Will an individual who has the appropriate qualifications and experience find that tech jobs are harder to find, less stable, and less well compensated than they were 5 years ago? Yes, absolutely!
But will that same individual find that tech jobs are harder to find, less stable, and less well compensated than jobs in another industry right now? If so, which industry?
When even "the rich people" with "all the right stuff" can get laid off, people have Big Feels.
Whoever thought that didn't work during 2001 or 2008, or has a short memory.
Lots of people have skewed perspectives.
Industry / Company / Place where people make lots of money firing people = lots of clicks.
the same way advertisement upholds political correctness and same-thinking and make criticism harder, based solely on self interest and "not being demonetized by youtube", a journalist having clicks as the only metric will benefit whoever can spend money not caring for clicks to push an agenda to select the click-driving crisis du jour.
Remember that careers last 30 years, and if you're the average engineer, you're more likely to fall into the 80% of the pareto half than the 20%. Can you be confident that AI won't displace you in 10, 15, or even 20 years?
This doesn't apply to Stanford grads destined for high-tech roles in FAANG tier companies. I'm taling about the Idaho State grads who will work for IBM and Accenture and likely won't make the $500k salaries to retire from their tech roles in 10 years.
1) No, but I am nonetheless skeptical of AI-takeover in general — I'm in the wait-and-see camp and so wouldn't be put off by the might-happens.
2) If one were AI-alarmist, is there any profession you can be confident will not be displaced by AI in 10, 15, or even 20 years?
3) Confession: I'm retired and no longer have any skin in the game.
Many; Dentists, people that fix your AC, electricians, etc, etc.
In the trades themselves, we've been doing this for centuries... have a master mason supervise the journeyman masons supervising the manual day labor. AI will not be able to compete with experienced personnel. In that field they've already dumbed down the entry level requirement to "pick up a brick and move it there" and it can't go much lower.
On the other hand, if I were manufacturing survey equipment I'd worry about AR goggles as the competition.
Do I think white collar jobs go first, yes. also, the dynamics who buys all the stuff that blue collars workers install and build? without a white collar workforce the demand for that goes way down, and the supply of workers goes up.
Not saying it's going to happen just think other jobs aren't that far behind.
With the exception of law, automation has already arrived in all of these fields (to accounting first, 1-2 generations ago) and there are now more people in each field rather than less.
Answering my own question: each has a comfortable regulatory moat and competent professional society to defend it.
Same for accounting and TurboTax.
Indigenous Ranger [1]
[1] https://www.niaa.gov.au/indigenous-affairs/environment/indig...
As long as we have human using computers, we'll have more skill humans helping the humans.
We were told that inventing web search engines and giving kids ipads would completely eliminate IT. We see how that turned out LOL.
From a financial standpoint, as long as the top 1% of "IT skills" population can make the other 99% of the company more than 1% more profitable, they'll never get fired, well, completely anyway. At big companies its a pretty low bar to surpass, and small companies can contract with MSPs.
From a cultural / psychology standpoint, its pretty deeply ingrained that some folks are dumb/lazy/ignorant and thats OK, some folks have intense learned helplessness as a character trait, and some folks get really excited about forcing others to "do their work for them" WRT primate dominance. We as a culture will never avoid the appeal of BYOD, even with a miracle of 100% BYOD in IT, we as a culture would STILL hire cloud admins just so the job can be delegated if nothing else.
The pay in IT in most of the country is ... microscopic compared to software dev. New grads or people with nothing but an A+ are not getting new Stanford grad software dev salaries, its more like $22 to $25/hr in most of the country for a new help desk jockey. And it's pretty boring work for 99% of the employees 99% of the time. However, if chatgpt can fizzbuzz better than humans, doing "IT stuff" beats starvation for us computer people.
Its also worth pointing out that AI as a tool is just biased single answer web search. Web search more or less resulted in more employment. Seems likely this variation on the theme will result in more employment.
We have no way of knowing what this tech will be like in 15 years.
The iPhone was released about 15 years ago. Even the most prescient of us couldn’t have predicted how fundamentally that would change life, culture, work and business.
Any career with strong regulation is going to take longer to automate. Hands-on work as well.
For example, there is strong regulation preventing computers from practicing driving/trucking/delivery, law, medicine, nursing, physiotherapy, and certified engineering
Also, build me a robot that can do the following. I'll wait: construction, woodworking, metalworking, glassblowing, painting (painting houses), electricking, plumbing, delivery, service industry, cooking.
Yes it can write very short snippets that often make sense, but in no way can understand requirements, do debugging or maintain existing code.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/how-to-watch-first-d...
This place needs to change its name to LudditeNews.
The belief is that new means of production should be embraced, owned, and operated by workers to benefit the many and not just the few exploitative capitalists (which are those who own means of production).
Instead of exploiting lay-offs and long shifts, and disregarding safety to save the capitalist money, the factory would instead be built and operated for the benefit of workers and society, prioritizing safety and sharing shorter shifts among a larger workforce to preserve jobs.
From a socialist/communist perspective machine taxes and UBI are like cheap bribes to avoid the issue and preserve the exploitative system in place. The luddites probably would have felt the same had they been offered a pity sum or machine tax from factory owners to "offset" their condition.
If I wasn't scared before, I'm even less scared now.
But if all you do is write trivial code anyone can learn to write in 1 week, with extremely detailed instructions, perhaps your job is in danger indeed. That's not what a software engineer does anyway.
It improved drastically in quality within 4 months, yet for some reason, the nex 10 years will see 0 progress in a field with literally tens of billions and intellectual capital flowing in.
Not bad news for anyone involved in this work, though. That period is when the real business and societal changes happen. It’s also when most of the money gets made.
People and businesses need time to test new technology and adapt it so that it works reliably for their specific use cases. GPT and other LLMs are no exception.
That might not be a threat to you if you’re a 35 year old developer, but if you’re an 18 year old exiting high school, there’s a non zero chance that by the time you’re 35 - 17 years - the tech will be good enough to replace you.
There's a few layers that make me not worried:
- automation will shift jobs
- an engineer is a generally smart employee (yes, even the average engineers), so the company will be a sinking ship if they have to eliminate jobs and get rid of people instead of moving smart people around
- even if you do end up jobless, as a generally smart person, you can learn a new skill. Plus, now AI can help you learn more quickly.
The catch is, of course, predicting which next job won't be replaced by AI.
If you're the type of person to worry, you'll always find something to worry about.