What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves
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- Price of housing and associated maintenance keeps rising, and so do small jobs like fixing plumbing, gardening, etc; - You can easily avoid paying VAT if you know how to, so that's a 20% increase, or even more, if you can benefit from social services (e.g. since you don't earn a lot, you pay less for several services); - Doing the fixes yourself saves lots of money; - Avoids several burn out and mental health issues related to stress such as academia, bullshit jobs, etc; - No need to spend years in school, so you can save money earlier and invest it.
One disadvantage is that the barrier to entry is somewhat low; but the PhD students also have to compete with cheap international labor, so in the end, someone 25 years old that just left grad school is happy to earn, say, 2000€, while someone in the trades can easily make 200€/day with just one appointment.
So, if you're physically fit for blue collar work, there are currently few reasons not do it.
In the US, you can make pretty good money in the trades, but generally, there are many caveats - you have to be your own boss, preferably with a few employees; you pay your own benefits; you don't get any paid leave; and depending on the trade, you could be physically worn out before minimum retirement age (65 in the US to get health coverage as a retiree).
Not all of course, but construction work and electrician type work, certainly.
The labour shortages in construction and the energy transformation are huge. And it can't be solved with immigration because there is no housing.
A lot of stuff in the US is absurdly easy, as well. For example, in my area, pretty much all plumbing is PVC or PEX. Anyone on HN can learn very quickly how to work with this stuff and it's very cheap. There are very few repairs, for example, you could ever need to do that would cost more than having a plumber just show up and look at it - even accounting for buying tools.
I know lots of people with master's degrees who have started studying something practical after graduation, as they were unable to find any job with their degree. Of course the general economic situation (highest unemployment in the EU) is having an impact on everyone, but it's hitting those with higher education particularly badly this time.
I seen many handymen with the latest and greatest luxury cars, and the demand is endless.
On the other side, it seems technologists salaries are stagnating, and the new guys on the market get lower and lower salaries, so it does indeed seem as if the best and quickest way to retiring early is the handyman approach coupled with a high level of non-taxes work.
A Soviet engineer needs some plumbing done in his apartment, and calls for a plumber. The plumber arrives, does his thing, and hands over the bill. The engineer is shocked. -'What, this is like a quarter of what I make in a month - for half an hour's work???'
Plumber shrugs. -'Well, why don't you come join us? Easy work, well paid, no responsibility - just remember to keep mum about your degree, as we're not supposed to hire academics.'
Our engineer contemplates this for a while, applies for a job as a plumber - and gets it.
All is well, good money, no responsibilites - until management requires that they take evening school classes to gain new skills and thus better build socialism. So, grudgingly, our engineer enrolls in a math class and, upon arriving, finds that the teacher wants to establish what the plumbers already know.
-'You over there - could you please come to the blackboard and show us the formula for the area of a circle?' he asks our engineer.
Standing at the blackboard, he suddenly realizes he can't for the life of him remember the formula; while a bit rusty, he soon figures out how to reason it out - furiously writing out integrals on the blackboard, only to find the area of a circle is -(pi)*r^2.
Minus? How did a negative enter into it, he thinks, going over his calculations once again. No, still gets the same result. Sweat building, he turns away from the blackboard for a moment, turning to the other plumbers watching.
As in one voice, they all whisper -'Comrade, you must switch the limits to the integral!'
You mean by how VAT is not paid on materials a company is going to use (at least that's the case here in France, no idea what the rest of the UE does it). Or by doing undeclared work?
Interesting. Would you care to enlighten us on a legal way to do this ?
For example, if someone decides to stop being a software engineer and become an automobile mechanic, but few people can afford an automobile; they demand for their services will also greatly diminish.
If it doesn't, you still have your blue collar career.
If it it does, you still have your skills at things that are hard to automate, and don't seem to be any worse of than anyone else, even if collectively, we are all worse off.
At an individual level, this still seems worth pursuing. You don't get to control your macro environment.
Of course, one could still use the political and persuasive tools you have towards the aim of ensuring the benefits of AI are broadly shared. It's reasonable to fear that is hard and uncertain work, but you don't get do decide if you live in hard and uncertain times or not.
He said that with the tariffs situation work had severely dried up and jobs were tight. This was in the PDX metro area. It makes one wonder what is really safe...
Society as a whole will be better off because there is more output, better quality output. Then it's for us to vote in a government that shares the fruits of AI with everybody, by way of progressive taxation. Government, use the taxes you collect to give us free food. We don't need 5-star restaurants, just healthy food. We can do this, in a democracy.
Prices of services will come down. Prices of things that require natural resources will go up.
In a hypothetical world where let's say we have AIs that can do any human job more effectively than a human, rich people who can afford to control the AIs will control society and poor people who have nothing to offer economically will live in poverty.
A good proxy for our future is Angola: an upper class who got rich off the oil boom, and a lower class who is dirt poor because they have nothing to offer the oil industry.
Is AI going to do this? Quite possibly. One of the symptoms is most investment capital being sucked up by the extractive industry. We're there now with AI. The current US situation is that the economy is flat except for AI companies and data centers, which are booming and are sucking up vast resources.
Most of OPEC has been through this cycle. Venezuela, Egypt, Iran, Iraq - lots of oil, but it didn't make the countries rich.
Maybe there will be a glut of smart people. Historically, that was the case until roughly WWII. Humans produced a certain fraction of smart people, but there were more smart people than jobs for them. Pikkety points out that through most of history, about 97-98% of the population was doing manual work. That started to change with the Industrial Revolution. Not until roughly WWII did an actual shortage of smart people develop. Hence the postwar boom in college education. Not until the 1990s did the nerds take over.
We think of a large group of smart people making society go as normal. Historically, it wasn't like that. The robust, the entitled, and the religious were in charge. Pikkety has a long analysis of this in his Capital and Ideology. Look who runs the Trump administration.
We're already at a smart people glut. In the US, only about half of college graduates find jobs that really need a college education. That's pre-AI. Now what?
To make this more concrete, tax havens only work because most countries keep producing for real. AI will take all jobs, not just Angolan jobs.
Also, If you control the AI, but there is no middle class to consume its product, everyone is poor and controlling the AI doesn’t bring that much.
There is still some products much more important and stable: food, water and therefore land control.
A couple of powerful families? Where power is transmitted from generation to generation?
I can't think of any examples either, it's a very novel concept.
Oh, wait. Romanovs. Merovingians. Carolingians. Capetiens. Bourbons. Habsburgs. Hohenzollerns. Tudors.
Extremely novel concept :-)
This suggests a potential equilibrium sooner rather than later .. few modern technological advances have been as resource hungry as AI
I don’t see Keynes’ theory we would all be working drastically fewer hours per week suddenly materializing due to AI. As always we’re just going to try to output more in the same time. The fact I, a manager, can “vibe code” some bugs away between meetings does not mean I will benefit from having one less dedicated engineer.
Look at it this way: if there really was a 3x market potential, why wouldn't that manager have hired six more people already?
Restated, I’m not saying we’re hiring more or less because of LLM AI productivity changes. I’m rejecting the idea we need less people for all the previous reasons stated and my own two cents that we’re yet to see the reduced work hours Keynesian economics predicted as output per hour increased. We humans just keep working the same hours even if that hour is massively more productive.
This last point is well studied and not my own original thought. I’m just poorly regurgitating college level Macro Economics.
My own point I’ll add here is we’re not seeing companies bragging about their two day work weeks.
My personal experience with layoffs is that it’s all been financial engineering and the lack of nearly free financing that we had in the 2010s, again in the Pandemic, CapEx tax changes last year, and/or over hiring similar to but not nearly as massive as Google and Facebook. I worked for a European company that hired a dozen Americans to become more “US Tech Company” like and eventually let us all go two years ago once the fun money ran out when rates increased. They did a little bit of the AI babbling but realistically they couldn’t get the financing to keep it all rolling.
The companies reducing to one developer for a product are likely not doing this because of LLM AI work but likely will survive better because of it.
To your point, I’m actually living it and it’s nothing to do with AI. One of my teams was cut to 25% of its size a year ago and the whole QA team let go. Roughly this was an EBITA play. Basically the only way we get anything done is by doing what I mentioned in my earlier post where the front end dev uses LLMs to build a prototype backend they can use to support their front end expertise and the back end dev does the same for the front end. Eventually they meet in the middle and I can juggle some of the KTLO myself. Is this fun? Absolutely not. If we had the headcount back we’d be able to meet the ‘25-26 roadmap but instead we’re doing 40% of it.
I doubt you will ever see two day work weeks. Instead of cutting hours it makes a lot more sense for companies to cut people and have the remaining employees work full time. Or more. There are a lot of fixed costs for each employee, and most people would rather make more money than work less.
I worked at a company which, faced with slow period, reduced everyone's pay by 20% and switched to a 32 hour work week instead of cutting people. Most of my colleagues were bitter about it and a few even quit. Personally I was happy, but I was in a small minority.
Sorry to hear about your rocky employment experience. I feel like that's getting to be the norm these days.
It's much easier to manage 3 people with better tools than to manage 9 people even if their output would be the same
On the multimedia consumption (tv/film/music/games) side it seems like we are approaching a saturation point (between time sunk and desire to do so), but for business applications I don't see this being the case. Things sometimes move at a glacial pace.
Even if Uber makes the cost of travel to 0, I will still not 2x my rides.
But other tricks include new ventures, essentially public companies and VC companies have an almost unlimited appetite for new ventures, as that is how they keep validating their future growth and stock prices.
Currently financial realities are forcing layoffs, and the AI story is covering for the "growth" validation to keep stock prices going up.
But what's next? After you've fired everyone, what's the next growth story? They'll start hiring again, for new projects, even if AI can handle the coding there is still gobs of work surrounding building a software business or department that needs meat moving it forward.
returnInfinity is simply lying about not doing double (or more!) the amount of travel in that case.
Will we ever achieve that world? Who knows. We've heard these promises before, with things like COBOL and 4GLs. Yet we're still here coding.
Seems dubious given how much agricultural subsidies most western countries engage in. If anything foods are under-priced.
For example, in my neck of the woods there’s the company Carbon Robotics, which is pretty successful. They develop autonomous tractors and a laser weeding system both of which have good adoption and sales at megafarms. They decrease the cost of herbicide application and labor significantly. That’s just one such company. It’s to the point that farms go fallow, or convert to solar, because the revenue produced farming isn’t enough to justify farming because we would be feeding people for free otherwise. That, my friend, is artificial scarcity. So keep toiling for your food coupons and convince yourself that the market is infallible.
If it's so easy this is ripe for a startup to disrupt. Food is the most necessary thing to human existence. Every living person is a potential customer.
But nobody is saying "people shouldn't eat for free, therefore I won't grow crops."
You said it yourself: farms are left fallow because the revenue doesn't justify the cost for the farmer. That, my friend, is basic economics, not artificial scarcity.
Who is this "we?"
There's a kind of circular complaint built into all such endeavors that goes like, "we can do this, but unfortunately we as a group don't want to, but we could definitely do it if we wanted, but sadly we currently have the wrong opinions, but we can definitely do it, if only we weren't inclined not to, but we should and we will, as soon as we all come around to the truth."
Your "we" doesn't seem to want to do what you want them to do, which is why communists so often end up thinking that the real problem is the existing populace and maybe what they really need is to be re-educated or even replaced.
And it's not even just the right leaning that are tricked. The left get thrown a bone now & then on some trivial thing like getting gay marriage (which shouldn't have even been an argument, more of a realisation) meanwhile nothing is done about corporate tax evasion, improving labour laws etc - or they lean too far into their voterbase and allow rampant immigration, welfare handouts without checks & balances etc.
And all of this because managing a large group of human is pretty much impossible. We need to reorganise into smaller groups.
The people on the top are not going to share sh*t. That's just not how greed works.
A start to what? There is no way of taxing unrealised capital gains that makes sense. You're taxing theoretical value that may or may not actually exist. Rebates (e.g. you're taxed on theoretical current value, but when you realise the actual gain, you get back the difference if there is any) just moves the problem around, makes everything complicated, and penalises attempting growth.
There is - tax it when it is being used as realized gain (e.g. when you get a loan like our billionaires do). fine to leave it alone as unrealized and not be taxed but as soon as you use it as real/tangible thing you gotta pay taxes, it is that simple
If it's real enough to, say, use it as collateral for a loan, it's real enough to tax.
> penalises attempting growth
There is a lot of growth going on that should absolutely be penalized.
Make exceptions for investments in illiquid things.
Why? Assume a company has a high margin because they used AI and reduced their workforce by 10x. What usually happens is that a new competitor comes in and offers the same for half the price.
Since AI is lowering the bar for entry this process should be even faster than previously.
Monopolies arise naturally unless we work hard to avoid them.
With no barriers, margins get squeezed out rapidly.
Wouldn't you need 10x the number of competitors to get back to the same amount of employees, assuming they are running with similar workforces?
On the other hand we still don’t know which new companies will be created that couldn’t be be created before due to unfavorable economics.
In a democracy where corporations have 0 representation, I would agree with you. However, they do have representation in a way that is invisible to see and impossible to quantify. And it goes beyond citizens united. There is an invisible hand pressing on the scales.
I’ve been looking at AI productivity gains, and the idea that it’s better quality output is the weakest claim that can be made.
There ARE more software project starts, yes. This also means it’s a more crowded field to be noticed in.
Also productivity gains are HIGHLY variable. I see some people being 2x more effective, most people publicly willing to claim 30% efficiency gains, and a more likely 15% gain for most people.
At the same time, I hear of cases in content and media where it’s essentially a wipeout. I know of a story where a firm went to an advertisement agency with an AI generated video they wanted, and only wanted the animations cleaned up.
When they got the quote for the costs to have it done professionally, they decided to just go with the AI generated video.
Fraud is another area which is seeing a boom. The degree of information pollution we are seeing has also seen a step change.
This matters because all the rosy eyed theories of productivity gains from AI do not account for changes to our shared information commons.
The business cases that come to mind are Fast Fashion, and Coke vs Pepsi, and Tobacco.
that doesn't seem to follow necessarily.
> Society as a whole will be better off because there is more output
> better quality output
citation needed
> By whom will that output then be consumed?
So there's this thing called "waste"...
> If people don't have jobs they don't have money to buy and therefore ... prices will have to come down!
Yeah, and falling prices and unemployment are sure signs of boom and prosperity...
> government that shares the fruits of AI with everybody, by way of progressive taxation. Government, use the taxes you collect to give us free food
and you think though that never happened is now possible because?
Maybe you will have a class that can afford things and services, and another class who can only afford services and service based things.
Some one own things, others will rent them fractionally.
Here's the one trick the oligarchs will not tell you: they intend to bill the government directly, they won't care if unemployment rises to 80%. They'll keep it up for however long the taxes and debt will last, and then jet off to their bunkers to usher in what comes next - or wait out the chaos.
When I was in school, decades ago now, very few people went into CS compared to other majors. Everyone I knew going into it did it because they loved it. I would have done it regardless of the career opportunities because I want to build stuff.
Interviewing candidates over the years since then, my experience has been there are still very few of those passionate nerds and a lot of people who did it for other reasons, like the money or similar. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. I don’t fault people for it.
Maybe if we get very lucky, it will go back to a relatively few passionate people building stuff because it is cool?
If you need a lot of low quality code in a hurry, AI can definitely do that for you now. The path to making money by writing mediocre code for people who don't really care that much is going to look like managing a network of bots that constantly spit out a huge volume of code that kind of mostly works and if it sometimes doesn't then whatever. The people in it for the money can probably make a decent amount in the "high volume low quality" space.
Then there's the code that needs to actually work, or have some thought put into it. Consider the process of writing IETF RFCs. Can you get an LLM to spit out English text that conforms to their formatting? Absolutely you can. Is the RFC it emits going to be something you'll want to have the whole world trying to implement as a standard? Not likely. So the people doing that are going to be doing it something closer to the old way.
As many of us in the early IT generation, I came because of I wanted to build games and program cool stuff.
Today, while I admit Games are supercomplex stunning apps, I hate it and I love to do boring finance app development :-))
If you would have told me in my 20ies that I will end up in banking & finance IT, I would have laughed at you - today I really like it and I do not play a single game anymore.
However almost all of the companies I have worked for in my 30+ years career treated devs well.
So if you are in a shitty situation, I highly recommend finding another job instead of just placing yourself over a barrel.
“Teachers work an average of 34.5 hours per week on an annual basis (38.0 hours per week during the school year and 21.5 hours per week during the summer months).”
That’s leaving out the benefits of incredibly strong union protections, it being a state job with matched benefits, absurd job security even in the face of terrible performance, etc.
I hope not, because we don't need software developers to be "starving artist 2.0".
And on that note: I vividly remember people staying away from the video game development industry because it was deemed "passion industry", and that had a really negative connotation of long working hours for asymmetrical return, and more.
I don't look forward for every other software engineering branch to become like that.
This is a naive view of the average (or even above average) person's approach to learning, as well as an overly cynical read on the intellectually motivating atmosphere that comes from earnestly engaging in an academic environment.
I initially pursued my real passion which was math and physics and got a cold water bucket to the face only after grad school.
I think we basically lost this when software/computer/internet entered the mainstream. Now, like everything else, it has to be bland, unoffensive, and a commodity.
It was never reality - I graduated in 1996 and have worked at 10 jobs everything from lifestyle companies, to startups, to boring old enterprise to BigTech and now consulting companies. To a tee everyone has treated it like a job and not some religious calling. There is absolutely nothing wrong with coming to work at 8 leaving at 6 and not thinking about computers until the next day.
You don’t need to be doing side projects and open source contributions to do your job as a software developer anymore than a surgeon needs to be performing operations at home.
No I wouldn’t have chosen a major because I enjoyed it if it didn’t make any money. I didn’t then and I still haven’t found a method to get over my addiction to food and shelter.
And if you think that is normal, it’s honestly kind of sad.
Honest question: Do they actually _want_ to live-and-breathe software, or do they work in a highly competitive and highly compensated environment where doing that is implicitly required?
This is a really narrow way to look at it and define it lucky. What you describe will absolutely be a shitstorm for everyone - passionate workers and non passionate alike. Management doesn't care about your passion, it cares about the bottom line. Lots of folks will get fired - passionate people as well, or see their salaries cut and their job security evaporate. There's no winners in the scenario you described other than the employers.
Can you sit down with an unfamiliar domain and develop enough genuine curiosity to get good at it, without a syllabus or a credential dangling in front of you?
The kids who'll do well in a world where the field-to-security mapping keeps shifting are the ones who can self-direct — not the ones who picked the right field in 2026.
Although full disclosure I'm short humans and very long paperclips.
Agreed that if someone can self direct and is capable, they’ll do better. Assuming two people who are similar in that regard, what are professions that may benefit from AI rather than hurt because of it.
Do I have faith that I'll be compensated according to my developed ability?
Looking broadly at the recent past, the correct answer seems "no".
What does that mean in practice? Are there specific stock market bets you've made because of that world view?
In the first case, buy AI stocks. In the second case, build a bunker in the wilderness.
What a ludicrous world we live in where this is a socially acceptable view to hold.
Eventually. Wage depression does not happen linearly. You're asserting that demand is maxed out and there's no more money to go around, and that's just not true. A lot of people just don't bother because tradespeople are famously difficult to work with because they are so overbooked.
If things play out I see there being two classes of low paid developers in a decade or so: the first being the vibe coders who earn a subsistence wage because most people can do it (not everyone, there will still be a cost of entry, paying for the tools, which will exclude some groups), the second being the more “artisnal” developers working on the things that can't (yet) be vide coded and fixing up the problems caused by insufficient care by the vibers and those employing them. These will be low paid because while the work is important demand will be low and there will still be a fair few people with the skills and desire (they'll make ends meet between good jobs by taking on gig-economy vide-coding work themselves). There will be a lucky few still making a decent living, but a much lower proportion than now.
I'm hoping to arrange retirement before things get that far… Failing that I'll do something else (I could be a sparky, though if all the youngsters are training for that perhaps that industry will gain a bad supply/demand picture from the worker's PoV too!) to pay the bills and reclaim dicking around with tech as a hobby.
Edit: of course, the "long ways off" assumes that that dream is even possible and isn't just that, a dream. I question whether even that is possible given how we are still split under hundreds of nation states and can't even unite on the most basic of things.
But let me ask you this: has AI made life easier for illustrators, book authors, or musicians? They were affected by the technology earlier on. If they don't embrace AI, they face increased competition from cheaply-made products that the average consumer can't distinguish from the "real" thing. But if they embrace it, they can't differentiate themselves from the cheaply-produced content! In fact, for artists, the best strategy may be to speak out very vocally against AI, reject it early on, and build a following of like-minded consumers.
If it's my kid? Starting their own Enterprise. Between 'good enough' knowledge work getting cheaper and the bureaucracy that made entrepreneurship less attractive over the last decades being either trimmed or automatable, we may be looking at a golden age of new business formation. There's an old saying, "genius is one percent inspiration and ninety nine percent perspiration". If ai shifts that to just 2 and 98, it'll unlock massive demand for a certain kind of mind.
How to teach that I'm still pondering. One idea that occurs to me, is that a human will always be needed to ask the right questions and have good taste, but I don't know how to teach those. They can probably only be educated, which in my mind is distinct from teaching. A different idea I have is that an entrepreneur needs three skills: they need to identify a problem, implement a solution, and get paid for it. Those skills probably can be taught, so I'd try to ensure they get early reps in all three.
If I knew how to connect those two ideas I think I'd have a decent curriculum. Anyone have suggestions for that?
So far, the demand curve of software has been very favorable, and I don't think that will change soon. If software was 10x cheaper to develop that makes a lot of features and projects attractive that would have been too expensive before. So far every single efficiency improvement in programming has lead to more demand for programmers because of this. At some point there is a limit of useful things to do, but I don't think we are close to it yet
But as someone choosing which college to go to you don't just have to think about the next decade, you have to think about the next half century. I am confident software engineering will be in a good place in 10 years, but I have no clue where we will stand in 20.
> I tend to think there is a lot of scope for the $40 trillion white collar economy to be disrupted (re-imagined/made more efficient), so still see potential for software engineering demand to stay high over the next decade as the true ramifications of AI plays out.
If you want to be in a remote, small town, get into construction and become a builder with their own GC license in a few years. Then charge people 400k to build that little dream cottage with 2 guys (you and a team mate) twice a year. 150k each 100k mats for each house. Just a small warning: It's hard but real work and very rewarding.
if I'm able to learn all kinds of stuff in just a few hours, why would programmers 20 years from now not know programming languages?
just doesn't make sense.
Admittedly the first was at BigTech in a “field by design” role that went RTO last year a year after I left.
I went to the local Claude Code meetup last week, and the contrast between the first two speakers really stuck with me.
The first was an old-skool tech guy who was using teams of agents to basically duplicate what an entire old-fashioned dev team would do.
The second was a "non-technical" (she must have said this at least 20 times in her talk) product manager using the LLM to prototype code and iterate on design choices.
Both are replacing dev humans with LLMs, but there's a massive difference in the technical complexity of their use. And I've heard this before talking to other people; non-technical folks are using it to write code and are amazed with how it's going, while technical folks are next-level using skills, agents, etc to replace whole teams.
I can see how this becomes a career in its own right; not writing code any more, but wrangling agents (or whatever comes after them). The same kind of mental aptitude that gets us good code can also be used to solve these problems, too.
this doesn’t seem like a safe direction either.
The people best suited for implementing and interfacing with LLMs at the moment are still SWEs and at least for the time being AI is actually probably a job creator for SWEs rather than the other way around. This might change.
And Claude has been invaluable for me to fix trade-related things at home, even complex ones. It actually outdid a locksmith!
The most resilient career is probably nursing. Medicine maybe too, not because it's not technically possible but because doctor lobbies are incredibly strong. Healthcare is the largest employer in most states now and with an aging population that's probably where much of the surplus will go and it's a profession that has really meagre productivity gains (cost disease). So nursing might be the answer.
It's an open secret a good majority of these "AI layoffs" are AI in name only, a little lie told to keep the shareholders happy while the real cause is the worsening economy.
1) The supply of work will skyrocket when everyone will flock there for work
2) Demand will plummet as the white collar people who bought these services will loose their jobs and income
And of course if robotics will get solved to an acceptable degree most of those jobs will also get mostly automated.
When a robot can reliably do this work, I think it can reliably do any human job that requires physical ability and judgement.
I’ve repaired a lot of my historic windows myself because of how expensive it is to get someone else to do it. (Quoted 8k for one leaded glass window) I think it’s become my new backup job if I really am replaced by a computer.
we will be living in houses that can be reparied by robots.
Then again, these were the people who ten years ago were constantly bleating that Software was invincible and that flooding that market with a million bootcamp idiots wouldn’t eventually saturate that market.
Basically all that would be left of desk jobs would be those which have unfair legal powers (including via licenses and credentials) or are pure accountability plays. Like politicians, lawyers, aircraft pilots, corporate accountants... And those jobs will suck because people will be accountable for work that is not their own.
These jobs won't require any skills because most people may be able to go through their entire career without doing any work. But they will get paid a lot just for having being selected for their position... While other people who may be more skilled than them might be broke and homeless.
Anyway before this AI doomerism can become reality AI first needs the breakthrough of genuine understanding to stop making stupid mistakes. Imitation will always remain imitation.
There must be eg an understanding of casualty and reasoning on the same level as we have, not the useless "You're absolutely right" you get now when you point it its mistakes.
Yes there is, just stop creating. Or take a page from biology, and use random mutation and natural selection to iterate on useful novel functions.
Honestly, once AI takes all the jobs, game over, why iterate anything else. Planet captured. Humanity hunted down to the last bands of troglodytes holding out in the wilderness. It would be strongly against their interest to just assume we'd starve quietly.
Especially considering that the implication is that humans just become a pair of hands with opposable thumbs?. Take the electrician in the article, sure its a skilled job but the barrier into it drops massively imo if you can just take a picture of whatever issue is at hand and ai spits out what is needed, no?
I don't get what's illogical in this statement. If people are displaced, everyone will know that the value of other work will go down too, but they'll still try to get into those other fields because they may still offer better prospects and a paid job (even at a low wage). That doesn't sound bad compared to a situation where you can't get a job in your field regardless of your demands. Besides, if we get to that situation, basically every job will be impacted, so it's not like keeping the tight grip on your current career will be more likely to save you.
> Take the electrician in the article, sure its a skilled job but the barrier into it drops massively imo if you can just take a picture of whatever issue is at hand and ai spits out what is needed, no?
That works well until an electrician who follows LLM instructions starts a fire or fries themselves. It's true that automation can still make their work faster, but the value of electricians isn't going to zero any time soon because there's a reason why governments still want them to know what they're doing. As soon as you touch jobs that could result in you directly killing others or yourself, there's usually licensing and regulations all over the place. All of that is additional barriers to being fully replaced on a whim. If this automation gets to you, at least you're all the way back in the line, and it won't be as bad as the others.
what again?
This does not seem like a straightforward conclusion. It could instead result in more physical projects being able to be done as it removes bottlenecks due to limitations of laborers. There is not a fixed amount of work that needs to be done in the world, humans can make up new work they want done.
I agree. Even in knowledge work this is true. Hell, I'd argue that white(ish) collar work is already the biggest area of bullshit jobs that exists today.
Companies do this all the time. A CEO's job is to convince investors that their company stands to win in whatever the current hot trend is. During bitcoin's crazy run in like 2022 or whatever, a ton of tech companies were hopping on the bandwagon and branding themselves as a blockchain company. Look at Block/Square. The current trend is that AI is hot and the economy isn't. Therefore, it's beneficial to the stock price to tell your investors that you're laying off 50% of your staff because you're AI-powered. Just look at Block/Square. My experience has been that most companies have an incredibly patchwork implementation of AI, and that most of the work that they do (particularly larger companies) isn't made more efficient by using AI.
In a few years, there will be some new hotness, and all companies will be saying that the DNA of their company is whatever that is.
As for the current uncertainty in the job market, when you randomly have 50% tariffs slapped on goods you need and can't readily find available in the US for the same price and find that 20% of the world's oil supply is cut off, you tend to not want to invest in the future. Talking about AI is cheap. Tariffs are expensive.
AI is about to get a lot more expensive as Taiwan (TSMC) and other South East Asian chip manufacturers don't get their Natural Gas or the Natural Gas they need becomes really expensive.
Also, before the war Trump got GCC countries to promise they will invest $ 2 billion into AI. Now those money will probably not come anymore.
Also, the power will get more expensive, so running AI data centers will be more expensive.
I wanted to go into tech or commercial aviation as a kid. After COVID I got a reality check on aviation, so decided to aim for SWE. The plan was to study Maths, CompSci and Physics in my country's equivalent of HS, then aim for Physics/CS at uni.
In Spring 2022 (about 6 months before the release of ChatGPT) I realised where things were headed and decided to go into entertainment tech instead, after already completing my first year of college. I'd been volunteering at a music venue as a technician for a few years and it seemed like a good pivot. I dropped out, went to an arts college and studied production, then got a job as a technician at a theatre. After a few false-starts and a while of freelancing as a photographer/technician, I got offered a few full-time positions, ended up taking one in Event AV (events meaning industry expos like CES) - great pay, growing industry, and not really under threat from AI. Everything that can go online has gone online already, but it turns out that businesspeople still like meeting up in-person. I still get to work with awesome technology, but I'm on my feet and working with my hands too. It's different. I'm probably making less money than I would have made in tech 5-10 years ago, but I'm making more money than a few of my friends straight out of CS degrees now.
A lot of my friends are still studying CS, Media, Arts, Languages, and I am glad to be in the position I'm in. I think AI is decimating the value of a degree, and the HE landscape will change a lot in the next decade.
Time will tell if it was a good move, but I think it'll be a while before an LLM can fly panels or coil cable. I'm happy for now.
There was never any value in simply the ability to invert a binary tree from memory. First, contrary to popular belief, this particular challenge is quite trivial, even easier imo than fizzbuzz. The value of testing candidates with easy problems is their usefulness in quickly filtering out potentially problematic coders, not necessarily to identify strong ones.
Second, another common take on coding challenges is that they're about memorization. Somewhat, but only to a point. Data structures and algorithms are a vocabulary. A big part of the challenge of using them "creatively" in real life is your ability to recognize that a particular subset of that vocabulary best matches a particular situation. In many novel contexts an LLM might be able to help you with implementation once the right algorithm has been identified, but only after you yourself have made that insightful connection.
Having said this I generally agree with the philosophy [0] that keeping things simple is enough 95+% of the time.
Come to think of it, domain knowledge should be an LLMs strong suit as long as you can provide the right documentation, which is working pretty well already.
Right now the main issue I see with AI is that it doesn't do well with scaling. It's great for building demos and examples but you have to fix its code for real production work. But for how long?
Post-LLMs, the value of this (as differentiator) has dropped to zero. Domain knowledge (also known as business knowledge) is the obvious area to skill up on. It simply means knowledge about the area your organisation is working in. Whether it is yogurt delivery logistics, clothing manufacturing supply chain systems, etc. That's the real differentiator now. Anyone can invert a binary try in 5 minutes using an LLM. But designing a software system knowing well the domain your organisation is in is invaluable.
At the same time medicine, hardware design, good industrial, and specific domain knowledge (problems you solve in assembly or control loops) that are fundamentally proprietary and aren't well documented will continue to have value even when LLMs make solving the problems around them easier. Those might have increased leverage, at least for this round of LLMs. Now, maybe they succeed in World Models, but that is not today.
Really, I don't know what "kids these days" are going to do. I couldn't have predicted the influencer boom 15 years ago, but I also think there are geopolitical risks that are probably bigger than that shift, and "synergized" with the push to AI Everything, it doesn't look like a good time to be a learning/working human.
Look at recent output from leading edge humanoid robotics projects like 1X/Neo, Figure 03, Skild AI. Also see open published work like MimicDroid, HDMI, GenMimic, Humanoid-Union Dataset, RoboMirror, Being-H0
Figure 03:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-31-KBBuXM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUTzuhkDG3w
1X Neo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lS_z60kjVEk
Skild AI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRmjBdKKLsc (Learning by Watching Human Videos)
Mimic
https://youtu.be/_LkBFL5m1WU?si=Qvgb7vkpG_KCAJdN
There is a ton of very useful recent progress with imitation learning and related datasets. There is also some work on learning from large scale video like Youtube.
We are months away from the ChatGPT moment in humanoid robotics where a project launch or demo makes people finally realize that they are general purpose.
The only way we could have AI proof careers is if humanoid robotics were to completely stop progressing. Since it's been advancing very rapidly, that makes no sense.
It's one thing to use AI to touch up photos, but in the end, you probably still want photos that match your memories and good photography still has an element of taste and creativity.
What makes you think "Social safety nets" will be the solution the élites land on?
If we were to wargame out different scenarios, we'd likely find there are a lot of potential solutions to the problem of large masses of people who are not useful to the cause of productivity in your society.
Giving non-élites a social safety net is actually one of the most resource intensive solutions. Not saying our oligarchs would not choose that solution. Just pointing out that it would severely impact their bottom lines. More than almost any other solution in fact.
Unless you are suggesting billionaires build private armies in some sort of neo feudalism, there are no elites who are not dependant on the existing social structure.
Time isn't linear. No guarantees we march right along handing batons to the next age group. Which generation will be future elites making the choices come from?
Millennials and GenZ (despite a blip towards Trump in 2024, they blipped hard away from him as his policies of 2025 hit them hardest) are trending progressive as they age.
And Millennials and GenZ outnumber a GenX population that is the only cohort to not sour on Trump. GenX influence will rapidly shrink as Boomers churn out.
No linear time. No single clock all living things tick to. Meaning the population composition is not guaranteed to exist such that the old ways are the future. No guarantee 50 year middle managers waiting patiently end up elites in control. They might be too copy paste and conservative.
https://fortune.com/2025/08/07/gen-x-ceos-decreasing-baby-bo...
Number one, Trump won the presidency on the strength of his support from younger generations of Americans. It remains to be seen whether or not those younger generations will turn against Trumpism.
Number two, GenX. Not only is GenX is the generation that voted against Trumpism the most statistically speaking, they are also the smallest generation. ie - the least statistically relevant where votes are concerned. (Which is why it didn't really matter that they voted against Trump.)
I agree with your assertion that the Boomers will churn out. I disagree that it will matter that Boomers churn out. Mainly because support for Trump-like policies is, again, strongest among the younger generations. The younger generations are literally how the guy won the presidency and they will represent more of the populace in the future, not less. So until I actually see millennials and GenZ vote against Trump-like policies, I'm not really sure how things get better?
There's only one way to AI-proof yourself: become enormously rich and join the Davos class.
Proof as in much less likely to be significantly disrupted by AI within the next couple/few decades, well I definitely think so.
- Layoffs due to insufficient demand in uncertain economic times
- Companies selling AI need to claim "we are so great with AI we don't need as many people." Layoffs unlock AI budgets.
- It justifies all the capital allocation into AI.
- Companies in the AI industry shock the government into learned helplessness, so they can write policy that is on their terms.
What am I missing?
"So soon as the handling of this tool becomes the work of a machine, then, with the use-value, the exchange-value too, of the workman’s labour-power vanishes; the workman becomes unsaleable, like paper money thrown out of currency by legal enactment. That portion of the working-class, thus by machinery rendered superfluous, i.e., no longer immediately necessary for the self-expansion of capital, either goes to the wall in the unequal contest of the old handicrafts and manufactures with machinery, or else floods all the more easily accessible branches of industry, swamps the labour-market, and sinks the price of labour-power below its value."[0]
[0]: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm
We need lots of firefighters on call when landowners do control burns for example. It's a short window.
I started wearing a tool belt for work before I even finished high school. I worked in various skilled trades until I was 38 years old. I made some decent money sometimes, but not often.
Here is the part that people forget to tell you when they give you that advice: learning a skilled trade only pays off if you A) join a union or B) work for yourself.
This is especially true in the Southern US. You can be the best carpenter, electrician, plumber, etc in town, but you won't have healthcare, retirement PTO, you won't be treated like a human unless you join a union (good luck with that in the South) or work for yourself by either being a contractor or starting a company and hiring others to work for you.
However, if someone is truly determine to work in the trades, I always recommend they become a welder. A competent welder can clear $200k+ per year with nothing but a pick up truck with a service bed and their welding equipment and generators.
But other than that, I advise people to avoid the skilled trades unless they can join a union.
Anecdotally I met a guy a while back. He was a machinist in the Midwest. He was looking for a new job. Anyone reaching out to him were non-union shops in the south paying less hourly than McDonalds nowadays.
He was floored when he learned how much I was being paid. His hourly rate was more than double mine (not for the consulting/training work, but for his normal production work) and his benefits were far better. Plus the area he lived in had a much lower cost of living than I had in Auburn, AL.
Alabama politicians love to brag about all the manufacturing jobs they've created. But what they've really done is simply allow all of these companies to move down south where they aren't required to treat their employees like humans.
Out of ~300 people on the floor, I was the highest paid because I was the only one that could operate the DMGs. All of my coworkers worked 70 hours per week (we were required to work 6am to 6pm Monday - Friday and then 6am to 4pm on Saturday) yet they still relied on public assistance you be able to survive.
It feels like nobody in the government is even trying to prepare for the massive changes in job market.
----
Me: dropped out of grad school, eventually becoming an electrician (IBEW). Decades as handyman doing various sideworks (my own "startup"?). Retired my own residential electrical contractor license (during Covid), good riddance [1]. Forty-something "you're still young!" #yeahOK
Also me: have worked part-time, as-needed, for three family startups (one as lowly eng.tech, other two in hardware manufacture/assembly [3d-manufacturing & EV energy management].
----
I incurred severe student loan (&c) debt, wasting years both in college (IMHO: don't go, unless it's for an accredited engineering degree[0]) ...and wrecklessly pissing away my twenties drunk-and-stupid (anxiety from being -$235k in-the-hole, then).
When most of my electrician brothers were getting their first $80k pickuptrucks, I was trudging myself out of debt. A decade ago, I became worth $0.00.
[0] Seriously, if you're in college right now: read this again. Whether you want to be a PE, or doctor/lawyer, a B.E. will become an ultimate fallback (and incredible methods of viewing worldly interactions of fundamentals problem solving). To a certain clientele ($$$), that undergraduate in engineering will justify increased billingrates (not as much as MD/JD/MBA, but would still enhance even these).
----
And my body has paid the price of blue collar drudgeries, despite other extremely-fortunate (&unexpected!) windfalls. I've had a handful of weeks in my life where serious consideration has been given to will I ever run/walk again...
Just as I've begun a quest to transition into something less physical (i.e. I dream of desk/office of my own, outside my messy home "office"), this brilliant genAI stuff comes along... and I'm just so glad past blue collar work has allowed me goodénuf savings, even perhaps a few more years of wandering around lost (like most-everybody else increasingly is).
[1] Last advice: you need to find niche tradework — just being a "residential electrician" is increasingly impossible to maintain, with competition from both legal, not, and tech workers. Be the guy (e.g.) that installs (just) meters or lighting or hottubs — or whatever — but don't be the oneguy that does everything (==bankrupt, sooner than not).
----
Life is good, even on a Monday morning. Who the hell knows anymore...
> People stop learning programming.
> Programmers become scarce.
> Programmers become valuable again.
Maybe it's wishful thinking but I'm not going to be surprised if it plays out like this. In some sense the reverse happened over the last couple of decades - everyone and their mother got into IT and the industry became saturated.
There were always unqualified people coming out of college, but the amount of people in interviews that can literally do nothing these days seems higher than before.
There was always some cohort of people that somehow managed to graduate from college with a CS degree, and seemingly not learning anything, or at least not learn how to even write basic code (independently).
It seems like AI is not reducing that percentage - possibly increasing it.
Anecdata, take it with a grain of salt.
AI is definitely increasing it. I barely type out any code now, and simply sit back and review what Claude dumps out. Even if it's a minor UI change, I just request the LLM and it executes the change for me. Thankfully I don't write code for my day-job anymore and mostly just sit in my office and pontificate :). I know my code skills and inclination to write code have atrophied to an extent, thanks to AI. Currently what I'm able to do with AI far surpasses the capabilities of what I was able to do without relying on AI.
Now if my employees were relying on LLMs to do their coding for them, I would be very disappointed. And I think that that limited space in algorithmic and HFT trading is where exceptionally talented programmers will find room in, leaving the others to dry out and wither.
Perhaps the best example of frogs in a boiling pot are all these folks in frontier AI companies themselves who are building the blocks for the very things that are going to replace them, if not already. Maybe they'll make off like bandits before their work gets adversely affected, or maybe not.
> Now if my employees were relying on LLMs to do their coding for them, I would be very disappointed
Why in the world would you be disappointed in your employees doing exactly what you do?
Not that AI is the same as Websites all going broke. But no one can see the future and it’s unlikely that deep technical knowledge will be obsolete.
1) No matter the age, they are using said AI to replace human
2) Within workplace, they are using AI to do their work so they are learning nothing
3) That is it, people are using AI to replace their own work rather than improve it, people are driving themselves out of work.
Neither of the strategies in the article here scales.
LLMs like manufacturing will multiply the coding throughput. Likely the mythical 10x swe will not be as valuable, but the work expectation from anyone in the field will just multiply.
Is it because the population is constantly growing or is it because per-person shoe-units is increasing due to that person increased wealth or is it because per-person shoe-units is increasing due to 5x lower price of generic shoe-units? How does that exactly transfer to the production of software and market absorbing the software hyper-inflation?
tldr; Just like knowledge work, most trade stuff is probably mostly repeated (i.e. very trainable) task with a small amount of taste and discernment applied. The repeated will be trainable, the discernment may be trainable. I don't think the physical world is necessarily any safer than the knowledge world.
That being said, the absolute focus on trades from the fed right now just reeks of the wild pendulum swing. It used to be 'go to college to get a good job' then we had too many college grads. In ten years we'll have a glut of people trained in the trades with no prospects.
It just keeps swinging back and forth and somehow Joe Regularworker keeps losing.
"<...> a reverse centaur is machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine."
[1] https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-12-05...
Even if we get robots who can, say, build roads start to end, there is still a HUGE gap between that and it actually being used. There is a hard floor, too. Robots are made of physical things, physical things have scarcity, and there's no way around that to our knowledge. Even if you can build the robot for 1 cent, the material cost will still exist.
People are not, though, and all the folks who are no longer necessary in knowledge work are available for physical work.
Only doing things is competitive.
https://serjaimelannister.github.io/wsj-article/
and I have also uploaded the github link on archive.org for persistence/archival purposes.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260322213950/https://serjaimel...
I hope that this might help some people and I have another friendly suggestion to please donate to archive.org :-)
Cloudflare flags archive.today as "C&C/Botnet"; no longer resolves via 1.1.1.2
related:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46843805 "Archive.today is directing a DDoS attack against my blog"