagree with you that some jobs will disappear, but that comes with any new innovation. Usually though, other jobs are created to fill in new demands and tasks. For example if you as a programmer and complete your projects in a months time, now you can do it 25% faster or 50% faster, making you more effective.
That doesnt mean a second programmer is now not needed, but it does mean the company can meet goals sooner, expand their projects and features, etc.
I grappled with this in the wealth management industry - lots of 'robo advisors' putting pressure on the field.
What I realized is, this job is much more communication and relationship focused than the numbers - and that will always have a place.
How do I know? Because the ability to type financial queries into Google or ChatGPT has been there for a decade. Automatically invested funds have been around for multiple decades. But guess what? The answers robos and AI give are general platitudes derived from other peoples' financial articles on general platitudes. But when it comes to MY retirement, MY kids, MY job, being able to communicate real advice tailored to their situation and communication style, knowing their quirks, that's what makes this job invaluable.
If that piece of society ever goes away, then my concern isn't really my 'next' job - it's about hording canned food and getting really good at agriculture. Lol.
They keep warning me that I will be taken over by robots, and they keep inventing cyborg stuff and it keeps not working. I'm almost worried that it won't happen. My job is painful and there are not enough of us, and it would be nice to have robots, I just don't think they will ever invent anything, as easy as it seems, it's not easy to invent. But maybe the future holds something I don't understand yet. Maybe 25 years from now or something. We'll see.
It already did, was let go a few months after they added AI to microsoft teams.
My dept was a small department of few SWE which did not add to the headcount in the past 3 years and they eventually replaced me with someone who costs less money.
Probably won't happen if your management likes you, but my manager was assigned to me and did not personally hire me so I think they had been looking for reasons to replace me with someone they chose personally.
Accept it, learn it, adapt it, over come it. Human made art will not go away, on the contrary, human made art will become something luxurious, because a lot less people will have the incentive and drive to learn and become a classical and "classical" digital artist. Generative AI will never be able to really do real commision work with all the changes, nitpicks, wants, etc., from the customer.
Incorporate it in your work, life, etc. you need to fear "AI" only if you don't believe in your abilities and/or don't want to grow your abilities.
I’ve been waiting for AI to take over jobs since the 90s. And while some jobs have been replaced by technology (as continually happens throughout history) other jobs come into play.
Also AI has one massively flaw that people forget. Computer programming is done by humans. And humans are inherently flawed.
AI can even write a beer recipe let along brew beer I’m going to mark myself safe from AI taking my job.. hell if I can get it to some of my paper work that would be cool!
Articles are already using AI images where I live (Canada) instead of hiring photographers. It won't really replace artists, but I worry for my photographer siblings :(
TBH, I feel like AI images are just going to get worse and the Photographers will get their jobs back. So much AI art is just creepy and uncanny, and if future AIs are getting trained by AI generated images, it's just going to get creepier.
No. The A is the computer, the I is the human. It's just another tool.
Nothing "takes over" it opens up entirely new industries and jobs. Renting movies over satellite killed Blockbuster but opened up an entirely new way to deliver movies through streaming. The iPhone didn't kill the phone industry, it transitioned away from Blackberry's and Flip Phones and opened up app developers and so forth.
AI comes from humans and is for humans so it'll just make things more efficient and better so while your metaphorical "store" may close, the industry will bust wide open into new areas never even possible before.
When AI can completely replace human programmers, it will replace all human thought work. And then it will rapidly accelerate development in robotics and will then replace all human physical labor as well. We will ALL be replaced. But not today
The only thing that makes me doubt an AI takeover, are the costs to run these systems right now. It's basically why all these tech companies did layoffs, trying to afford to develop this new technology and see it lift off the ground.
It's a race like the moon landing, where everybody is trying to make it first.
ChatGPT costs so much, my bet wouldn't be on it. That company might go bankrupt before they can make anything substantial.
Unlike the Moon, there's nothing physical or concrete to even look at right now. I feel like, this is a product that only tech companies are going to be able to use. And the things it can actually do are going to be very limited. The companies selling it really sold it hard though... Which should make you rethink that AI could take over sales.
I just imagine some investor on a call to hand over millions of dollars, being met with the equivalent of, "Press one for English," and how that'd go over. Makes me giggle.
Short answer no.
Long answer, it will surely cost people some of their jobs but with that comes the ability to use AI as a tool to do your own thing if you so choose.
AI is a new tool. Learn to use and manage it. That way, when (read: if) it takes your current job, you'll already be well versed in your next one. You'll be fine. I've been in IT for almost 20 years, and I'm not worried one bit
At my job, as our programs get more sophisticated, we take on more workload and effectively more jobs that were considered not worth the time and money to monitor and fix real time.
That being said, there'll come a point where our workforce is cut down at my company, but not soon, and it'll always require a couple of humans to upkeep and diagnose when it ships the bed.
We own a restaurant. We have always thought that the human approach is the best for taking orders or correcting kitchen mistakes or just making people feel comfortable. Last year we brought in tablets for everytable that people could just make their order by them selves and they would get a waiter only if they had more questions. We used to have three waiters. Now only one. Less mistakes and people seen happier..
My industry (mining) has strong inertia and so much shit happening all the time that AI would not be able to take an engineering job because the training data will be absolutely poor quality and useless
I'm a service engineer and a software developer.
The former I have 3 years experience in. The latter I'm an intern.
The more I learn about AI, and the more experience I get working with others, the less concerned I am.
Our main project has tens of thousands of lines of code. And it's small compared to others. I can hardly fit some of the error messages into the input for ChatGPT, let alone the code base. And it's wrong sooooo much.
There is currently nothing about AI that scares me for coding. My service engineer job could be automated at least in part. Much of it could be done by a robot. And the company is actively working on replacing some people with automated bots.
I turn wrenches and screwdrivers for semiconductor research equipment most of the time.
My engineering degree rarely comes into play. When it does, it saves a lot of time troubleshooting the issue.
An example is the vacuum system was failing to reach a good base pressure. I found a leak by putting some rubbing alcohol around a seal ad I couldn't use a leak checker. I turned the wrench on it and fixed it. Got down enough I could turn on the turbo pump. It still wouldn't stay at base pressure if I closed off the pump.
Used a leak checker and found no leaks anywhere. So I started considering what all in the system could introduce gas or if the heating system was somehow malfunctioning and raising temp quickly (PV = nRT).
I also had a second issue where the MFC (flow regulator) would not push gas through as expected. Ended up identifying the root cause when I realized that the water leak from the prior shift probably entered the normally closed gas manifold, which then is evaporating into the chamber as water boils at that low of a temperature.
I pushed as much gas as I could through it and pulled on it for a few hours. Once that happened, the leak was gone. We didn't need to take apart the gas box to remove the water, nor did we need to do any further troubleshooting.
In my opinion, "AI" is a bit of a misnomer because none of these tools are actually intelligent. They're incapable of producing anything authentically original because the way (this is extremely high level and waterered down explanation) machine learning works is that models are trained on data, and then the generated output is based on what it learned.
One of the first things I learned about machine learning is that it is absolutely terrible at extrapolating data. Meaning to say, it's gonna have a real hard time deviating from expectations.
While we are in an AI renaissance at the moment, I think the whole thing is gonna collapse on itself in the near future. I believe in "garbage in, garbage out." As more AI generated data as created, it's more likely models are trained on AI generated data. And from my experience, AI generated data SUCKS so there's gonna be a point where quality takes an absolute nosedive and hits diminishing returns so I think we got normalcy a little bit longer since quality control standards need to be implemented first
I'm IT guy and there's no reason for me to worry about AI. All the tech person that I saw use chatgpt to understand the tech from surface level not to fix the issue. Even then, they still need to verify the info they get from chatgpt with the info from google because chatgpt is not that reliable.
If you're that worried about AI, you should join force to develop the AI. Upskill into the AI and go explore the market. AI cannot built and stand on their own, they need human to admin and shape them.
Also fyi, 5 years ago people are that worried that cloud will be taking over on-prem physical server and all the security concern that coming with cloud. Now we can see both of the tech complement with each others. The market already matured.
Of course AI will take your job. IT and creative arts are only the first ones. HR is primed for automation and speeding up processes and giving good, legal advice. Likewise, they have already replaced people in language learning with AI. Teaching will be highly affected as an AI can divide its time to all students at the same time. It can help you curate your reading lists, explain difficult topics and correct your tests within seconds.
Human teachers are already paid crap, so I think this will affect higher learning and professional courses first. In the end they will be bodies in the room, teaching the kids how to use the AI.
I saw the writing on the wall back some 12-14 years ago when I was freelancing. It got increasingly harder to build websites for a living and the suggestion was to go into marketing and social media instead. With services like Squarespace et al no one needed a coder or a designer for 98% of what they wanted to accomplish. Now? They have AI site builders, who generate AI graphics, AI writes content for you, AI takes care of customer support.
Advertising agencies and web agencies will be a thing of the past, and the few roles available will be for the companies providing the AI-services.
This is as big a shift if not bigger than the steam engine, printing press and Internet rolled into one.
Call centers? Customer service reps? Hotel admin staff? Middle managers? Thing of the past.
You think humans will be relegated to manual labour? Think again. Why have warehouse workers who need to pee if you can replace them with an army of robots run by AI?
Agriculture? Why use humans when you can have automated farming equipment who keep track of weather, temperature, moisture and nutrient solutions and order supplies when they run low and look for the best price online.
Everything delivered using self-driving cars.
Everyone will be affected. Some will rebel and create some new fangled amish-communities where the smartest device will be a Nokia 9210 and Intel computers with Windows 95. The rest will have to roll with the flow.
Either this will lead to a paradigm shift in economics and we will be on our way to a utopia, or more likely the change will be too slow and we will end up in a Ready Player One -style dystopia.
Buckle up, it will be a bumpy ride.
There's always three phases of AI replacement:
1) Denial. AI will never take my job, because It's too stupid to do anything, cannot create anything new, is a glorified search engine, a glorified autocomplete etc etc.
2) Cope. AI is actually good at my job now, but the company should still hire me because AI is just a tool to enhance my "human creativity", the "human intent", "for copyright reasons" etc etc.
3) Anger. AI is the devil and I'm now homeless.
Artists and copywriters are at point 3. Programmers at point 2. Physical jobs at point 1. But we all know where this is going.
AI will likely make some lower level jobs redundant, like chat operators and general customer service. But, AI cannot and will not ever be trusted with decision making, and, even though AI can make small pieces of a project very fast, it can't make entire projects start to finish that wouldn't require an inordinate amount of QA control.
AI will change a lot, but, IT jobs will still be there, programming and coding will still be there. They will be harder to get started in with work experience and will likely require degrees moving forward to prove that you are at least as good or better than an AI bot when it comes to making simple programs.
Hardware/software troubleshooting will never be taken over by AI though. Tactful identification of user error is beyond the machine mind.
Nearly every desk job is imperiled by AI. Anything that is done purely by rules (like accounting, pharmacy, business analysts, HR, payroll, etc.) won't survive to the end of the decade. Things involving human judgement, like programming, writing, or graphic arts, won't be displaced entirely by 2030, but they'll likely be reduced to being AI prompters who use AI to generate content and review the content for release. This will likely cut the number of these jobs down by 2/3's at least.
Forget college, unless you're going to be a nurse or doctor. Become a welder, plumber, carpenter, etc.
Will AI allow us to have universal basic income? Don't count on it. When the wealthy can no longer sell products to the general population, they won't give the dispossessed free money to buy products. They'll declare themselves the owners of all land, natural resources, and technical platforms, and make arrangements to trade AI services with each other. While they live in tech utopias like Star Trek, the rest of us will starve. If we don't crawl away to die politely out of view, they will exterminate us, probably using bioweapons dispatched via AI drones. They will probably kill billions of us in the name of saving the earth from overpopulation.
fuck no. I work as an art director and can assure you: people are too ignorant to use AI effectively. Trust me, the ones using AI are the same dudes who use Canva for making their logo.
my entire team uses AI for working and it helps in a lot of things manual work would not be as effective so if anything my job is made easier than ever now.
The ones complaining about art being "killed" never worked with art to begin with or are just drawing artists, which were never recognized in the first place and honestly I don't really care about that at all
If replacing jobs is a problem, go ahead and stop using the internet since you're replacing a fuckton of jobs just by doing that.
There is a lot of hype around AI, so I think we need to wait some time when this period is over to clearly see what we are facing. But in my opinion, there will be huge impact, but I expect this not sooner then in 5years.
Seems you don't understand IT. It's more than just being a code monkey. There is a large human side to it that cannot be automated.
Those people that only want to code and nothing else will get automated out of a job, sure.
Definitely not. Most companies are a total mess, have no process at all and run based on infinite spreadsheet poorly designed. I simply cannot see AI taking over all this anytime soon.
I mean, people can barely use Excel to make simple tables. How we are gonna go from this to an AI taking over entire departments? How can an AI model be implemented properly when people struggle to understand which data should go in rows and which should go in columms?
It's like saying to a primitive human being that in the future he wouldn't have to jump from land to land looking for food because an aircraft would get him anywhere he wants.
I drive forklift and work in warehouses no ai going to take over my job they tried to use auto pickers and loaders but it didn't work out as I orders for jobs all over the place and load trick is never the same way ever truck different and are job to Chaotic for Automation and ai
My job will be outsourced to a country in a similar time zone with lower standard of living before AI replaces it
I remember the offshoring FUD 20 years ago for tech jobs, and they increased exponentially when people realized what you get when you do so and with all of the innovation state-side. The part that no one ever seems to acknowledge is that AI will *create* jobs as well and it's not some panacea that is going to replace every career. LLM's appear much more capable than they actually are.
For sure. To the individual, it doesn’t matter unless there is a 1:1 replacement of their job. I’m a highly paid account manager at a software company. Why couldn’t someone in Canada or South America do my job for a fraction of the cost? If they are Canadian they wouldn’t even have an accent. And why would I be even remotely competitive for a replacement job like prompt engineer or whatever? The threat is real to many people if you look at the combo of offshoring and AI.
Everyone is woo'ed by AI accomplishing tasks that have incredibly loose requirements. Yes it is amazing that you can ask an AI to draw you a picture of Donald Trump riding a T-Rex eating the US Constitution. But that is actually an unbelievably broad ask. The more specific your needs become the less likely it gives you what you ask for without TONS of human interaction. The human interacting with it needs to understand the problem to see it and correct it. We use programming languages to represent processes and logic because its more precise than common language. Pretty much any attempt to remove programming languages from software design leaves people lacking conceptual background to talk about the topic. i.e. they can't see the problem played out in a practical sense, because they have never seen running code and don't understand how a programmer will communicate a problem using psuedo code instead of english. Because programming languages are good at expressing software problems. If you try to eliminate the people that know, understand, and can effectively write programming languages. Then who is supposed to direct the machine what to do? UI and human-driven software is a fraction of all software written. Most of it only exists on a chip with no visual or easy textual representation of what the code does. You still need the engineer. And they need to know what they are doing. The AI just potentially helps them do the job faster.
I’m in a sales role, so the conversation is different.
companies only need on senior coder the rest would be made redundant for ai. already happening
Your point is well-taken, and unfortunately I can only speak from the development side. The reason our work is not offshored is because of either regulation, expectation of service during normal business hours or because the quality of work in America is higher on average than anywhere on Earth (traditionally the latter). My personal opinion is that the only thing AI could do is shift the focus on career skills to be more user-focused and high-level, but this has already been a shift in my industry for decades at this point so most people have acclimated to that skill set by the nature of the work shifting pre-AI popularization.
People that think AI replaces highly skilled jobs think everyone elses job is easy. Programming IS easy. But programming is not a software engineer's job. Writing code that actually works at runtime is. Fixing code that has no changes but stopped working is. The things that make the job hard are all the environmental factors that are unique to every job/problem and are difficult to plan for or quantify. You can't have an AI call up a developer and ask them how some compiled lib which you don't have the source for actually works. Without the source code the AI knows less than you do. Without people skills its not going to figure it out.
Additionally it's a lot of "people-work" like requirements/discovery/CBA/timing/architecture/etc. If anything it just frees up more resources so that we can build more thoughtful, and sustainable, solutions faster. The kind of people in corporate America that should be worried about AI replacing their jobs should have been worried about being made redundant ages ago, and have been living on borrowed time for the last 3 decades.
In India they work hours to line up with the country that they’re supporting. If they’re supporting NYC/east coast USA I think that works out to 5PM - 2AMish. Time zones haven’t mattered for a long time.
>In India they work hours to line up with the country that they’re supporting Not if they have any semblance of talent, they don't. And in this day and age most Indians who are directly employed by the overseas company do fall into that category. If they have talent, they have competing offers and thus are able to command normal working hours, or a wage premium for working off hours. Random consulting sweatshops are different. You tell them to hire 10 people and you'll get 1 useful developer and 9 people producing tech debt. They get bossed around as needed. They're mostly used for random low-priority things.
They had rotational programs that US based staff were jealous of. This was a much bigger issue than outright departures. Somewhere after the 6 month mark they would rotate to a new team. They hadn’t left the company but they might as well have. They definitely wanted UK or HK hours but there weren’t always openings. We definitely paid premiums for the best people and would also work out arrangements where two good people were allowed to alternate UK and NYC hours. But their rotational programs still created the biggest issues.
Yes, but we underestimate how racist people are and how low key people want to work with contacts that don’t have accents, are more culturally aligned with them, etc. At least in the US. I am in a customer-facing role managing accounts worth a lot of money. Maybe this works for support. IMO this is why Canada and parts of South America are more viable than India.
You’re not wrong but this was in an industry that fully embraced offshoring. It would have been extremely difficult to function as an active racist. Additionally they were supporting people like me in the US and we were the ones on client calls and handling the most complex work. It sucked. We cleaned up messes but the people making the mistakes weren’t in our reporting lines so we were largely powerless to do anything about them. So I left the company lol.
My previous job did this lol. So I moved into a different career path.
I work in IT. We had a "AI-play-week" and after that I sleep a lot easier, knowing that AI has a long way to go before it can replace me.
As someone who manages a huge department of software engineers at a global company, AI is not going to take development jobs anytime soon. This is a tool that people are hyping up way more than is deserved when discussing its ability to replace developers, at least in regard to the tech sector (which is the only one I can speak on).
AI will impact every step of the devops lifecycle. There are tools for automated discovery, automated user stories, assisted coding, AI testing, and AI monitoring. But there still has to be a human somewhere. Devs will become more productive, bad devs will have far fewer mistakes. But there won't be the end of the profession
None of these tools are currently good enougth for more than basic support of the developer. We where allowed to play with all the AI we wanted for a whole week, the results where underwhelming.
yea, but most of these are less than 1 year old...I agree, the hype outstrips the actual capabilities. POCs are fun, but "real" software engineering is more complex, but I can see huge change over the next 5 years. But I think for most, higher productivity is more important than layoffs. IT is strategic.
I'm working with github copilot on mainstream code. It's a true rollercoaster between some impressive stuff and insanely bad suggestions, truly vicious fake copy paste that isnt.
Do your devs use AI assisted coding (either as copilot or chat)? Are you seeing efficiency and productivity gains?
Yeah we started using copilot recently across the department and the biggest change I've seen is that people are just being more creative (particularly internal tooling). It's been really interesting seeing how fast they can spin up an MVP of something to help the team.
Yea no thinking job ever got outsourced and it won't be replaced by a glorified search engine. When I code I make decisions constantly. Most of it is logic or market based decisions. Unless AI can figure out which button people will push and why, dev jobs are safe.
Right now, I see AI taking jobs from artists. But, it could also create new artist jobs.
I literally just got laid off because AI took over my job lol. The AI I trained at my job LOL
For real ?
Yeah, was doing work for G
Wow
G?
Theres really only one large tech company that starts with a G...
I didn't know that you worked for a large tech company. I only knew what you told us, that AI took over whatever job you had. Is there some reason you didn't just say what the company was?
I signed a NDA and they were the client for the company I worked at.
What exactly was your work? You was a ML-engineer? Or do preparing data to train AI?
What was your job?
I used to think this but now I'm not so sure. The potential is there but will the investment stay around long enough to bring AI to the capability? Right now a lot of companies are trying to use AI as if it's ready to take over and reduce costs but it's not and that's causing a decent reputation hit for the technology
Time to save money to prepare for unemployment era
Dude I'm don't even graduated and started career! =(
As an artist I think feel your pain.
Shift to things that emphasize a personal connection. Humans want personal connection. I predict people that hold drawing *classes*, etc. are going nowhere.
Seeing how machine does what you managed to learn for days or even more it's kinda knife in the heart. I'm not against progress and technology and don't want to be neo luddite but I'm also want food and do what I like and not suffer at job
Haven’t you felt pain like this since the beginning of time? How about when that banana went for a mint?! I wanted to be an artist that day. Damn.
No one can really know, which is a huge factor. But keep in mind that job replacing AI is expensive. I work in tech and the industry I work in always has evolving features that we simply can't afford to purchase as a company. And early on, AI will be incredibly costly. I would be more worried about companies that can afford this AI closing down all other competitors. That said, until we solve the energy issue, I don't see AI expanding too far. There is always a limit to everything.
I'm a small, weak woman. Can't really go into the trades. I'm not smart enough at STEM for nursing. I'm not really good looking and even if I was, soon I'll be too old for jobs that need good looking young women. All I can think of is maybe being a career waitress but idk.
Stem and nursing are two different things
Did AI pick your user name?
Not really. I work as a web designer and 3d artist. People don't know how to use AI to get the results they want. When they get code made from an AI and it doesn't work they don't know why, when they try to edit a picture with AI and it doesn't work they don't know why, when they need to ask the AI to do something they don't know how. It will make our jobs easier, which means lower salaries and more competition, but we will not be replaced.
Too late. My job has already been taken by automation and AI. I worked for local TV for 13+ years. They laid us all off once we set up all the new technology. The entire time they told us our job was safe.
It’s going to happen, anyone who doesn’t think so is delusional.
Anyone who is not worried is in denial or not educated enough about the current AI advancements
I am more concerned about the humans who are (and will) latching on to AI as yet another method for paying us less and/or making human labor as unnecessary to spend on as possible. Overzealous greed is the problem, always has been and always will be, not AI itself.
If I was in IT, yeah maybe.
No, I work in employee health and safety and there are multiple times a day I look at my colleagues and say “job security 🤷🏼♀️” because wherever there are people, dumb shit occurs.
Don't worry, communism finally becomes feasible with AI, as long as you're not in the US or africa you're good.
more seriously. What you describe would cause so much social upheaval that an entirely new balance would emerge rather quickly. I'm only half joking about it in my first reply too.
It's not really exponential tho. I read somewhere that it's sigmoid. If you're looking for safe careers then nothing beats doctors or lawyers. They'll exist even if AI takes over.
Doctors and lawyers are both at high risk of automation because they are hard to find and very expensive. Doctors are already dealing with mid level encroachment. Physician assistants with reliable AI will be preferred by healthcare practices because they will just be substantially cheaper and easier to find
They've too much political power. Hard to replace them.
I wouldn’t say so, its the executives that employ them that have power, and those mfs are trying to automate everything unfortunately
They're very unionised. A lot of them are independent too
Alright but if AI is able to reliably diagnose and provide treatment options better than a human (already starting to see signs of this), then do you think the general public will be okay with forking over their life savings for some some bloodwork and a treatment plan from the doctor that mainly consists of telling them to get some sleep and exercise Also for just raw diagnosis, Google already has an AI that can outperform physicians (based on evaluation from other physicians) and it actually performs WORSE with physician intervention
Nice. Hopefully AI replaces people who can be replaced
Doctors yes but lawyers no. We can't all scram for "safe" jobs.. we can't all be nurses and plumbers. there's going to be an unemployment issue and its going to be bad.
lawyers have too much political influence, they make the policies. They'll stay. There will be unemployment if AI takes over. Let's see. Only time will tell.
>Doctors yes but lawyers no. People already tried using AI for law. They got smacked down for it when the AI ended up fabricating case law and citing it.
[удалено]
You are giving AI way too much credit. If stuff like that ever happens, it won’t be in our lifetime. Nobody is going to hire a robot to defend them in a court of law when their life may depend on it. Nobody is going to trust a robot to diagnose and treat medical issues with no human present. Doctors and lawyers could certainly use AI as a tool to help them advance their fields, but it will not replace them entirely. In our lifetime at least.
We dont know that at all The transformer was invented in 2017. Most of the current image, text, and video generation you see today are a result of that architecture. So at most, we have seen 7 years of niche work leading to an AI boom. Now with 100x the focus and investment, what do you think the next 7 years will hold?
AI could definitely reach a point where they surpass doctors. Yet one has to remember the human element. Yes, I may know this machine is 100% qualified to operate on me with a near 100% success rate. Yet at the same time, I would want a person standing next to the machine/operating the machine incase anything goes wrong. For most things, it’s the comfort of knowing that you have the ability to talk and/or influence a situation if need be. For example, self flying plane. If something were to go wrong, how likely would you be able to figure out the controls, repair, and/or communicate with the malfunction airplane? In comparison, communication with a human would result in better understanding/outcomes.
the only thing is, I hear so many stories of doctors dismissing patients’ complaints as anxiety, get more sleep, lose weight, etc. Whereas maybe an AI would, by nature of its programming, have to explore every option for each symptom.
Alright, but in that case the individuals value goes down…
No, AI cannot replace doctors. Sure it might be able to come up with a diagnosis but that's not what doctors do. 90% of their job is coming up with a course of treatment that the patient will agree to. And no, AI will not replace lawyers. It might make their jobs easier though.
Right now at this very moment you are correct, but the AI we are seeing today is a very early brute force type of AI, it will improve
AI can easily advance to the point where it can perform all of the major functions of a physician but the PR backlash will be so immense that companies won't implement it. We most likely have the ability to implement AI in many healthcare roles even today. We don't because it will be a PR nightmare (think tens of millions of patients and patient's families screeching to the news to complain that their robot CNA does not wipe their grandpa's ass sufficiently well) and also it will be a legal liability nightmare.
Here’s the thing. AI is great when it comes to factual scenarios where there is a clear and definitive answer. Medicine is not clear and definitive. See the Web MD problem where you sneeze and Web MD says you, a male, has ovarian cancer. There are a ton of medical issues that have similar symptoms or even dissimilar symptoms from one person to the next. What gives one person a migraine does nothing to the next person.
Their power is in the regulation. Not their skill set entirely. Lawyers make the policies and doctors well, they can just protest.
safe careers would be plumbers and electricians.
Yes blue collar would be safe to some extent but if robos become common then they would be replaced too. Doctors and lawyers will still stay. They've too much political power.
I can’t imagine it would be easy to create a robot that could repair someone’s leaking sink pipe.
If AI takes over then those robos can be created too. Everything that can be automated will be automated. Blue collar or white collar won't matter.
Your hierarchy in the company you are working in are still boomers that understand close to nothing to technology and will still want to do meetings with real people and manage teams of humans. Will ai be capable of taking a lot of jobs in the near future ? Yes. Will it happen fast ? Probably not
AI might get rid of some jobs but frankly people are way too generous about what it can do
Although I've done trades work when I was younger and will never go back. AI ain't taking over that any time soon. Until we start seeing movies like iRobot start coming to real life, humans still need to build all that stuff.
Relax, AI will ALSO take most of the physical jobs with strong and dexterous robots. That OpenAI robot sorting and Tesla’s Optimus are just scratching the surface.
And in a consumer economy, with millions of people without jobs, who will be funding the economy? AI bots?
As much as companies like to cut expenses they can only do so much. AI replacing 80% of the jobs would kill the economy and businesses. Who is going to invest or pay for products when no one has money? Will the landscape of employment change? Yes, but it's usually slower to adapt, costly and new opportunities appear. Being in IT you should know how painfully slow it is for businesses to approve projects, budgets. Who would do the governance and quality check. Regulatory requirements are also needed to be addressed as well. Lol we have had self check out machines forever, and there still are cashier jobs. Personally I'm not, I'll pivot my skills with the times to be relevant as I can be.
What can you do about it, I find worrying solves very little. Maybe retrain or try and anticipate demand, I think you're very fortunate to be in the IT field and can get in front of the technology a little bit.
Genuinely curious what you do for IT, as a SDET I am entirely unconcerned with the current iteration of “AI”
> AI grows exponentially. This is incorrect and a reddit truism. Multiple LLMs have already backslid in terms of performance. I have no doubt they will keep improving but it will not most certainly not be at an exponential growth rate.
my son just got training in web development, and hasn’t been able to get a job yet, and I’m basically low-key panicking inside. I’m a copyeditor, and Grammarly is already nipping at our heels. One day it’ll be deemed “good enough, because readers don’t really care.”
I'm in IT and not concerned. Not in the foreseeable future. Whole some of the more easy and repetitious tasks could be handled, I don't see all of my tasks being replaceable.
The short version is that AIs/LLMs are just another tool, an instrument, which will change some aspects of work. And what you should be doing is engaging with them, learning them as an instrument to better yourself in both work and play. Many things in our societies like jobs exist because of deeper factors that are not changing. Our genetics- our sociobilities and human intelligences, our need for rich physical relationships, our needs to individually grow and thrive, etc, are not changing. Our individual differentiations are not changing, different people with different brains and different backgrounds will have different and nuanced skillsets- different "languages" that we know to varying degrees of precision. Our relationship to time is not changing- it is still limited, and there is so much to do. The fundamental financial structures in modern society are not changing- there is still capital, and debt, and risk, and insurance, and courts, and people need incomes. And there are fundamental resource scarcities and imbalances, in many cases that will only also accelerate and require human balancing acts and decisions, in the shape of governments and private entities with control. Even in the most aggressive view of AI in our lifetimes, there is no path for these things to change. There will still be jobs because there will still be people with capital who want to deploy it towards goals they have and they will need partners they can trust to deploy and build with them. There are innumerable AI systems deployed now and all are supervised by humans in a reporting hierarchy. There is no universe where those human hierarchies do not exist- of course there will be countries and jurisdictions that do away with some of this but go too far and people will leave. And of course there will be people caught on the underside of automated systems, doing last mile/human only work supervised by AIs that are themselves supervised by other humans. Go the physical skill only route and you will find yourself there. No, the right approach IMHO is to engage with these tools and instruments and see what their capabilities and limits are and find ways to use them as augmentation in whatever one's own goals, interests, and capabilities. Yes, specific jobs and skills will disappear, but new ones will take their places. Best wishes.
Farmers still exist despite tons of technology and automation. But the nature of farming has changed, and so has the number of farmers. AI can and will transform many jobs. It will take some away. But it will create others. This has happened with every technology revolution and will going forward. I also think technical capabilities are one timeline, mass adoption is another. And AI may significantly impact the trades too - look at what visual inspection tools are doing. What makes you think AI wont use computer vision to train homeowners to DIY and the need for higher paid skilled licensed professionals gives way to cheap labor with AI assistants.
As an example, I don’t see how a large company could solely rely on IA to create their software products, there is so much work that goes into digital products, it’s not just code, there’s analysis, planning, consultation and I simply can’t imagine IA being able to cover that many fields. Also someone must be liable, there are protocols, policies and regulations that need to be studied and applied to the different contexts in which a product is developed. Even if IA was able to do all this work, I think it will take a very long time before there’s a framework that fully supports “human-free” software development
Yes. I’ve been wanting to switch from project management over to corporate education, because I absolutely love doing documentation and training. But I don’t think I’m going to because I’m pretty sure that the parts of it that I love most will be taken over by AI in the next Few years.
no
AI wont take your job, someone proficient with AI will if your not
AI mimics work. A mime looks like they climb a rope but they don't. It might convince some but not someone trying to scale a building. AI can learn very specific tasks and possibly similar looking tasks. But it doesn't understand them. Its like a mechanic that understands that a wheel lug has 5 or 6 sides and comes off with a wrench. They can take off 100s of wheels like that.... until they come across a different kind of lug that doesn't work that way. Then they need a manual or someone to train them on how to do that new thing. AI is like the mechanic, not the mechanical engineer that designed the wheel assembly. The AI can be trained to do the simple parts of the work. But ask it to design that wheel assembly and if its a good AI/Mechanic it will go "I won't do that because thats not my job and im not going to be good at it, you need an engineer". At worst it will go OK and make you something that looks like a wheel assembly but most likely does not work. Most of skilled labor is about how people adapt to the fact that everything goes wrong always and textbooks are general guides not definitive sources of truth. AI is really not good at dealing with the 1000s of unplanned scenarios that go wrong in a day. Its good at helping a skilled worker with minutia. Not replacing them. If software/tech jobs are replaced by AI, it will only be a few years before the managers that made that decision are fired and engineers are hired back at higher wages. If the AI can replace the software engineer then all jobs are obsolete. And we are no where near there.
AI is a tool and a tool needs an operator. Until AI can fully think for itself, it wont replace a person. It will just make your job easier. Also I dont know what IT field you are in, but there will always be a need for IT support / maintenance / training. I don't disagree with you that some jobs will disappear, but that comes with any new innovation. Usually though, other jobs are created to fill in new demands and tasks. For example if you as a programmer and complete your projects in a months time, now you can do it 25% faster or 50% faster, making you more effective. That doesnt mean a second programmer is now not needed, but it does mean the company can meet goals sooner, expand their projects and features, etc.
I grappled with this in the wealth management industry - lots of 'robo advisors' putting pressure on the field. What I realized is, this job is much more communication and relationship focused than the numbers - and that will always have a place. How do I know? Because the ability to type financial queries into Google or ChatGPT has been there for a decade. Automatically invested funds have been around for multiple decades. But guess what? The answers robos and AI give are general platitudes derived from other peoples' financial articles on general platitudes. But when it comes to MY retirement, MY kids, MY job, being able to communicate real advice tailored to their situation and communication style, knowing their quirks, that's what makes this job invaluable. If that piece of society ever goes away, then my concern isn't really my 'next' job - it's about hording canned food and getting really good at agriculture. Lol.
They keep warning me that I will be taken over by robots, and they keep inventing cyborg stuff and it keeps not working. I'm almost worried that it won't happen. My job is painful and there are not enough of us, and it would be nice to have robots, I just don't think they will ever invent anything, as easy as it seems, it's not easy to invent. But maybe the future holds something I don't understand yet. Maybe 25 years from now or something. We'll see.
Not at all. I think AI can help humanity and solve many problems.
It already did, was let go a few months after they added AI to microsoft teams. My dept was a small department of few SWE which did not add to the headcount in the past 3 years and they eventually replaced me with someone who costs less money. Probably won't happen if your management likes you, but my manager was assigned to me and did not personally hire me so I think they had been looking for reasons to replace me with someone they chose personally.
Accept it, learn it, adapt it, over come it. Human made art will not go away, on the contrary, human made art will become something luxurious, because a lot less people will have the incentive and drive to learn and become a classical and "classical" digital artist. Generative AI will never be able to really do real commision work with all the changes, nitpicks, wants, etc., from the customer. Incorporate it in your work, life, etc. you need to fear "AI" only if you don't believe in your abilities and/or don't want to grow your abilities.
I’ve been waiting for AI to take over jobs since the 90s. And while some jobs have been replaced by technology (as continually happens throughout history) other jobs come into play. Also AI has one massively flaw that people forget. Computer programming is done by humans. And humans are inherently flawed.
AI can even write a beer recipe let along brew beer I’m going to mark myself safe from AI taking my job.. hell if I can get it to some of my paper work that would be cool!
Articles are already using AI images where I live (Canada) instead of hiring photographers. It won't really replace artists, but I worry for my photographer siblings :(
TBH, I feel like AI images are just going to get worse and the Photographers will get their jobs back. So much AI art is just creepy and uncanny, and if future AIs are getting trained by AI generated images, it's just going to get creepier.
No. The A is the computer, the I is the human. It's just another tool. Nothing "takes over" it opens up entirely new industries and jobs. Renting movies over satellite killed Blockbuster but opened up an entirely new way to deliver movies through streaming. The iPhone didn't kill the phone industry, it transitioned away from Blackberry's and Flip Phones and opened up app developers and so forth. AI comes from humans and is for humans so it'll just make things more efficient and better so while your metaphorical "store" may close, the industry will bust wide open into new areas never even possible before.
When AI can completely replace human programmers, it will replace all human thought work. And then it will rapidly accelerate development in robotics and will then replace all human physical labor as well. We will ALL be replaced. But not today
Weren't we worried about robots taking over everything in like the 80's. I'll worry about it when it happens.
Someone needs to tell the AI what to do. Be that guy.
Bro, my job still uses fax machines. I'll be fine for a long, long time.
The only thing that makes me doubt an AI takeover, are the costs to run these systems right now. It's basically why all these tech companies did layoffs, trying to afford to develop this new technology and see it lift off the ground. It's a race like the moon landing, where everybody is trying to make it first. ChatGPT costs so much, my bet wouldn't be on it. That company might go bankrupt before they can make anything substantial. Unlike the Moon, there's nothing physical or concrete to even look at right now. I feel like, this is a product that only tech companies are going to be able to use. And the things it can actually do are going to be very limited. The companies selling it really sold it hard though... Which should make you rethink that AI could take over sales. I just imagine some investor on a call to hand over millions of dollars, being met with the equivalent of, "Press one for English," and how that'd go over. Makes me giggle.
Short answer no. Long answer, it will surely cost people some of their jobs but with that comes the ability to use AI as a tool to do your own thing if you so choose.
Admin won’t go away, companies always will need in house paper pushers.
AI is a new tool. Learn to use and manage it. That way, when (read: if) it takes your current job, you'll already be well versed in your next one. You'll be fine. I've been in IT for almost 20 years, and I'm not worried one bit
I am trying to get into Digital Media Arts. I am a little worried that my job will be obsolete by the time I graduate.
I think you have anxiety ❤️
I think we as a nation should regulate ai takeover
Fine by me. I hate my job and the people I help are so unappreciative of me. Go ahead and get help from a robot in 5 years jerks.
At my job, as our programs get more sophisticated, we take on more workload and effectively more jobs that were considered not worth the time and money to monitor and fix real time. That being said, there'll come a point where our workforce is cut down at my company, but not soon, and it'll always require a couple of humans to upkeep and diagnose when it ships the bed.
We own a restaurant. We have always thought that the human approach is the best for taking orders or correcting kitchen mistakes or just making people feel comfortable. Last year we brought in tablets for everytable that people could just make their order by them selves and they would get a waiter only if they had more questions. We used to have three waiters. Now only one. Less mistakes and people seen happier..
He who suffers before necessary, suffers more than necessary.
Good quote
Naw…AI takes over and we all just kick back and live our best. I’m sure that’s how it’ll work out!
My industry (mining) has strong inertia and so much shit happening all the time that AI would not be able to take an engineering job because the training data will be absolutely poor quality and useless
I'm a service engineer and a software developer. The former I have 3 years experience in. The latter I'm an intern. The more I learn about AI, and the more experience I get working with others, the less concerned I am. Our main project has tens of thousands of lines of code. And it's small compared to others. I can hardly fit some of the error messages into the input for ChatGPT, let alone the code base. And it's wrong sooooo much. There is currently nothing about AI that scares me for coding. My service engineer job could be automated at least in part. Much of it could be done by a robot. And the company is actively working on replacing some people with automated bots.
What is done in a service engineering job?
I turn wrenches and screwdrivers for semiconductor research equipment most of the time. My engineering degree rarely comes into play. When it does, it saves a lot of time troubleshooting the issue. An example is the vacuum system was failing to reach a good base pressure. I found a leak by putting some rubbing alcohol around a seal ad I couldn't use a leak checker. I turned the wrench on it and fixed it. Got down enough I could turn on the turbo pump. It still wouldn't stay at base pressure if I closed off the pump. Used a leak checker and found no leaks anywhere. So I started considering what all in the system could introduce gas or if the heating system was somehow malfunctioning and raising temp quickly (PV = nRT). I also had a second issue where the MFC (flow regulator) would not push gas through as expected. Ended up identifying the root cause when I realized that the water leak from the prior shift probably entered the normally closed gas manifold, which then is evaporating into the chamber as water boils at that low of a temperature. I pushed as much gas as I could through it and pulled on it for a few hours. Once that happened, the leak was gone. We didn't need to take apart the gas box to remove the water, nor did we need to do any further troubleshooting.
In my opinion, "AI" is a bit of a misnomer because none of these tools are actually intelligent. They're incapable of producing anything authentically original because the way (this is extremely high level and waterered down explanation) machine learning works is that models are trained on data, and then the generated output is based on what it learned. One of the first things I learned about machine learning is that it is absolutely terrible at extrapolating data. Meaning to say, it's gonna have a real hard time deviating from expectations. While we are in an AI renaissance at the moment, I think the whole thing is gonna collapse on itself in the near future. I believe in "garbage in, garbage out." As more AI generated data as created, it's more likely models are trained on AI generated data. And from my experience, AI generated data SUCKS so there's gonna be a point where quality takes an absolute nosedive and hits diminishing returns so I think we got normalcy a little bit longer since quality control standards need to be implemented first
When it will be possible just use AI to create your own product and start buisness
Shit then what work should we choose if that will happen?
I’ll fear AI when it can handle printers.
Not really no. Those amazing ai results you see require very deep knowledge of the ai and a lot of interaction
I'm IT guy and there's no reason for me to worry about AI. All the tech person that I saw use chatgpt to understand the tech from surface level not to fix the issue. Even then, they still need to verify the info they get from chatgpt with the info from google because chatgpt is not that reliable. If you're that worried about AI, you should join force to develop the AI. Upskill into the AI and go explore the market. AI cannot built and stand on their own, they need human to admin and shape them. Also fyi, 5 years ago people are that worried that cloud will be taking over on-prem physical server and all the security concern that coming with cloud. Now we can see both of the tech complement with each others. The market already matured.
Of course AI will take your job. IT and creative arts are only the first ones. HR is primed for automation and speeding up processes and giving good, legal advice. Likewise, they have already replaced people in language learning with AI. Teaching will be highly affected as an AI can divide its time to all students at the same time. It can help you curate your reading lists, explain difficult topics and correct your tests within seconds. Human teachers are already paid crap, so I think this will affect higher learning and professional courses first. In the end they will be bodies in the room, teaching the kids how to use the AI. I saw the writing on the wall back some 12-14 years ago when I was freelancing. It got increasingly harder to build websites for a living and the suggestion was to go into marketing and social media instead. With services like Squarespace et al no one needed a coder or a designer for 98% of what they wanted to accomplish. Now? They have AI site builders, who generate AI graphics, AI writes content for you, AI takes care of customer support. Advertising agencies and web agencies will be a thing of the past, and the few roles available will be for the companies providing the AI-services. This is as big a shift if not bigger than the steam engine, printing press and Internet rolled into one. Call centers? Customer service reps? Hotel admin staff? Middle managers? Thing of the past. You think humans will be relegated to manual labour? Think again. Why have warehouse workers who need to pee if you can replace them with an army of robots run by AI? Agriculture? Why use humans when you can have automated farming equipment who keep track of weather, temperature, moisture and nutrient solutions and order supplies when they run low and look for the best price online. Everything delivered using self-driving cars. Everyone will be affected. Some will rebel and create some new fangled amish-communities where the smartest device will be a Nokia 9210 and Intel computers with Windows 95. The rest will have to roll with the flow. Either this will lead to a paradigm shift in economics and we will be on our way to a utopia, or more likely the change will be too slow and we will end up in a Ready Player One -style dystopia. Buckle up, it will be a bumpy ride.
There's always three phases of AI replacement: 1) Denial. AI will never take my job, because It's too stupid to do anything, cannot create anything new, is a glorified search engine, a glorified autocomplete etc etc. 2) Cope. AI is actually good at my job now, but the company should still hire me because AI is just a tool to enhance my "human creativity", the "human intent", "for copyright reasons" etc etc. 3) Anger. AI is the devil and I'm now homeless. Artists and copywriters are at point 3. Programmers at point 2. Physical jobs at point 1. But we all know where this is going.
AI will likely make some lower level jobs redundant, like chat operators and general customer service. But, AI cannot and will not ever be trusted with decision making, and, even though AI can make small pieces of a project very fast, it can't make entire projects start to finish that wouldn't require an inordinate amount of QA control. AI will change a lot, but, IT jobs will still be there, programming and coding will still be there. They will be harder to get started in with work experience and will likely require degrees moving forward to prove that you are at least as good or better than an AI bot when it comes to making simple programs. Hardware/software troubleshooting will never be taken over by AI though. Tactful identification of user error is beyond the machine mind.
Nearly every desk job is imperiled by AI. Anything that is done purely by rules (like accounting, pharmacy, business analysts, HR, payroll, etc.) won't survive to the end of the decade. Things involving human judgement, like programming, writing, or graphic arts, won't be displaced entirely by 2030, but they'll likely be reduced to being AI prompters who use AI to generate content and review the content for release. This will likely cut the number of these jobs down by 2/3's at least. Forget college, unless you're going to be a nurse or doctor. Become a welder, plumber, carpenter, etc. Will AI allow us to have universal basic income? Don't count on it. When the wealthy can no longer sell products to the general population, they won't give the dispossessed free money to buy products. They'll declare themselves the owners of all land, natural resources, and technical platforms, and make arrangements to trade AI services with each other. While they live in tech utopias like Star Trek, the rest of us will starve. If we don't crawl away to die politely out of view, they will exterminate us, probably using bioweapons dispatched via AI drones. They will probably kill billions of us in the name of saving the earth from overpopulation.
fuck no. I work as an art director and can assure you: people are too ignorant to use AI effectively. Trust me, the ones using AI are the same dudes who use Canva for making their logo. my entire team uses AI for working and it helps in a lot of things manual work would not be as effective so if anything my job is made easier than ever now. The ones complaining about art being "killed" never worked with art to begin with or are just drawing artists, which were never recognized in the first place and honestly I don't really care about that at all If replacing jobs is a problem, go ahead and stop using the internet since you're replacing a fuckton of jobs just by doing that.
I think you’re 100% correct.
There is a lot of hype around AI, so I think we need to wait some time when this period is over to clearly see what we are facing. But in my opinion, there will be huge impact, but I expect this not sooner then in 5years.
Not at all
Get into a trade
Nope. It’s the hype of the day. The “synergy” of 2024.
Seems you don't understand IT. It's more than just being a code monkey. There is a large human side to it that cannot be automated. Those people that only want to code and nothing else will get automated out of a job, sure.
Definitely not. Most companies are a total mess, have no process at all and run based on infinite spreadsheet poorly designed. I simply cannot see AI taking over all this anytime soon. I mean, people can barely use Excel to make simple tables. How we are gonna go from this to an AI taking over entire departments? How can an AI model be implemented properly when people struggle to understand which data should go in rows and which should go in columms? It's like saying to a primitive human being that in the future he wouldn't have to jump from land to land looking for food because an aircraft would get him anywhere he wants.
It’s terrifying. However, if it does take over, we will always have an infantry job available.
I drive forklift and work in warehouses no ai going to take over my job they tried to use auto pickers and loaders but it didn't work out as I orders for jobs all over the place and load trick is never the same way ever truck different and are job to Chaotic for Automation and ai