I mean yeah if you're making $80/hr writing marketing noise then your job was always insecure
Which is to say, this isn't just something that AI could automate; this is a job that could have been outsourced to much-lower-paid human workers in (English-speaking) developing nations decades ago. There is no reason anybody should have been making $80/hr doing this job in the first place; there wasn't $80/hr of labor going on, nor was there a moat to doing the job that qualified only a rarified number of people that could then demand $80/hr.
Instead, the wage being paid was a path-dependent coincidence of how most companies see marketing as a profit-center, and therefore want to offer "incentive pay" for marketing jobs; and how these same companies happened to consider copywriting — really just marketing-adjacent — as a "marketing job." Coupled with the fact that any given company doesn't usually need very many copywriters, and so doesn't focus on what sort of per-headcount cost-optimizations would be needed to "scale" their copywriting.
Bland, inadequate platitudes thrown out advising people to just go find a marketable skill in the new economy ignore the fact that the number of potential occupations that you can make a decent living doing has been shrinking for decades.
If you're not a programmer, a doctor, or possess some other rare skill, you're fucked. And of course the whole point of a marketable skill is that it's only marketable because other people don't have it.
At some point we're going to have to go through the stages of grief as a society and accept that it's unsustainable to deny a middle class lifestyle to anyone who doesn't possess rare skills, especially when the list of skills considered rare shrinks decade after decade thanks to automation.
A continuously growing underclass with continuously declining prospects is a recipe for violence and revolution if we don't start taking this problem more seriously.
There are many possible answers. Universal basic income gets thrown around a lot. I like that idea, but I think it needs to be paired with wage subsidies for low wage jobs too. If basically every job is on the path to becoming low wage some day, we have to regard that as the market failure that it is and stop letting the market near-unilaterally decide the price of labor.
it's coming for these too
> A continuously growing underclass with continuously declining prospects is a recipe for violence and revolution if we don't start taking this problem more seriously.
the complete breakup of Microsoft, OpenAI, Google and Amazon will be on the political agenda in 2028
failing a political solution: violence will follow
there was a post yesterday that wished GPT-4 was never invented... it's one of Nick Bostrom's black marbles
https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf
by the end of the decade we're all going to be wishing it had never been invented
Both are fundamentally negative for people in the long run, but I think the superiority complex comes from the naive idea that if you’re the place the garbage is sent to then it’s somehow better. There’s probably a lot of TV execs who felt the same way.
Huge mistake.
This all leads back to a conversation one of my professors talked about. In other engineering professions, you need to be licensed by the state. Software "Engineers" don't have this license, so anyone can go to bootcamp and become one. I think if we changed this, then we would be able to differentiate software engineers from simple developers and that would help engineers maintain their status above chatGPT for a while longer.
But software is a different beast than bridges or power lines. It takes a creative streak that goes beyond that. And math is not the great filter in the same way it is for those disciplines. I don't think credentialism is the answer. But perhaps something more along the lines of trade licensing.
Academic achievements and actual work experiences are already sufficient here in-practice. I don’t think certifications would be as impactful as you might hope
It's one of the biggest reasons that coding interviews are such a train wreck, because of the incredible disparity of competence between potential applicants.
We've been working on that one a lot longer than frontend.
$80/hr is a pretty decent salary full time, so if people are finding chatgpt a reasonable alternative salaried office work isn't far behind here.