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Comment by arjie | Hacker News Reader

Really enjoyable read. I escaped a career in Mathematics by being sufficiently bad at it that I only have a Masters. Fortunately, I escaped to a field immune to AI: CS and then a software engineering career. Well, not really, but I did get a good 15 years out of it so thank god for that.

About half of my friends are founders of various startups and the rest are executives of and almost all of them have the view that it’s better for everything to be a failure than to be in the “it could make it” category for half a decade or more.

In that way, I am glad I found that it wasn’t for me. I had the curiosity, but not the doggedness to face difficulty (not enough curiosity perhaps?) or the ability to not encounter such difficulty. And fortunately that meant I was never in the “I could make it” category. God bless clear and present boundaries and may the devil take the grey zone.

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Yeah, I’m pretty much on a trajectory of building up as much retirement savings as possible before AI completely kills my career. The sweet spot seems to be about three years out. I honestly don’t know how to guide my 12-year-old son who loves math¹ and coding.

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1. Which at his age essentially means solving computation problems, although he figured out how to take something like 0.3535… and turn that back into a rational number without any guidance at all.²

2. I want to see how close to the general solution he’s gotten on his own, but given that he’s not had any formal algebra, it’s damned impressive and bodes well for his future development.

Im going with this... scifi stuff still requires engineers. Its laughable and insulting to think these billionaire owners are going to make robots and llm loops to get real shit done

https://rcsnyder.github.io/open-frontier-curriculum/

Ya "claude can you build me the next cern Thanks"

How many CERNs are there? Enough to build careers on?

No, what do you think about the book Four Futures?

I have not read it but I can't imagine a book written before the current explosion of AI can be accurate. What do you think of it?

From what I’ve seen of what AI can do for coding, the part of software engineering that I like is going to be automated out of existence, much like the ability to do serious calculations by hand got automated out of existence with the development of computing. Writing code by hand will be as marketable as factoring 5-digit numbers in your head.¹

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1. I enjoy doing both, but I doubt that anyone will pay me what I’ve been paid in the past for this five years from now.

If you want AI-proof careers it seems risky to go into knowledge work at all. Robotics lag behind mere computation, so something where you do awkward work in places designed around human bodies seems a lot safer. Plumbing, landscaping or something like that perhaps.

This is a romantic and very appealing idea that flies in the face of reality. The market for skilled trade workers like plumbers, electricians, landscapers and so on is more or less in equilibrium, and the demand side of it is relatively inelastic. Dumping hundreds of millions of new workers into these trades will not increase demand sufficiently to let anyone earn a viable living from them.

There is nothing that can absorb millions of new workers. If AI destroys jobs to that degree pitchfork manufacturers will be the only ones left in business.

Where I live at least right now it is quite hard to find contractors for anything and many are close to retirement age and have a hard time finding replacements.

There's also the thing where trade work is in the process of pricing itself out of what normal folks are willing to afford. Combined with Youtube tutorials and AI help that is getting better, it wouldn't surprise me if more and more people would just decide to do all this stuff themselves at a fraction of the cost.

Yeah, I feel DIY is definitely on an upswing. There's surprisingly decent info, tools and parts for cheap to be found. And materials are getting simpler to work with.

There are still things that will remain difficult (or illegal) in domestic settings for DIY, of course, but that's no model for full employment.

I haven't got any experience with them but there's even vendors for house assembly kits that cost a fraction of a finished one. Imagine you idiot-proof house planning and building: just do exactly what the app says.

I wonder just how far we have to push this until we finally get the 10h work week.

As someone who's also thinking about their child's future, I've come to the conclusion that building their capacity for precise language by expanding their vocabulary and grammar in an array of domains and subdomains is the best way forward. Not only will they have a more detailed understanding of what's out there, but using specialized, narrow terminology with AI provides vastly better solutions than general prompt language.

It was this way before AI.

Being an artist has always been a pretty difficult career path. But lots of people do it because they love creating art. If AI actually does what people fear it will to programming, people like your son and mine can choose to be an artist as a hobby or make a go of it as a profession.

the arts is crashing harder than programming

many schools have shuttered since ~2022

artist gigs are at an all time low

if you practice artistry as a craftsman in niches like carpentry, maybe you could make a living..

grey failure is the worst, not dead, not alive and no clear signal.

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