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Comment by rozap | Hacker News Reader

That's around, give or take a few years, when I plan to retire. Don't care a whole lot what happens after that point :)

I think if you are either young or bound to retire in the next 5-10 years there's less worry. If you are young you can pivot easier (avoid the industry); if you are old you can just retire with enough wealth behind you.

Its the mid age people 35-45 yr olds that I think will be hit hardest by this if it eventuates. Usually at this point in life there's plenty of commitments (family, mortgage, whatever). The career may end before they are able to retire, but they are either too burdened with things; or ageism sets in making it hard to be adaptable.

I think you can look at any cohort (except for the people already at retirement age) and see a way that they're screwed. I'm 34 and I agree that you're right, but the 22 year old fresh out of college with a CS degree might have just gotten a degree in a field that is going to be turned inside out, in an economy that might be confused as we adapt. It's just too big of a hypothetical change to say who will get the most screwed, imo.

And like the parent poster said - even if you were to avoid the industry, what would you pivot to? Anything else you might go into would be trivial to automate by that point.

I think trades and blue collar work where experience learnt (the moat) is in the physical realm (not math/theory/process but dexerity and hands-on knowledge), where iteration/brute force costs too much money/causes too much risk is the place to be. If I get that building wrong unlike software where I can just "rebuild" it costs a lot of money in the real world and has risk like say "environmental damage". It means rapid iteration and development just doesn't happen which limits the exponential growth of AI in that area compared to the Digital world. Sure - in a lifetime we may have robots, etc but it will be a LOT more expensive to get there, and happen a lot slower and people can adjust. LLM's being 90% right are just not good enough - the cost of failure is too high and accountability in failure needs to occur.

Those industries also more wisely IMO tend to be unionised, own their own business, and so have the incentive to keep their knowledge tight. Even with automation the customer (their business) and the supplier (them and their staff) are the same so the value transfer of AI will make their job easier but they will keep the value. All good things to slow down progress and keep some economic rent for yourself and your family. Slow change is a less stressful life.

The intellectual fields lose in an AI world long term; the strong and the renter class (capital/owners) win. That's what "Intelligence is a commodity" that many AI heads keep saying actually means. This opens up a lot of future dystopian views/risks that probably aren't worth the benefit IMO to the majority of people that aren't in the above classes of people (i.e. most people).

The problem with software in general is that it is quite difficult generally to be a "long term" founder at least in my opinion for most people which means most employment comes from large corps/govt's/etc where the supplier (the SWE) is different than the employer. Most ideas generally don't make it or last only briefly, and the ones that stick around usually benefit from dealing with scale - something generally only larger corps have with their ideas (there are exceptions in new fields, but then they become the next large corp and there isn't enough for everyone to do this).

What if anti-aging technology is developed and you can live up to 1000 years?

I certainly am not in the 0.5% rich enough to be able to afford such a thing. If it does get developed (it won't in my lifetime), there's absolutely no way in hell it will be accessible to anyone but the ultra rich.

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