My prep is:
1) building a company (https://getdot.ai) that I think will add significant marginal benefits over using products from AI labs / TAI, ASI.
2) investing in the chip manufacturing supply chain: from ASML, NVDA, TSMC, ... and SnP 500.
3) Staying fit and healthy, so physical labour stays possible.
The only thing I see as obvious is AI is going to generate tremendous wealth. But it's not clear who's going to capture that wealth. Broad categories:
(1) chip companies (NVDA etc)
(2) model creators (OpenAI etc)
(3) application layer (YC and Andrew Ng's investments)
(4) end users (main street, eg ChatGPT subscribers)
(5) rentiers (land and resource ownership)
The first two are driving the revolution, but competition may not allow them to make profits.
The third might be eaten by the second.
The fourth might be eaten by second, but it could also turn out that competition amongst the second, and the fourth's access to consumers and supply chains means that they net benefit.
The fifth seems to have the least volatile upside. As the cost of goods and services goes to $0 due to automation, scarce goods will inflate.
It substitutes for human labour. This will reduce the price and substantially increase the benefits of land and resource ownership.
4) Develop an obsession for the customers & their experiences around your products.
I find it quite rare to see developers interacting directly with the customer. Stepping outside the comfort zone of backend code can grow you in ways the AI will not soon overtake.
#3 can make working with the customer a lot easier too. Whether or not we like it, there are certain realities that exist around sales/marketing and how we physically present ourselves.
At best AI will be a tool I use while developing software. For now I don't even think it's very good at that.
The question is which probability do you assign to getting TAI over time? From your comment it seems you say 0 percent in your career.
For me it's between 20 to 80 percent in the next ten years ( depending on the day :)
Huge asteroid? We know full well how to deflect an asteroid -- launch rockets, deploy thrusters or explosives or &c, give it a little nudge and it'll miss the Earth by a huge margin. And better yet: everyone would be aligned on the need to do so!
AI on the other hand -- I don't think this applies. We couldn't stop nuclear proliferation -- what makes you so confident that we'd stop AI development before it was too late?
Last famous words.
Current technology can't do your job, future tech most certainly will be able to. The question is just whether such tech will come in your lifetime.
I thought the creative field was the last thing humans could do but that was the first one to fall. Pixels and words are the cheapest item right now.
I'm not aware of any big changes in writer/artist employment either.
The only argument you can have is to be cheaper than the machine, and at some point you won't be.
Things change and people adapt. Maybe my job won't be the same in 20 years, maybe it will. But I'm pretty sure I'll still have a job.
If you want to make big decisions now based on vague predictions about the future go ahead. I don't care what you do. I'm going to do what works now, and if things change I'll make whatever decisions I need to make once I have the information I need to make them.
You call me naive, I'd say the same about you. You're out here preaching and calling people naive based on what you think the future might look like. Probably because some influencer or whatever got to you. I'm making good money doing what I do right now, and I know for a fact that will continue for years to come. I see no reason to change anything right now.
One believes the following:
> AI can't do my job and I doubt it will any time soon
The other believes the opposite; that AI is improving rapidly enough that their job is in danger "soon".
From a game theory stance, is there any advantage to holding the first belief over the second?
Meanwhile the engineer who isn't bothered by this bullshit prophecy goes about their day, making lots of money and becoming less replaceable every day. Maybe they learn to use these AI tools to be more efficient, which is really the only realistic endgame of AI tools anyway. You don't just fire all the devs and have some manager do the prompting. Maybe you fire some devs and keep the best ones as prompt engineers. Maybe this isn't even a management-driven process at all, maybe the developers just start using these tools of their own volition, become more productive and everyone's happy. It's not like we're running out of development work any time soon, whenever we meet a goal they set a new one. Being able to move faster doesn't necessarily mean we need fewer developers.
Setting aside hypotheticals and game theory, it's completely unrealistic to expect that software developer suddenly won't be a job any more. If it even happens it will be a slow, gradual process. The people working as software developers today will be prime candidates for using AI tools to create software. You still need to understand what you're doing, what's possible and what isn't etc. There is absolutely no reality where some business person just tells an AI to make a banking system and it does that perfectly without any human intervention.
I try to do 3 as much as possible.
My current work explicitly forbids me from doing 1. Currently just figuring out the timing to leave.