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Comment by juvvel | Hacker News Reader

What worries me is not so much the fear of a certain job becoming obsolete, but the fear of the alternative new jobs becoming inaccessible to those left behind by automation. You can have a good and stable career and do everything "right" and still end up a complete beginner a few years later because your skills are worthless now. Especially after a certain age, employers won't choose you over fresh graduates who are knowledgeable in the new tech. The standard advice is to "always keep learning" but not every job will give you the opportunity to do so. Someone's gotta do what has to be done, we can't all just learn new things all the time. Also I wonder how much we'll realistically be able to keep up because the pace of new change has been steadily increasing. We've seen AI breakthroughs over the course of months.

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100% and this has ruined millions of lives throughout history, most notably in the Rust Belt. A heck of a lot of auto workers had their job automated away and weren't able to make the jump to white collar work or another trade profession and so fell into unemployment or much less lucrative service employment. And the country ignored the pain and despair of these folks because they were a concentrated group of people, outside of the Coastal bubble.

The people on this forum who go on and on about "we have gone through this before and society kept going, people were fine in the end" are half right. Society as a whole did keep going and people outside of the Rust Belt weren't directly affected.

But what is different this time is that this is going to annihilate 70-90% of jobs in the "knowledge sector" and it is going to do so very, very quickly. This will knock out most of us comfortable engineers, but also middle management, consultants, journalists, writers, artists, paralegals, influencers, wall street traders, maybe even teachers, lawyers, and doctors to an extent.

I don't know what the US will do with the middle/top of the income brackets all across the country suddenly facing mass unemployment and then the subsequent race to fill service or trade jobs. How is a software engineer who got a 30 year mortgage that costs $3k a month going to survive going from a $180k a year salary to being an electrician apprentice at $50k a year? And that is in an environment where this hypothetical former engineer was the top candidate out of 100 other former engineers vying for a spot. GPT-4 will kill many people via unemployment unless it is paired with a UBI, or at least that is my pessimistic view.

I believe that most of the rust belt jobs were sent to countries with lower wages/more lax environmental laws.

>> A heck of a lot of auto workers had their job automated away

And a lot of the remaining jobs went to Mexico.

> wall street traders

When I started working in FinTech at a big bank, our Managing Director mentioned that he was told:

"In 2 years, there will no longer be the job of 'trader'"

This quote was from 2005 and he was sharing it with us in 2007.

While, yes, there are a LOT less traders than there used to be, it is certainly not zero.

> there are a LOT less traders than there used to be

That is the core of the problem, which has been iterated several times in this thread.

Where do those traders that used to be there go? Historically, switching careers or positions has not been insanely difficult. But as there are fewer and fewer jobs, it becomes more and more difficult for people to retrain.

Who is this super-layman that can sit down in front of ChatGPT5, ask it to produce a highly technical document and then immediately implement it's recommendations?

The man is going to ask it for explanations for days, throw something together that kinda works and hire an expert 'consultant' that should have been an employee, when it inevitably breaks or requirements change.

Who would bet the legal success of their company on the 'truthiness' of ChatGPT?

The skilled knowledge workers just got upgraded to a better set of tools and the layman is as equally clueless as ever. C++ didn't get easier to read, we just got a robot teacher.

Yeah but the point isn't that all engineers will go away, but there will be a much lower need for them at scale. Who is going to have use for a bunch of junior/mid level engineers when the job becomes purely specification writing and verification? 1 senior engineer who also plays double duty as project manager will be able to replace a team that had been like 8 people before. We aren't going to all of a sudden have 8x more projects to work on, we are going to have 8x fewer engineers. And companies will LOVE this because it will become a rat race down to the bottom salary wise as people get desperate for any job at all

The loss of low-hanging fruit is likely, I agree. Same as most mature technological markets. Making an iPhone app today is a saturated proposition, compared to a decade ago.

But the paradigm that websites, iphone apps and windows programs are the breadwinners, can very well change.

If we're really getting on the 'gpt engineering revolution' bandwagon, then it must logically bring quantum computing, metaverse, more cybersecurity vulnerabilities, more sophisticated internet backbone and better computing hardware with it. (And fusion power and flying pigs, ect idealism).

A revolution for one, will bring a revolution for everything and that involves an awful lot of developer-hours, once we have changed the target market from "http-websites and apps" to the next market.

I agree. Automation is getting to the point where it isn't just replacing manual jobs but now it is going to replace most creative jobs.

And it isn't going to be a high tech utopia, because a small group at the top is going to capture 95% of the wealth generated.

I would predict serious social unrest. The problem is people won't understand why they don't have jobs, so they will blame x country or z group for their problems which will lead to extremism.

I would argue many of the major historical events in the US, such as civil war, great depression, WW2, great recession were actually connected to automation requiring a reset of society.

UBI can also go different ways. It's one thing when everybody gets an equal share of some reasonable proportion of what society as a whole has produced. It's quite another when the elites (= the people who own the automation) maintain UBI on the level just enough to prevent social unrest while still maximizing profits otherwise. The latter can still be a very shitty place to live in; for a sci-fi example of something like this, consider The Expanse.

Is there an “ought” argument that deals with the “left behind” concept?

Obviously there are tons of practical considerations to deal with, but in a theoretical, general sense, is “left behind” a problem? Shouldn’t lifelong learning be a thing everyone is indeed capable of?

In an ideal world but this one isn’t and even if it were the purpose of life is living not keeping up with a endless rat race of employability in a world that doesn’t know when to slow down.

Leaving people behind is problematic because not everyone can keep up or has the time and means to do so. Should a single mother be expected to put in hours every week learning some crap on top of working and raising kids or can that person just breathe and deal with their other problems? Full time house parent that loses a spouse and has to start working. Someone in a low income house that can’t afford professional courses/books or even has access to a computer.

You ever see those commercials about kids that can’t focus on school because they’re hungry? Yeah it’s not just them. When people are deprived of life essentials or dealing with personal problems studying is the last thing on their minds.

Here we have people in tech burning themselves out and we want to export that mentality to everywhere else instead of seeing it as a problem.

I saw an interview with Ray Kurzweil recently who is a huge driver and influencer of a lot of these changes towards AI everything.

Ray is a trans humanist who believes we’re on the cusp of eternal life via the singularity.

One of the things he is relying on is that people will keep up with technology through computer brain interfaces like Neural Link but faster.

We should be seeing this come to market sometime around now.

It’s not here so I guess that’s not good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykY69lSpDdo

Worth a watch…

> Ray is a trans humanist who believes we’re on the cusp of eternal life via the singularity.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1968#comi...

The challenge is not people's inability to learn new skills but employers unwillingness to accept the risk of hiring mid-life new-learners.

This is an example of a practical concern that I'm not sure meshes with what we might presume is our shared philosophical underpinnings.

Why is the burden placed on the employer to grow their employee and not the human being to grow themselves? In a generic sense, it could be outside of the purview of the employer to consider the employee's future in that specific way (in other ways it makes more sense, like health and happiness while employed).

It seems oddly paternalistic, to me, and once you remove that moral presumption doesn't the conversation become more complex?

Since companies do need workers and working is mandatory in our society, it seems weird to expect people to always be ready (and able) to mold themselves into whatever a company wants at the snap of a finger just so they're "allowed" to work in the first place.

Ah but isn't "working is mandatory in our society" an "is" argument, not an "ought" argument? Ought jobs be mandatory in our society? That seems like a better question.

Even if we did presume that jobs should be required in society, how would it even work for a job creator to preemptively know what skills were needed with enough time to ensure at your current job you were trained for future jobs? Why would that fall to your current employer?

How is the individual going to know what to learn in advance? If anyone knows the requirements of companies, it's the companies themselves, no?

Well what are companies, if not collections of individuals? Nobody has a crystal ball, nobody can know what'll be needed next.

When you have a large pool of qualified mid-life new learners available for hire while fresh graduates are scarce, why wouldn't employers hire them?

This is only an issue if either there are genuinely not enough jobs in the field lots of people are trying to go into, in which case people should not be encouraged to go into it; or if older people demand higher compensation for the same skillset as younger people based purely on age, in which case that doesn't seem fair anyways.

And realistically, a mid-life learner is generally the better option to begin with - it's nearly impossible that someone after years of working has picked up no transferrable hard or soft skills and made no network connections of any value.

You may think so, companies are notorious for rejecting middle aged applicants in favor of 20-somethings because the latter are considered more malleable and eager to prove themselves.

> more malleable and eager to prove themselves.

That's just a polite way of saying "willing to work for less" which again means either somebody's asking for too much or someone's being exploited, which is the real issue.

Obviously its mere anecdote, but every company I have ever worked for has gladly hired middle aged entry level employees. If anything they have been preferred.

In short, the job hunt is going to become even more unbearable. I don't trust companies with the kind of leverage they're going to have with AI at their fingertips.

So software engineer salaries will experience a race to the bottom because you'd have to be grateful to be hired as one. That's just the way it is, I guess, but I can't fault people for feeling bitter that the skills they've built over many years or decades will be massively devalued. I often wonder which profession is safe from others working as hard as they can to make it less valuable. Probably you'd have to get on the side of those building the automations. Become an AI/ML engineer or starve, basically.

There are certainly plenty of people with learning disabilities, etc. Yes, most of us will have to adapt throughout our life, but not everyone is as fortunate (possibly not the right word).

I literally addressed this in my comment.

Do you believe I agree that you addressed “this” in your comment? Or would it be more likely that I implicitly categorized your comment as a practical argument, without really addressing the moral underpinnings in what you’re describing?

For example you place the burden of “learning new things” at the feet of the employer, but you don’t really justify that. Why, in a general sense, can people not learn on the remaining hours of the day?

Your comment is riddled with moral presumption and I think it’s worth figuring out what those are.

And you seem to think it's every human's moral obligation to not only spend the majority of their waking hours at work, but also their free time on making themselves more valuable to corporations. And that's not a moral presumption? Where does that leave time for anything else in life?

Why would learning something new take up all of one's free time?

If you have the secret on how to work 40+ hours, stay healthy, on top of chores and social obligations, have at least a little time for your hobbies, get your 8 hours of sleep, and learn a new profession on the side, please do share. Most people are already fully booked with a fraction of these things.

New profession? My understanding was that we were discussing evolving our existing professional skills to stay relevant in the workforce.

But yeah, I think there are many books on spaced repetition and deliberate practice such that it's hardly a secret.

Besides, does everyone have a right to every single one of those things you've listed all the time? I wouldn't argue so, considering we're talking about people who are providing less value over time to their fellow human being.

When time conflicts exist, you must prioritize, and I would imagine "remain able to contribute meaningfully to society" (with caveats around capability) ends up being more important than, "maintain multiple hobbies".

And no, I don't think people are, generally, perfectly optimizing their time.

So people should not be allowed to sleep properly (8 hours), eat well, exercise, have time for loved ones, keep their area clean (chores), feed themselves properly (prep, cook, cleanup), attend to any other needs simply so that we don't have to inconvenience companies with the task of training up employees in their weak spots? You are either a troll, a young person, or have no family.

Can you imagine a world where all of those things don't take up literally every second of your non-work time?

If you did indeed live in such a world, would your opinion change? If people did indeed have ~30 minutes a few times a week to keep up with their field's growth (and that's all it took), would that matter to you?

Trying to find the theoretical line for you.

I'm really really skeptical about the professional growth you can achieve during mostly unguided ~2 hours a week. Might be enough to read some articles, but not enough to build any marketable skills. ETA: I know very few people who find it enjoyable or sustainable to account for every single minute in their day, humans also need rest and downtime to continue to function.

Why unguided? And why does learning require losing rest and downtime or having to "account for every single minute" of your day?

I'm not sure where you're getting those things, these aren't "either/or" suggestions, but "both/and".

> The standard advice is to "always keep learning" but not every job will give you the opportunity to do so.

Yes, we "ought" not let people starve, go without heating, or become homeless because their skills were obsoleted by automation.

We "ought" to share the rewards and efficiencies of automation with the people that it displaces, rather than solely with the owners of capital.

Uncertain. How old are you to be so knowledgable about the challenges of learning when 40, 50, 60, 70 or beyond?

> You can have a good and stable career and do everything "right" and still end up a complete beginner a few years later because your skills are worthless now.

Nothing about that is new. It has been a common fear and very real issue since the industrial revolution took hold.

Just that it's happening faster and more ruthlessly than ever before.

Is it? I’d say a lot of stuff around a century or two ago was far worse than what we’re going through.

It's more ruthless than the industrial revolution? Are you surfing HN from a workhouse?

If it has been that bad or worse before, I wonder why we're not learning from it then. Humanity as a whole will be fine but tons of individuals are going to have their lives ruined.

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