If you are white collar then it’s going to “disrupt” your field.
I work in tech. I got laid off last year. I wasn’t at Alphabet or Amazon or anything. Much smaller company. But AI “optimization” has ravaged the tech industry and not just programmers. Admins, database specialists, network specialists, developers, you name it. Our job market is absolutely fucked.
In my county, a major metro area in the US (like, top 10) craigslist used to be the place to get real job postings. If it wasn’t a recruiter then your odds of getting a callback from a job posting there is pretty high. There are plenty of postings for other fields like mechanics and tradesmen and so on. For the few tech categories: nothing in the last month. Zero postings. Not even recruiter ads. Literally nothing. It’s a wasteland.
I’ve been told to “go back to school.” I’ll be 41 soon. I’m still paying off my computer science degree. It’s worthless. What else should I go for? Accounting? HR? These are going to be taken by AI, too. Will it be a mistake? Sure. They don’t care. They’ll do it anyways.
When I got my degree my wife and I were homeless. We just got back out of the hole in the last 10 years. I was finally building savings. It’ll be gone in 60 days. She was laid off on Friday. Her industry is in property finance. Another gutted industry. She has to change industries, too.
What is to be done?
As a teacher, I’m keenly aware of the fact that my future is not guaranteed at all. Particularly because I’m a language teacher, which is a field that, at least in my country, is mostly driven by marketing. I’m sure that someone will figure out a way to make an AI English tutor sound like a great, cost-effective idea, and then I’m screwed. I give it about four or five years.
I know that because I used to do plenty of side gigs as a translator as well, and these have simply dried up in the past year and a half or so. Like, literally zero jobs since the dawn of ChatGPT and the like.
I’m glad I used most of that side hustle money to buy myself a whole workshop’s worth of woodworking tools, and my way out will be to make high-end furniture. I still need a couple years to really get good at it, but I reckon it’ll be longer until an AI chatbot can run a piece of wood through a jointer.
Maybe failing to become a teacher was a good thing for me after all. At least I don’t have to deal with the prospects of a disintegrating job market. Plus all the political hostility from the state.
I wonder when they’ll penetrate food service jobs though?
Can’t say I can see an AI cooking anything good.
I don’t even cook, I just wash dishes and serve food.
I would have liked being a teacher or professor, as I understood the profession pre-cellphones, but CS had shinier career options, plus more introvert appeal, and almost every day since acquiring my degree, there is a new horror story about how bad teachers are treated, meanwhile, I’ve had weeks where 99% of my job was goofying off instead of doing real work and I still get a raise.
I guess I fell in with the wrong group of nerds, lol. I never did sort out my own issues with introversion (undiagnosed autism?), so in some ways I’m happy I didn’t waste more time right away trying to learn to swim by being thrown in the deep end. Maybe some day I’ll go back to school. There is a labor shortage in that area after all.
Ouch, that is ROUGH. AI language tutoring is one of the elements they showcased in some of the recent new release stuff for AI. Going to school to learn a language was already a hard sell because language is mostly acquired and not learned in traditional ways. Glad you saw the writing and switched your specialty.
It’s going to be wild asking for help and then having the other person respond with “as an AI language model” because they learned their apologies from the supervision-free AI tutor
They already read from a script at most call centers. What’s the difference?