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Comment by stoddardlabs | Hacker News Reader

Ive been really worrying about my future career wise the last month+ because of chatGPT and the incoming AI wave of innovation. The issue I have is, what’s the obvious choice for a career pivot? Do I switch to something like nursing where physical labor is involved? Do I get into networking and deal with setting up physical servers? I don’t have a great answer, so it seems to me that the best course of action is continue trying to become a better software engineer, and see what happens. I don’t know if anyone else feels more or less in the same boat or not…

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Carpentry would be my recommendation. Even feels a bit like working on a react app because you are constantly making new tools to make your work easier.

The simple, brutal truth is this: The age of human accomplishment is almost over. It could be as early as 10 years from now, or it could take another 10 years after that, but sooner or later, "people doing things" is going to end. There will be no field of expertise where even the best humans can compete with AIs.

Instead of worrying how you can avoid the inevitable and win tomorrow's rat race one more time, I recommend you prepare yourself mentally for this. The vast majority of people will no doubt be in denial long after they have already been made obsolete. Defying mass sentiment and recognizing the truth is perhaps the last great truly human act left for anyone to do.

Hmm, AI may be poised to make software devs, copywriters, and accountants redundant, but it's not likely to make a good salad, play a killer live concert, or set a broken arm. At a certain level I think I'm fine with being made redundant (I don't hate my job, but I wouldn't mind retiring early - unless that was to sleep in a cardboard box). So for me the question is can our society survive AI replacing a lot of lucrative white-collar gigs - maybe?

> but it's not likely to make a good salad, play a killer live concert, or set a broken arm

Why not? I see no reason to assume that AI can't do those things better than any human.

Pretty sure those 3 examples will be completed by robots this year if they haven’t already.

You don't even need AI to make a good salad, someone can program a robot with pre-made recipes.

And the other examples are also poor. AI today can already compose unique music.

I don't think it'll be 10 or 20 years. I think it'll be more like 2% of good jobs (or 10%+ in random sectors) will disappear on a yearly basis for the next 50 years.

Learn to drive a truck?

I don't know honestly. I had a period recently where I wasn't sure if my business was worth/able to continue and I spent some free time thinking about what I could do next and what seemed like a good call for the next 10-20 years. I have to admit all of this would have changed my thoughts significantly. For now I feel slightly more comfortable over the short term than several months ago so I've decided to watch and see how things shake out. I have to say I am pessimistic about a healthier relationship between labor and capital as result of this, but that is just a feeling and not backed up by much.

Put those questions to ChatGPT.

You're probably in a good position to be the one operating the tool that's going to replace you

Operations. You still need humans to run everything physical.

> pivot

Humanism, art, politics, soldiering, crime. Anything that doesn't rely on producing value.

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