I wish there were studies on when this situation will normalize. Will the lost jobs ever come back? Or not?
I think they will have big problem finding people who will actually train those juniors by then.
For example - at first ATMs created more jobs in banking because employees could move to more complex services. But banks are back to downsizing after further advancements streamlined those services too, aiui.
A lot of people may have to transition to careers that people do not want to have AI do, like nursing. The earlier you start such a transition the easier it is because you still have resources to make moves.
Becoming bum or going off the grid would be way more attractive to me than working my ass of in stressful conditions for meager pay so some motherfuckers can buy yet another yacht
Smart choice
take ATMs. they automated the task but the rung above it remained human. someone to handle exceptions, sell the mortgage, etc. running a branch actually became cheaper. cheaper branches meant more branches, so teller headcount went up for two decades.
what seems different now isn't that the models are better at tasks. it's that the rung above is being climbed at the same time. the coordination layer is getting absorbed concurrently rather than a generation later.
that doesn't mean no new work appears but every historical instance seems to have some kind of "escape route" which i'm not sure exists this time around.
maybe they became taxi drivers. But that too will be gone soon.
Can't beat capitalism + technological innovation.
Blacksmiths, wheelwrights, and wainwrights transitioned to auto mechanic or carpentry work. Not all of them, but for most the skills were portable. Several of the carriage-making businesses transitioned to automobiles. Studebaker and Oakland (which became Pontiac), for example. I'm sure the most experienced people lost big, of course, and we shouldn't minimize the damage done to people's livlihoods.
Unless you mean taxicab drivers, which was the term for them before the automobile. Taxicab = taximeter cabriolet, and a cabriolet is a style of horse-drawn carriage.
It really was the horse people that lost out the most. That's why the idiomatic reference is for buggy whips, not so much for buggies themselves.
I mentioned it to my daughter. She said, "Rich people are going to keep having horses." I'm pretty sure she's not wrong.
But there's still a lot fewer farriers than there used to be...
Not the same as the horse and cart operator, for various reasons... Maybe the wheelwright? But even that seems like a specialism of carpentry
> It really was the horse people that lost out the most. That's why the idiomatic reference is for buggy whips, not so much for buggies themselves.
.... Had you forgotten what I'd wrote by the time you got to this point?
I’ve just started transitioning my career closer to management, so I develop/manage roughly 50/50. At this point, if I had to manage a tight budget, I’d rather have an entry level salary as tokens for a senior engineer.
We’ll need a way, as a society, to help new adults transitions from education to productive employee. But individual companies don’t have aligned incentives.
Be realistic. Would you start a business and risk it's viability giving away free training to the public? No, and neither would anyone else.
maybe govt can tax ai companies and use that money to prearm juniors with tokens that only they can use.
A high-potential junior you can at least justify as an investment in the future.
The other people who are going to get squeezed are the later-career developers who are below-average in ability. (I'm not using "below average" here pejoratively - just noting that by definition, half of developers are below-average.) Outside of big tech, there are piles of organizations with devs who don't make big-tech salary and who are only marginally productive for what they're getting paid.
If you're an organization that only has the budget to pay non-junior devs $80k... you can see the implications of having the option to spend your dev budget on seniors + tokens instead.