Seven Ways to Avoid Losing Your Job to AI(www.thefp.com)

14 pointsby yarapavan6 hours ago8 comments

RetroTechie2 hours ago
# In many situations, people prefer to deal with other humans. Just because we're social animals, and a machine isn't it. Sure, jobs may still be cut in such sectors. But people won't be automated away there. Just roles changing.
# I'm sure we'll find many 'niches' where AI powered robots or humanoids could replace humans, but it's just not effective. Or desired. Or fun. Soccer-playing humanoids, anyone? I suspect the novelty will quickly wear off.
# Society will have to redefine the meaning of "job" in relation to "obtain basic necessities for life". Throughout history & across the world, these 2 are strongly coupled. But going forward, it may be wise to loosen that coupling. Think UBI and the like. The robots are there to serve us!
- keiferski2 hours ago
  #1 is a thing that is constantly under appreciated by AI theorists. For example - it's been possible to have waiter-free restaurants and bartender-free bars for decades. From the automation perspective, why do these professions even exist?
  It turns out that people generally like ordering food from other people. I don't see AI changing that much.
keiferski4 hours ago
The easiest thing IMO is probably to just pick a career path that isn’t reducible to a person doing something on a computer.
If I were 20 again and picking future-proof careers, personally I think I’d go into sailing / ships or become a chef. Neither are easy jobs and the income is less than working in tech, but I don’t see Claude replacing ship captains or head chefs anytime in the next fifty years.
- wortleborltle29 minutes ago
  Both careers have notoriously bad work life balance. My father was a head chef and later restaurateur and had a very messy personal life because he worked many holidays and often 7 days a week, 14 hours a day. Not saying it can’t be better than that, but there has to be better options.
- root-parent2 hours ago
  >>I don’t see Claude replacing ship captains or head chefs anytime in >>the next fifty years.
  The nature of AI is that it can do any role.
  "Autonomous cargo ship" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_cargo_ship
  "Robotic kitchen with AI cooks and serves 120 meals an hour without human help" - https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/autonomous-ai-...
  - keiferski2 hours ago
    Yeah, and these are niche things that aren't going to replace the professions of cook or ship captain for 99.99% of scenarios. People paying for a high-end meal especially want a trained chef making their meals, not a robot. And the vast majority of restaurants don't have the resources to install an AI robot in the first place.
    For sea captains, I'd say it's highly likely that even automated ships will have captains on board for a very long time.
    In general it's like a lot of these "AI predictions": people making claims don't actually understand anything about the industries they're supposedly going to replace. Just because it can do something in an isolated scenario doesn't mean that it's economically viable as a whole.
igor_mart3 hours ago
Andrej Karpathy said once, that ..”ultimately, everything is automatable”, and as for me - it’s very likely. So I choose principle three: be proficient with AI tools.
yarapavan6 hours ago
Archive copy: https://archive.ph/SY91j
markus_zhang3 hours ago
Or you can build your own business, at least you are the owner so it’s kinda hard to layoff yourself unless willingly.
cesarrg5 hours ago
Interesting counter-intuitive tip on WFH. The study called out looks more like a co-relation and not a causation.
downbad_5 hours ago
Make yourself indispensable.
- cucumber373284218 minutes ago
  Kinda funny how the last programmers who'll get replaced are the guys taking calls from people who don't understand what they're saying, yoloing scripts, live editing shit in prod and all the other shit that the "pure engineers" doing greenfield development more or less sneered at over the years.
fzeroracer3 hours ago
This article is hot garbage going over some of the 'principals' they list.
> This is a more general version of the healthcare point. AI will generate so many new ideas and hypotheses, including for drugs and medical devices, but not only. Become a tester. Test new battery designs, new educational techniques, or new methods of conserving valued wildlife.
Like what the hell does this passage even mean? We're six years into the increasing AI psychosis among companies and you would think if it was good for ideas and hypothesis we would see them by now. Instead what we see is something incredibly incestuous as AI nonsense infects every sector whether or not it's actually needed. And in the realm where creativity flourishes I can't think of a single game that actively benefitted from the usage of AI.