IBM study: 40% of workers will have to reskill in the next three years due to AI
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
All the talk about reskilling is just so you stay calm and comfortable while the cows in front of you get a bolt to the head.
Reskilling is useful to help you find an external job more than an internal one in my experience.
IBM has more employees in India that the US. Given the how much USG contracts they have, that's shameful.
Wondering if unions could lobby for something like this.
I know the Kyndryl spin out recently made a decision that US based roles will be limited going forward due to cost goals and have been "workforce rebalancing" teams instead of allowing them to go to the bench to find new roles. The same is not true for offshore resources.
My feeling is that the level of changes in 3 years will be more akin to introducing a new version of software with some new capabilities rather than something more radical.
There is no reason to continue as we have. What gets you to where you're going isn't generally needed once you get there. We don't hike to the park only to hike up the mountain; we drive, then hike, then picnic or have sex (generally both). We must not let corporations or the greedy define what work and prosperity means.
Systemic change needs more than technological preconditions. Or in other words: Why would "corporate control" just give up its power?
The market didn't outlaw slavery (because it loved the profits); the government did.
The market didn't limit the work week to 40 hours (because it loved the profits); the government did.
The government is the moral conscience of the people. The market is a mindless paperclip maximizer. You can't expect it to care about anything individuals care about, like not being slaves or being healthy or having a life.
The “moral conscience” of a people might well get us to a much worse state, if we permit it too much control.
Then the FLSA happened and forced change.
The market didn't put billions in some politician friend's pocket; the government did.
The market didn't put people in jail because the system has failed them; the government did.
The market didn't decide that drugs are bad while financing the very drug lords in tropical countries that are dealing in our streets; the government did.
The market didn't pass a law to permit themselves to skirt the law. They asked, but the government signed.
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What you call the market is the combination of economics and politics. But the market itself, the free trade among people, is a neutral party and a chaotic self-driven mechanism. But if someone has the power to dictate what is a valid trade and what is not, to put tariffs on A and not on B, the market stops being a neutral chaotic equilibrium and instead tends to accumulate money on one side rather than the other.
Because in the smaller scope, where government action is not as heavy handed, the market works beautifully. Every shop in my high street thrives and dies the same way: good products = profit. Bad products = death, and get replaced by someone better.
That is, until someone that got huge thanks to government action (i.e. favour and corruption) can just destroy this equilibrium by opening a Walmart causing every shop to die.
What you call the market, almost as a slur, is the same mechanism we have had for thousands of years. Monopoly, exploitation of labour, squeezing money from the poor to make the rich even richer is governmental action. You don't become a trillion dollar company without many good friends in the palace. Nor it is the "division of labour" that money and trade enable that made the trillion dollar company.
The market is the convenient scapegoat for the thieves running the show.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_anarchism
> The unstated suggestion here seems to be that the government is not already THE (and best) system of control.
There are many form of government. Which form do you speak of? We must've lost so many idealists and visionaries in the past 150 years, that we have stopped dreaming a better, fairer world for everybody, and just decided that this is the best we can do. Maybe voting for the other colour next time will help, who knows. Whatever can one do?
The market did all those things; acts characterized as government are services traded on the market. Yeah, there are formal restrictions on doing that, but just as free marketeers bleat that regulation of more conventional goods doesn’t stop them from being traded and creats a black market still guided by market forces, that's also true of government acts.
People who use appeal to the market to sell political ideas never seem to apply their logic consistently, tailoring their description of what buying and selling is “market” based on what they are trying to sell you.
> But the market itself, the free trade among people, is a neutral party and a chaotic self-driven mechanism.
The market is not a party at all, it is an abstraction describing interactions of all the parties; and it is no more neutral than the ultimate outcome of the aggregate of interactions is.
We live in a world dominated by trade, everything has a price and an index. But here you're saying that the chicken came before the egg rather than viceversa. I wouldn't be so sure.
The point I'm making is that there is the market, and there is the government. The one that has the power to affect the other is the government itself, with its laws and tariffs and monopoly over violence. The result is some kind of symbiosis, of course, but everything started in the king's court, not the other way around.
Blaming the market for the ills of our world is like blaming the Internet for the existence of revenge porn. Both money and the internet are simply a technology to exchange information and some form of energy, and if it didn't exist, people would invent it (see black markets)
And my point is that that’s a an artificial, politically motivated distortion of reality.
> Blaming the market for the ills of our world i
I’m not doing that. I’m pointing out why giving the market blame or credit for anything is pointless, and only possible through selective, ends-directed reasoning.
I think there is a concept that if we are not re-producing above the replacement rate. That industry will collapse, there wont be workers.
There are plenty of capitalists, and free market capitalist countries that are advocating incentives to encourage more couples having more kids.
The machine also needs humans. If that means paying people to have kids doesn't make it Marxist.
It won’t happen though because the planet is stalling out around 9-10 billion and will see wars and starvation from under population.
Guess argument is, humans are really ever a generation away from extinction.
And latest trends are way down, we are below the replacement rate.
So in 50 years, we'll be out of people, and not able keep the 'modern' world moving.
Remember the times about 15-20 years ago when people were dishing good money on DSLR. Professional photographers were complaining that amateurs come in and lower both the quality and the prices charged. Well, after everyone now has a camera in their pocket that rivals a professional DSLR from 20 years ago, everyone can make decent photos. Not Ansel-Adams-levels, but usable photos.
AI will be like iPhone cameras on steroids. A lot of people will be able to do a lot of things, not at professional level, but at passable level. Very soon live speech translation will be a thing on a smartphone. How many professional translators will still have a job?
A modern, industrialized, knowledge-centric economy is constantly having to re-skill. (It seems to be largely due to innovation, but I am just guessing.)
e.g. A new technology comes in-- creating a rise demand for skills to use it, and a decline in demand for skills to use what it replaces.
The dichotomy of skills entering into and leaving importance & scarcity is apparent via the following lists of occupations:
Fastest __Declining__ occupations in the USA: https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/fastest-declining-occupations...
Fastest __Growing__ occupations in the USA: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/fastest-growing.htm
"Motion picture projectionist" is one of the top 5 occupations with the highest projected growth..? In 2023? Color me doubtful!
Both lists have items that really make one scratch their head. The movie one specifically really feels like someone started plotting a line from 2020, during the height of the pandemic, to right now, with Barbenheimer, and is treating that tiny window as the trend line representing meaningful growth (rather than looking at theater performance as a whole, which is still about half of what it was at its peak in 2018/2019.
I've seen people use ChatGPT in my team, this statement isn't really inline with my observations. Those using it are not really more productive than anyone else, if anything I've noted they became a bit frustrated and just back off usage? Anyone else?
I'm quite keen to use it more in my side projects, I just don't really see the time pay off to invest learning it yet so I've not bothered to upgrade from 3.5 to 4. I just dabble with 3.5 occasionally.
Also, this seems like a bit of a downgrade, 40%?
I think using it for side projects is where it shines, especially if you’re talking about coding side projects.
In my N=1 experience with coding, it can save me a ton of time by iteratively providing code and saving me time looking up documentation to find correct functions and syntax. ChatGPT frequently shows me functions that I wasn’t aware existed. It also can give me cleaner and/or more idiomatic code.
So a function or class that may have previously taken me 45 - 60 minutes to build, now takes 5-10 minutes. This is a huge productivity increase. It’s not some magic pill that builds whole applications, but it’s like having an experienced (but not expert) programmer by your side with unlimited patience for your questions. (This also applies to non-programming tasks as well.)
And it hasn’t taken me any time investment in learning it. I just have an iterative conversation with it, including asking it clarifying questions and requesting it to modify the code it provides.
Are you experiencing something different than what I’ve described?
Where it’s shined for me was writing code where I couldn’t be bothered to put together ideas from several distinct tutorials. It’s fantastic for writing code that you can basically google for, even if you have to read several disperate pages to get a clear picture of what to do.
> was writing code where I couldn’t be bothered to put together ideas from several distinct tutorials. It’s fantastic for writing code that you can basically google for, even if you have to read several disperate pages to get a clear picture of what to do.
I think this description of yours nails it.
Soon, though, you’ll be able to feed it a corpus of documentation and/or library code and question it based on those. That might help your use case.
- the projects are small in scale, meaning ChatGPT needs less context, and stereotypical solutions probably work quite well
- you're not a domain expert (as opposed to your paying job, which hopefully you are an expert in the niche there), this means relatively speaking ChatGPT can help you more, whereas if you're a domain expert, you probably outperform ChatGPT anyway.
That said, ChatGPT often replaced Googling and stackoverflow when I need to look up how some things are done. The benefit is that I get to ask very specific questions and get to ask follow up questions.
I'll believe it when I see it.
Voice acting, art generation, NPC creation, even storyline writing.
In less than 5 years games will be different almost endless games and game dev as a field will be dramatically different with a lot less people.
Even still legacy code will remain in use and talent to maintain legacy systems will remain in demand. My university still teaches COBOL because there still exists demand for people to maintain these legacy applications even if new applications are no longer written in that language.
[1] https://github.com/prettydiff/wisdom/blob/master/Object_Orie...
I read your link. It was an interesting essay. But how is OOP functionally obsolete?
The economic incentive for OOP is absolutely gone and cannot be recovered. The technical purpose of OOP is mostly gone and no longer desirable. The continued desirability of OOP is some variable combination of aesthetic and social. While those qualities are not without value they aren't functional, thus OOP remains popular but certainly not for reasons of utility or necessity. Other approaches now achieve superior desirability when considered only from a utility perspective. That means OOP is functionally obsolete.