9 ms·

When Will AI Take Your Job?

100 points by JSeymourATL 4y ago

Temporary_31337 4y ago
This, just like many other takes, confirms that there will be a short term boom in applying AI to everything. If you are in your 30s or 40s and surf this wave correctly, this may very well be the last job you will ever do. So my plan is to learn how to plug GPT to excel, databases etc and provide AI for the smaller companies that can’t integrate AI like Salesforce and big companies like Azure Professional Services will not find them profitable enough to deal with.
- robopsychology 4y ago
  What do you mean by last job? As in making money off of this wave by lucrative contract gigs or an acquisition?
  - nonbirithm 4y ago
    Even if all the jobs creating CRUD apps are automated away, there will probably still be an interest in automating them even faster. LLMs are currently the state of the art technique for doing so, hence there will be a continual need for more AI engineers/researchers. And if something that performs better than current LLMs comes around, all those engineers will shift over to whatever field develops them.
  - iamflimflam1 4y ago
    As in there won’t be any more jobs for you to do…
  - rnk 4y ago
    I'd see it as a last job. In terms of you can do it for 20 years and then retire. Not as jobs won't exist anymore.
    - prawn 4y ago
      20 years is a long time in an industry with an incredible rate of change. Though I guess if you're in the market now, you're 3-5 years ahead of kids coming through tertiary studies specialising in AI.
- aarong11 4y ago
  Right now seems like the right time to be doing this for sure. There are also a lot of potential applications for GPT to be used to solve problems that were previously too expensive or infeasible to be done by humans at scale. It definitely doesn't hurt for you to hedge your bets and try to learn how the tech works at the bare minimum.
- kkielhofner 4y ago
  This is a good strategy. In the early days of widespread internet connectivity (dial-up) it generally went two ways: 1) You lived in a big city and AOL/Compuserve/Prodigy/etc was a local call. Practically everyone had it. 2) You lived "somewhere else" and some random guy you could pay had a T1 and a bunch of modems in a garage (this was me). Eventually it became worth it and technology advanced enough (with demand) for cable cos to deploy cable modems. At first only in dense metro areas, then slowly out to more rural areas. Point is - there's a TON of opportunity for "guy with a T1 and modems in a garage" in this space. There is a huge market of ignored and underserved businesses/customers/applications/integrations/etc that (like AOL/Cable Cos) the big AI guys don't care about (yet).
- golergka 4y ago
  I hear many other tech professionals doing more or less the same. Shame you don't have any contact information in your bio, I would love to have a chat.
blhack 4y ago
Squarespace was supposed to take away the jobs of people who make websites, but it didn't. The same people who you used to hire to make a website for you are still doing that, but now they just use squarespace for it. I saw a recent quote for a very basic, static website that was greater than $10k. This would be about a day of work to put together in squarespace. AI is not going to take away jobs, it's just going to make the people already doing them more efficient.
- Joeboy 4y ago
  > AI is not going to take away jobs, it's just going to make the people already doing them more efficient In the same sort of way that wordprocessing just made typists more efficient.
  - ModernMech 4y ago
    Or if you want to make a more direct comparison, it’s like high level languages and compilers making punch card writers more efficient.
- tyingq 4y ago
  It's hard to predict. Consider bank tellers. ATMs initially allowed banks to run more local branches, resulting in more jobs. But now that ATMs, especially the ones inside, are VERY full function, the job numbers are reducing fast. https://www.vox.com/2017/5/8/15584268/eric-schmidt-alphabet-automation-atm-bank-teller https://www.vox.com/2017/5/8/15584268/eric-schmidt-alphabet-...
  - 13of40 4y ago
    Even that one's a little bit meta, since fewer people are using cash now.
  - chrisan 4y ago
    I don't think its because ATMs are so good/functional as much as it is people just don't use cash and deposite checks like they once did. > “because of industry consolidation and technological change,”
onion2k 4y ago
I think my job is reasonably safe simply because "AI" is never going to be as effective at it as "me + AI". Someone has to be there to understand the problem in human terms in order to know what to tell the AI to do. I've recently started pushing myself to take a more Systems Thinking approach to solving problems, and to start using AI in my work, precisely because I see this as a change that's coming. It is inevitable. I might as well embrace it. Also, and maybe this is selfish, I suspect fewer people are going to see tech as a good career option in the very long term (10+ years). The experience I have now puts me ahead right now, but if there are fewer devs entering the industry in a decade it'll keep me in work for a long time. I'm think (hope!) I'm going to be OK. If I was a junior right now, or a student, I would see AI as a much greater threat.
- eutectic 4y ago
  "never" is a long time.
- dudul 4y ago
  > "AI" is never going to be as effective at it as "me + AI" Yeah, but which one will be cheaper?
- theLiminator 4y ago
  "AI" is never going to be as effective at it as "me + AI". That's what people said about chess ai.
  - User23 4y ago
    Has Magnus or a similarly good player ever played against an AI using an AI to assist him? That sounds like it could be interesting.
    - williadc 4y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlsen%E2%80%93Niemann_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlsen%E2%80%93Niemann_contro... This is not exactly what you asked, but it shows that high-level players are using AI to play better chess.
cleandreams 4y ago
It's not just issues of tech and economics but perhaps more importantly, of power. If workers have political representation (power) than these productivity increases can feed into wage increases and hour reductions. A big if. In USA, workers are pretty powerless. That means it is most likely to result in massive waves of unemployment and political instability. When I first moved to the city in which I live there were NO homeless. That was in 1980. Since then the working class economy here crashed and the professionals took over. Now we step over bodies in the streets. I think it is likely that the AI wave will be this, but worse. BTW my last job was at an AI company as a high level tech contributor.
- colordrops 4y ago
  There has to be a tipping point when enough jobs are done by machines that there are not enough wage earners to buy products and services created by these machines. At that point a choice must be made, to either take the machines and lock them behind secure walls to only be used by the privileged and leave everyone else to squalor, or to fundamentally change the structure of society where work and money are no longer core elements. I've got my bets on which one will occur.
  - hammyhavoc 4y ago
    Which one do you think will occur?
    - colordrops 4y ago
      I think the movie Elysium makes a decent prediction for a potential near term future.
  - mc32 4y ago
    It looks like AI is more likely to render knowledge workers less valuable rather than making low skill workers less valuable. Now if you get AI + Robots (with dense energy) to work together, yeah we’re all in trouble.
timeon 4y ago
> The main winners of these trends will be all of us consumers, with access to much better content. Also, the best creators, who will use these tools to generate lots of great content and rake in its benefits. Maybe yes. But I wonder. Take that example with disappearing local football leagues: what is impact for local communities? When everything is "centralized" to very best providers... Is best always best?
- kkielhofner 4y ago
  Are you talking American Football or the "actually using your feet" one (Soccer to us)? Youth (American) Football is dying because the data on CTE and other debilitating injuries is clear and parents are less enthusiastic/willing to allow their kids to damage their brains.
- msftie 4y ago
  Related to this quote, I don’t think we’re guaranteed access to better content. I think we’re guaranteed to more prolific cheap to produce content. Think Instagram era relative to Flickr era. Less about the art, more about fast fashion, or fast art, to capture your ever more brief attention. Certainly the next chapter of Tim Wu’s book, The Attention Merchants.
lordnacho 4y ago
Tanks may have made cavalry obsolete (was is tanks? I don't know), but they didn't make generals obsolete. When was there ever a military engagement that was described in terms of commanders facing off? It's been the story since the beginning of war. Likewise there are decision makers in civilian life. They decide all sorts of things, sometimes relying on people to implement their decisions, sometimes machines. Sometimes they use a machine to replace a lower level decision maker. But there's always a boss. This is what will determine whether your job is automated away.
dwighttk 4y ago
In that first chart there is not a single test listed that people start at a job based on their performance on the test.
- Nevermark 4y ago
  Not being that sensitive to variation in test scores doesn’t mean an employer isn’t sensitive to pass or fail. Or that a score at the extreme high end wouldn’t get an employer’s attention.
  - dwighttk 4y ago
    the bar exam is the only one I see that is pass you can work fail you can't... and GPT4 only took the multiple choice half of that.
lolinder 4y ago
I don't worry about AI automating away my job not because I don't think it's possible (though I do think it's much much further out than the hype would suggest), but because an AI automating away software creation is the economic equivalent of nuclear war: it would irrevocably alter everything about the way the world is run and is therefore impossible to adequately prepare for on an individual basis. Most of us in software are automating other people's jobs: we learn and understand requirements and build things that make other people more productive or erase their jobs entirely. The rate of automation is right now limited in large part by the availability and cost of software engineers. If AGI can reduce that cost to ~0, then a massive percentage of the economy would be wiped out in a matter of months. What is any individual software developer supposed to do to prepare for that scenario?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- kajumix 4y ago
  If AI automates software creation, which automates everybody else's job, why does it follow that a "massive percentage of the economy would be wiped out?" What is so undesirable about productivity going up by a factor of a 100 or a 1000 and everyone living like an aristocrat, because machines do all the work? Why is full employment such an obsession?
  - lolinder 4y ago
    I didn't say it would be undesirable! Just that it would completely alter the world in ways that we cannot prepare for on an individual basis. Ideally, we move to UBI and, as you say, everyone lives like an aristocrat. But we don't get there by trying to hedge against AI taking over our individual jobs.
  - mostlysimilar 4y ago
    Because the benefits of these tools are not distributed equally. The ultra wealthy will become even more wealthy and the unwashed masses will starve. Of course the ideal outcome is the Star Trek post-scarcity utopia. But humans are not currently incentivized in a way that I can see leading to that outcome in our lifetimes.
thedonkeycometh 4y ago
[dead]
ETH_start 4y ago
This got me thinking: as more of what can be produced with existing technology, is made trivial-to-produce through enhanced automation (e.g. AI), one area that will still require labor, and that people will still be willing to expend resources on to procure, is the creation of new technology. It would be in our interest to remove legal impediments to raising capital for new ventures, so that more of the labor freed up by automation of existing industries can be allocated to the creation of new industries. Such a world would see more kickstarters, equity crowdsales, crypto token sales and DAOs for collaborative creation, and more people employed in the ventures these capital raising projects fund.
analog31 4y ago
Oddly enough half of my job is learning to get answers (from the physical world), the other half finding out if those answers are true. So far no human has come close to threatening my job if they don't actually care about those things. So it will be when AI learns to care about the truth.
impulser_ 4y ago
It's really feeling like AI is the new crypto. Majority of the people hyping up AI are directly benefited from the raise in AI. The same way the people that were hyping up crypto either ran blockchain, dapp, or were VC invested into it. I don't know the writer of this blog post, but I'm willing to bet he has posts about how crypto will replace the financial system.
- lolinder 4y ago
  You'd win that bet: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/about https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/about > I believe Bitcoin will replace gold, cryptocurrencies will replace fiat currencies, and smart contracts will upend how we deal with each other. https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aunchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com+bitcoin https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aunchartedterritories....
  - the_only_law 4y ago
    Tbh this makes me much more wary about all these AI claims. Wasn’t too long ago when people were clamoring about how their latest favorite technology, blockchain was going to magically come in and solve every problem since the dawn of society.
    - lolinder 4y ago
      Agreed. It's always possible that this is a "a stopped clock is right twice a day" situation—that by hopping on every bandwagon the hype artists eventually land on something that happens to work out—but in general I find it likely that this blows over to a degree.
8note 4y ago
There's an anti-productivity link round the front page that answers this well - the amount of useless work to be done is infinite, and growing productivity on useless work only lets you do more useless work. The more useless work ai is able to do, the more useless work will be asked of it. The ai doesn't have opinions about what it should be doing, so without people to push it into doing the right thing, it's going to be answering a lot of emails
- usrusr 4y ago
  The recent rounds of tech giant layoffs suggest that capital is far more capable of asking wether a given unit of work is actually useful than we might have thought before. If n employees can earn m money, sure, one form of institutional greed might assume that 2n employees will earn 2m money, and 100n 100m. But if that fails (and chances are it will, because everything has a sweet spot beyond which lies the land of diminishing returns), it's hardly surprising that the next form of greed that will be attempted is discovering how much of m will remain with n/2.
rcpt 4y ago
Seems like landlord continues to be the only secure career path.
- colordrops 4y ago
  Until an AI corners the real estate market.
  - breckenedge 4y ago
    They tried and it was a disaster. AIs just kept bidding up the market until pop!
  - chii 4y ago
    how does an AI get access to capital without a human in the loop?
    - he_is_legend 4y ago
      by mining bitcoin of course!
- pydry 4y ago
  Most productivity gains over the last 50 years have flowed into the pockets of capital or property owners.
  - rcpt 4y ago
    Henry George AI plz help
chiefalchemist 4y ago
What I find interesting is what professions are concerned about AI. For the most part they appear to be better paying white collar need-a-college-degree type of jobs. Tech, copywriters, marketing, designers, lawyers, accountants, etc. All feeling the heat. The person pumping gas? Cutting hair? Janitors? Nurses? They, for now, seem to be immune. As a side note, anecdotally, productive gains have a ceiling. Sure Copilot and ChatGPT free me up to focus on the heavy lifting. But my brain can't run that relentlessly all day. It seems to need to catch its breath.
- jimhefferon 4y ago
  The job of the future: butler.
- prawn 4y ago
  I haven't seen anyone paid to pump gas in my country for decades? Labour intensive services dealing with unpredictable environments or interfaces will be here for a while yet - cleaning, nursing and aged care, etc.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    > I haven't seen anyone paid to pump gas in my country for decades? Meanwhile, I've seen people at gas stations pumping my gas for me in plenty of countries, especially in South America. Some places in South Europe do it too during rush hour and at really busy gas stations in metropolitan areas.
  - chiefalchemist 4y ago
    My point is, the hunters are becoming the hunted.
A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
I will admit that I am personally on the fence. There are parts of my job that could definitely be augmented by LLM ( I know, because I have been trying to use them as a way to test whether it could work in my domain ). Some results were cool and shaved off a fair amount of time for me ( for example, it cut down some time on proposed approach to problem, where there was a solution already ), but I can't say it would, in its current state, replace me ( Python and SQL code quality gpt generated seemed to rely too much on how specific the prompt was and I typically had to refine it as I went through it ). But we are merely starting out. I actually started looking into building excel plugin ( first time ever too so, who knows how that will pan out ) for my use case ( categorizing some unstructured data into structured data, which is what GPT seems to excel at ). And the one thing that was initially protecting me is that some companies, rightfully, identified ingestion of prompt data as a massive privacy issue. Now OpenAI supposedly said data ingestion from prompts and provided files will be opt in only, which may mollify some of those companies. OTOH, some things can't possibly be replaced by AI ( last week we just dealt with a vendor requirements translation and, uhh, good luck with all that GPT ).
mwcampbell 4y ago
> get in the bandwagon of AI, start using the tools, explode your productivity I'm reluctant to start using LLM-based coding assistants (e.g. Copilot) in my programming work because I don't want to taint my code with laundered code that was under a copyleft or other restrictive license. Is this a reasonable concern?
- johnfn 4y ago
  In short, no. Once you try out the tool you’ll understand this concern never made much sense to begin with for normal usage patterns. Copilot primarily excels in writing very short snippets, far too short to be under copyleft.
brezelnbitte 4y ago
There are plenty of students who can ace these exams but then utterly fail at getting things done at companies because they lack problem solving experience, a toleration for ambiguity or any number of interpersonal skills needed to complete complex projects. Until AI can just deal with other AI and not messy humans, there will be job security.
- crop_rotation 4y ago
  Yes but AI won't have to deal with messy humans. Once companies see how quickly this ultra cheap AI can get things done, a lot of companies would restructure things to ensure the AI has a superhighway to whatever it needs. That sounds like an easy competitive advantage for any company. Messy politics exist within companies because there are so many people and so many orgs. If one cheap AI can do so much concurrently, structures optimal to the AI will be formed focused around the AI needs.
  - aldarisbm 4y ago
    who checks this output ? who troubleshoot when prod is down? what about regulations? which company is the first one to have a huge data leak and blame it on AI? which legislator bans use of AI unless there are human engineers? I’ve never seen any one company be successful at streamlining their projects. I am worried about AI but I doubt this will be happen as you’re saying it.
    - crop_rotation 4y ago
      > who checks this output Code is reviewed by one more person anyways right now in most continues. So it continues same way. > who troubleshoot when prod is down A human engineer for now. The amount of time when prod is down should be low enough for this to not be a huge factor. > what about regulations the AI will do a better job of memorizing and understanding those > which legislator bans use of AI unless there are human engineers? what does this even mean. Is it ok to have one AI and 5 engineers where previously 50 were needed? Since nobody is going to have a company with 0 human engineers and only AI. > I am worried about AI but I doubt this will be happen as you’re saying it. I also doubt it happens exactly as I am saying it, but I think the possibilities are non zero.
darod 4y ago
If AI is solving everything and ultimately phasing workers out, then what exactly would you be educating your kids in? Human's limiting factor is the time that it takes them to learn something (18-27 years of education depending on the field). What job would be worth striving for? They'd be training for jobs that a future AI would be trying to phase out. This whole article just described how most of the the highest paid workers (doctors, lawyers, driving, logistics, film, music, radio, etc etc) would be automated. I don't know what you'd need a person for at that point. Feels like a race to the bottom.
- kajumix 4y ago
  It's sad that to think that a human's worth is defined by their job.
  - throwawaysalome 4y ago
    More specifically, it's his ability to provide, which for most potential mates is his paycheck.
  - tap-snap-or-nap 4y ago
    It is also sad that every other specie has already suffered before humans are starting to feel this way. There was massive biodiversity loss on this planet and most of mammalian biomass consists of humans and animals that feed humans. Humans need to retreat. We have enough tools and people improving human lives. We now need more people and tools to improve many other lives and systems on this planet.
  - tnel77 4y ago
    Under our current economic system, it is. We can change that though!
- lewhoo 4y ago
  I think education will still be crucial in human to human relation but it remains to be seen if the value of education won't be lessened because it won't give any other edge. I really share this concern because let's face it - we're pushing ourselves for the sake of better life, better job, better X.
ultrasounder 4y ago
here is my day-day from this last Friday; 1. Made circuit boards for a Photo-diode circuit(1nA max out. welp!) with Altium previous week. 2. Got bare fabs from local fab-house. 3. Received them, did opens and shorts between power and ground. Also verified internal planes were intact(no dead copper). 4. Stuffed one board(made 5). 5. passed smoke test(huzzah!!). But op-amp output zilch. 6. Debugged the entire afternoon found out that the enable to the reference chip was "pulled-down" instead of "pulled-up". I fixed it the circuit started working and op-amp output high. In the intermeaning steps between 5 and 6, I tried searching for specific debug tasks using BingAI(I was an early adopter hihi). The results were sub-par. essentially summarizing data sheets. Went direct to the source(ChatGPT) with alarmingly same results. Hence I decided to have the data sheet on one screen and my schematic on the other and traced the connections and found out my error within say 15 minutes. Long story short, in my professional career AI is not going to be of any immediate help(in its current avatar) for the next 3-4 years. Beyond that I probably would be long retired and gone off grid.
- crop_rotation 4y ago
  In your case it is not going to do anything anytime soon (since your work involves interaction with the physical world). The article points out that different jobs get affected differently by changes.
- cyanydeez 4y ago
  Definitely, debugging is going to be a manifold problem. Particularly because it's typically not just undocumented behavior but also wrongly documented or inversely documented or it's not parallel safe, etc. Failure modes are entropic
crop_rotation 4y ago
I think even if the utopian case happen and the machine wealth get shared among people and everyone lives happy in leisure while the machine does everything, even then it would severely curtain social mobility. There will not be a way to get better outcomes in life. An even larger number of folks won't have any upward mobility. A lot of human inventions in the past 2 centuries have owed to individual drive and ambition. Once that goes away, how do anything new happens.
crop_rotation 4y ago
I think a lot of this thread (and HN in general) seems to think that their case is special and AI will not make any dent there. While this is true for many comments, it reminds of several studies that a majority of people think they are better than average in their field. We tend to view our tasks as special cases. People are trying to see how the current AI fits in their current process. However this won't be the case. The AI might improve and improve. And companies might change processes to revolve around the AI. Just like how companies change their processes to cater to ERP systems, they might change them to cater to AI systems. AI won't have to talk to 10 teams and play politics for prioritisation.
jftuga 4y ago
One job that will always be AI proof: preschool teacher.
- pydry 4y ago
  Not a well paid job though is it?
- throwawaysalome 4y ago
  That's the next job to disappear when parents have nothing else to do but raise their young.
- noogle 4y ago
  Parents already use technology (TV, tablet computer) to alleviate some of the burden of caring for their children. Why not use a far more engaging product?
markus_zhang 4y ago
As a non senior data engineer, I think AI can take my job already, except that it requires my company to open up its code base for AI to consume and train seniors to be better prompt engineers so that they spend less time modifying code written by AI. There are a lot of edge cases but I think the tech is already here. To escape from that fate I'm going to drill deeper into k8s, docker and Linux system programming. I know a better route is to launch a career that translates requirements from business stakeholders and develop an AI-friendly architecture so that our AI lords can conveniently code functions, scripts and programs without much interference. But throughout my career life I have tried my best to avoid that road (because I'm not interested in business), so I have to pick the second best way -- serve our AI lords by maintaining infrastructure for them, just like rhino birds serving rhinos I shall serve our AI lords faithfully in eternity, even after death when my coding skills can be consumed by them.
- stormfather 4y ago
  I think that's the most dangerous way to go, THB. AI is good at stuff that is very widely represented in its training data, and common pieces of infrastructure that many apps use like docker will be some of the easiest stuff to automate away. "AI, spin up a K8 with these properties like you have for 100,000 others..."
  - markus_zhang 4y ago
    After seeing a demo of ChatGPT generating terraform code I have to agree with you. I'm not sure what else can I do though. Looks like AI is indeed going to be very good at everything I love to do, mostly very technical stuffs. I just fed ChatGPT with a bunch of DOS viruses and it did a good analysis. It might take me quite a few months of full time study to reach that level. Do I have to be an entrepreneur? Sigh. I have spent my whole tech life to be away from that road...
credit_guy 4y ago
Before AI can take my job, AI can be my tool. I can become more productive with AI, many times more productive than now. Then the question will not be "is AI better than credit_guy?" but "is AI alone better than credit_guy who uses AI?". If I learn how to take full advantage of AI, I have a fighting chance.
my_city 4y ago
Under the current system, millions will lose their jobs and a handful of extremely rich people will get richer: capitalists. All of this will be completely lawful: is the law of the free market. The only answer is to destroy capitalism and unite as workers. Only if we unite as proletarians, we can redistribute the inmense profits of automation and make sure to live a worthy life.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
I think the mistake a lot of people make is assuming that their job is actually important. We got a little sneak preview of that during the lock downs in the last two years when people's daily routines got disrupted a lot and a lot of day to day work either stopped happening or was reduced by a lot. It had a lot less effect than you would expect if you assume that most people do something important/essential. Most of what people do in their jobs isn't all that important. This is a result of automation that has gradually been introduced since the industrial revolution. People kept on working but the nature of what they do has become increasingly detached from things that people back in the day would have recognized as work or important. We work less than ever and lot of "work" basically involves people having meetings, managing other people, or doing things in the services industry in a complex network of interdependent tasks and processes where you might question what it actually is that we are actually doing collectively or why. Obviously, there is some value in doing these things because we're obviously doing them and getting something out of the process of doing that. At least subjectively. But what matters economically is that money changes hands and is used to create the demand for all these things. Without demand, there's no need to do a lot of the things that we do. And without that, the need to automate it also goes away. So there's this paradox that automating what we do, removes the demand for the thing (or at least downgrades its value). And it helps create demand for more valuable things we can do. Take bread for example. Rather crucial to a lot of people and it used to be the main component of a lot of people's diets. Bread now comes from factories and ever since we invented sliced bread it's been considered the best thing ever. Sliced bread (sliced by a machine) from a factory that produces bread at an industrial scale. Except we pay extra for artisanal bread that is made the old fashioned way. So we now have people with college degrees opening bakeries and selling us really expensive baked goods that they made with their own hands. Could what they do be automated? Yes, that already happened. But the whole point of what they do and why it is valuable is that it isn't. The factory bread is low value. And the bread is just part of the experience. The whole bread experience involves interacting with the amazing people that bake the bread, that knead the dough, and visiting the beautiful shops in which they do that. Add premium packaging to the mix and it makes you feel really good about spending 10$ on a loaf of bread. Can AI automate that experience. No. It might bake some bread but it won't be worth 10$. There's going to be a lot of that. People will look for activities that are valuable to others in some way. The automated stuff is inherently lower value, boring, and a commodity. And we need value creation to create demand for whatever else it is that we do for each other.

100 points by JSeymourATL 4y ago

This, just like many other takes, confirms that there will be a short term boom in applying AI to everything. If you are in your 30s or 40s and surf this wave correctly, this may very well be the last job you will ever do. So my plan is to learn how to plug GPT to excel, databases etc and provide AI for the smaller companies that can’t integrate AI like Salesforce and big companies like Azure Professional Services will not find them profitable enough to deal with.

robopsychology 4y ago
What do you mean by last job? As in making money off of this wave by lucrative contract gigs or an acquisition?
- nonbirithm 4y ago
  Even if all the jobs creating CRUD apps are automated away, there will probably still be an interest in automating them even faster. LLMs are currently the state of the art technique for doing so, hence there will be a continual need for more AI engineers/researchers. And if something that performs better than current LLMs comes around, all those engineers will shift over to whatever field develops them.
- iamflimflam1 4y ago
  As in there won’t be any more jobs for you to do…
- rnk 4y ago
  I'd see it as a last job. In terms of you can do it for 20 years and then retire. Not as jobs won't exist anymore.
  - prawn 4y ago
    20 years is a long time in an industry with an incredible rate of change. Though I guess if you're in the market now, you're 3-5 years ahead of kids coming through tertiary studies specialising in AI.
aarong11 4y ago
Right now seems like the right time to be doing this for sure. There are also a lot of potential applications for GPT to be used to solve problems that were previously too expensive or infeasible to be done by humans at scale. It definitely doesn't hurt for you to hedge your bets and try to learn how the tech works at the bare minimum.
kkielhofner 4y ago
This is a good strategy. In the early days of widespread internet connectivity (dial-up) it generally went two ways: 1) You lived in a big city and AOL/Compuserve/Prodigy/etc was a local call. Practically everyone had it. 2) You lived "somewhere else" and some random guy you could pay had a T1 and a bunch of modems in a garage (this was me). Eventually it became worth it and technology advanced enough (with demand) for cable cos to deploy cable modems. At first only in dense metro areas, then slowly out to more rural areas. Point is - there's a TON of opportunity for "guy with a T1 and modems in a garage" in this space. There is a huge market of ignored and underserved businesses/customers/applications/integrations/etc that (like AOL/Cable Cos) the big AI guys don't care about (yet).
golergka 4y ago
I hear many other tech professionals doing more or less the same. Shame you don't have any contact information in your bio, I would love to have a chat.

blhack 4y ago

Squarespace was supposed to take away the jobs of people who make websites, but it didn't. The same people who you used to hire to make a website for you are still doing that, but now they just use squarespace for it. I saw a recent quote for a very basic, static website that was greater than $10k. This would be about a day of work to put together in squarespace. AI is not going to take away jobs, it's just going to make the people already doing them more efficient.

Joeboy 4y ago
> AI is not going to take away jobs, it's just going to make the people already doing them more efficient In the same sort of way that wordprocessing just made typists more efficient.
- ModernMech 4y ago
  Or if you want to make a more direct comparison, it’s like high level languages and compilers making punch card writers more efficient.
tyingq 4y ago
It's hard to predict. Consider bank tellers. ATMs initially allowed banks to run more local branches, resulting in more jobs. But now that ATMs, especially the ones inside, are VERY full function, the job numbers are reducing fast. https://www.vox.com/2017/5/8/15584268/eric-schmidt-alphabet-automation-atm-bank-teller https://www.vox.com/2017/5/8/15584268/eric-schmidt-alphabet-...
- 13of40 4y ago
  Even that one's a little bit meta, since fewer people are using cash now.
- chrisan 4y ago
  I don't think its because ATMs are so good/functional as much as it is people just don't use cash and deposite checks like they once did. > “because of industry consolidation and technological change,”

onion2k 4y ago

I think my job is reasonably safe simply because "AI" is never going to be as effective at it as "me + AI". Someone has to be there to understand the problem in human terms in order to know what to tell the AI to do. I've recently started pushing myself to take a more Systems Thinking approach to solving problems, and to start using AI in my work, precisely because I see this as a change that's coming. It is inevitable. I might as well embrace it. Also, and maybe this is selfish, I suspect fewer people are going to see tech as a good career option in the very long term (10+ years). The experience I have now puts me ahead right now, but if there are fewer devs entering the industry in a decade it'll keep me in work for a long time. I'm think (hope!) I'm going to be OK. If I was a junior right now, or a student, I would see AI as a much greater threat.

eutectic 4y ago
"never" is a long time.
dudul 4y ago
> "AI" is never going to be as effective at it as "me + AI" Yeah, but which one will be cheaper?
theLiminator 4y ago
"AI" is never going to be as effective at it as "me + AI". That's what people said about chess ai.
- User23 4y ago
  Has Magnus or a similarly good player ever played against an AI using an AI to assist him? That sounds like it could be interesting.
  - williadc 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlsen%E2%80%93Niemann_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlsen%E2%80%93Niemann_contro... This is not exactly what you asked, but it shows that high-level players are using AI to play better chess.

cleandreams 4y ago

It's not just issues of tech and economics but perhaps more importantly, of power. If workers have political representation (power) than these productivity increases can feed into wage increases and hour reductions. A big if. In USA, workers are pretty powerless. That means it is most likely to result in massive waves of unemployment and political instability. When I first moved to the city in which I live there were NO homeless. That was in 1980. Since then the working class economy here crashed and the professionals took over. Now we step over bodies in the streets. I think it is likely that the AI wave will be this, but worse. BTW my last job was at an AI company as a high level tech contributor.

colordrops 4y ago
There has to be a tipping point when enough jobs are done by machines that there are not enough wage earners to buy products and services created by these machines. At that point a choice must be made, to either take the machines and lock them behind secure walls to only be used by the privileged and leave everyone else to squalor, or to fundamentally change the structure of society where work and money are no longer core elements. I've got my bets on which one will occur.
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  Which one do you think will occur?
  - colordrops 4y ago
    I think the movie Elysium makes a decent prediction for a potential near term future.
- mc32 4y ago
  It looks like AI is more likely to render knowledge workers less valuable rather than making low skill workers less valuable. Now if you get AI + Robots (with dense energy) to work together, yeah we’re all in trouble.

timeon 4y ago

> The main winners of these trends will be all of us consumers, with access to much better content. Also, the best creators, who will use these tools to generate lots of great content and rake in its benefits. Maybe yes. But I wonder. Take that example with disappearing local football leagues: what is impact for local communities? When everything is "centralized" to very best providers... Is best always best?

kkielhofner 4y ago
Are you talking American Football or the "actually using your feet" one (Soccer to us)? Youth (American) Football is dying because the data on CTE and other debilitating injuries is clear and parents are less enthusiastic/willing to allow their kids to damage their brains.
msftie 4y ago
Related to this quote, I don’t think we’re guaranteed access to better content. I think we’re guaranteed to more prolific cheap to produce content. Think Instagram era relative to Flickr era. Less about the art, more about fast fashion, or fast art, to capture your ever more brief attention. Certainly the next chapter of Tim Wu’s book, The Attention Merchants.

lordnacho 4y ago

Tanks may have made cavalry obsolete (was is tanks? I don't know), but they didn't make generals obsolete. When was there ever a military engagement that was described in terms of commanders facing off? It's been the story since the beginning of war. Likewise there are decision makers in civilian life. They decide all sorts of things, sometimes relying on people to implement their decisions, sometimes machines. Sometimes they use a machine to replace a lower level decision maker. But there's always a boss. This is what will determine whether your job is automated away.

dwighttk 4y ago

In that first chart there is not a single test listed that people start at a job based on their performance on the test.

Nevermark 4y ago
Not being that sensitive to variation in test scores doesn’t mean an employer isn’t sensitive to pass or fail. Or that a score at the extreme high end wouldn’t get an employer’s attention.
- dwighttk 4y ago
  the bar exam is the only one I see that is pass you can work fail you can't... and GPT4 only took the multiple choice half of that.

lolinder 4y ago

I don't worry about AI automating away my job not because I don't think it's possible (though I do think it's much much further out than the hype would suggest), but because an AI automating away software creation is the economic equivalent of nuclear war: it would irrevocably alter everything about the way the world is run and is therefore impossible to adequately prepare for on an individual basis. Most of us in software are automating other people's jobs: we learn and understand requirements and build things that make other people more productive or erase their jobs entirely. The rate of automation is right now limited in large part by the availability and cost of software engineers. If AGI can reduce that cost to ~0, then a massive percentage of the economy would be wiped out in a matter of months. What is any individual software developer supposed to do to prepare for that scenario?

deleted 4y ago
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kajumix 4y ago
If AI automates software creation, which automates everybody else's job, why does it follow that a "massive percentage of the economy would be wiped out?" What is so undesirable about productivity going up by a factor of a 100 or a 1000 and everyone living like an aristocrat, because machines do all the work? Why is full employment such an obsession?
- lolinder 4y ago
  I didn't say it would be undesirable! Just that it would completely alter the world in ways that we cannot prepare for on an individual basis. Ideally, we move to UBI and, as you say, everyone lives like an aristocrat. But we don't get there by trying to hedge against AI taking over our individual jobs.
- mostlysimilar 4y ago
  Because the benefits of these tools are not distributed equally. The ultra wealthy will become even more wealthy and the unwashed masses will starve. Of course the ideal outcome is the Star Trek post-scarcity utopia. But humans are not currently incentivized in a way that I can see leading to that outcome in our lifetimes.

thedonkeycometh 4y ago

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ETH_start 4y ago

This got me thinking: as more of what can be produced with existing technology, is made trivial-to-produce through enhanced automation (e.g. AI), one area that will still require labor, and that people will still be willing to expend resources on to procure, is the creation of new technology. It would be in our interest to remove legal impediments to raising capital for new ventures, so that more of the labor freed up by automation of existing industries can be allocated to the creation of new industries. Such a world would see more kickstarters, equity crowdsales, crypto token sales and DAOs for collaborative creation, and more people employed in the ventures these capital raising projects fund.

analog31 4y ago

Oddly enough half of my job is learning to get answers (from the physical world), the other half finding out if those answers are true. So far no human has come close to threatening my job if they don't actually care about those things. So it will be when AI learns to care about the truth.

impulser_ 4y ago

It's really feeling like AI is the new crypto. Majority of the people hyping up AI are directly benefited from the raise in AI. The same way the people that were hyping up crypto either ran blockchain, dapp, or were VC invested into it. I don't know the writer of this blog post, but I'm willing to bet he has posts about how crypto will replace the financial system.

lolinder 4y ago
You'd win that bet: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/about https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/about > I believe Bitcoin will replace gold, cryptocurrencies will replace fiat currencies, and smart contracts will upend how we deal with each other. https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aunchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com+bitcoin https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aunchartedterritories....
- the_only_law 4y ago
  Tbh this makes me much more wary about all these AI claims. Wasn’t too long ago when people were clamoring about how their latest favorite technology, blockchain was going to magically come in and solve every problem since the dawn of society.
  - lolinder 4y ago
    Agreed. It's always possible that this is a "a stopped clock is right twice a day" situation—that by hopping on every bandwagon the hype artists eventually land on something that happens to work out—but in general I find it likely that this blows over to a degree.

8note 4y ago

There's an anti-productivity link round the front page that answers this well - the amount of useless work to be done is infinite, and growing productivity on useless work only lets you do more useless work. The more useless work ai is able to do, the more useless work will be asked of it. The ai doesn't have opinions about what it should be doing, so without people to push it into doing the right thing, it's going to be answering a lot of emails

usrusr 4y ago
The recent rounds of tech giant layoffs suggest that capital is far more capable of asking wether a given unit of work is actually useful than we might have thought before. If n employees can earn m money, sure, one form of institutional greed might assume that 2n employees will earn 2m money, and 100n 100m. But if that fails (and chances are it will, because everything has a sweet spot beyond which lies the land of diminishing returns), it's hardly surprising that the next form of greed that will be attempted is discovering how much of m will remain with n/2.

rcpt 4y ago

Seems like landlord continues to be the only secure career path.

colordrops 4y ago
Until an AI corners the real estate market.
- breckenedge 4y ago
  They tried and it was a disaster. AIs just kept bidding up the market until pop!
- chii 4y ago
  how does an AI get access to capital without a human in the loop?
  - he_is_legend 4y ago
    by mining bitcoin of course!
pydry 4y ago
Most productivity gains over the last 50 years have flowed into the pockets of capital or property owners.
- rcpt 4y ago
  Henry George AI plz help

chiefalchemist 4y ago

What I find interesting is what professions are concerned about AI. For the most part they appear to be better paying white collar need-a-college-degree type of jobs. Tech, copywriters, marketing, designers, lawyers, accountants, etc. All feeling the heat. The person pumping gas? Cutting hair? Janitors? Nurses? They, for now, seem to be immune. As a side note, anecdotally, productive gains have a ceiling. Sure Copilot and ChatGPT free me up to focus on the heavy lifting. But my brain can't run that relentlessly all day. It seems to need to catch its breath.

jimhefferon 4y ago
The job of the future: butler.
prawn 4y ago
I haven't seen anyone paid to pump gas in my country for decades? Labour intensive services dealing with unpredictable environments or interfaces will be here for a while yet - cleaning, nursing and aged care, etc.
- capableweb 4y ago
  > I haven't seen anyone paid to pump gas in my country for decades? Meanwhile, I've seen people at gas stations pumping my gas for me in plenty of countries, especially in South America. Some places in South Europe do it too during rush hour and at really busy gas stations in metropolitan areas.
- chiefalchemist 4y ago
  My point is, the hunters are becoming the hunted.

A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago

I will admit that I am personally on the fence. There are parts of my job that could definitely be augmented by LLM ( I know, because I have been trying to use them as a way to test whether it could work in my domain ). Some results were cool and shaved off a fair amount of time for me ( for example, it cut down some time on proposed approach to problem, where there was a solution already ), but I can't say it would, in its current state, replace me ( Python and SQL code quality gpt generated seemed to rely too much on how specific the prompt was and I typically had to refine it as I went through it ). But we are merely starting out. I actually started looking into building excel plugin ( first time ever too so, who knows how that will pan out ) for my use case ( categorizing some unstructured data into structured data, which is what GPT seems to excel at ). And the one thing that was initially protecting me is that some companies, rightfully, identified ingestion of prompt data as a massive privacy issue. Now OpenAI supposedly said data ingestion from prompts and provided files will be opt in only, which may mollify some of those companies. OTOH, some things can't possibly be replaced by AI ( last week we just dealt with a vendor requirements translation and, uhh, good luck with all that GPT ).

mwcampbell 4y ago

> get in the bandwagon of AI, start using the tools, explode your productivity I'm reluctant to start using LLM-based coding assistants (e.g. Copilot) in my programming work because I don't want to taint my code with laundered code that was under a copyleft or other restrictive license. Is this a reasonable concern?

johnfn 4y ago
In short, no. Once you try out the tool you’ll understand this concern never made much sense to begin with for normal usage patterns. Copilot primarily excels in writing very short snippets, far too short to be under copyleft.

brezelnbitte 4y ago

There are plenty of students who can ace these exams but then utterly fail at getting things done at companies because they lack problem solving experience, a toleration for ambiguity or any number of interpersonal skills needed to complete complex projects. Until AI can just deal with other AI and not messy humans, there will be job security.

crop_rotation 4y ago
Yes but AI won't have to deal with messy humans. Once companies see how quickly this ultra cheap AI can get things done, a lot of companies would restructure things to ensure the AI has a superhighway to whatever it needs. That sounds like an easy competitive advantage for any company. Messy politics exist within companies because there are so many people and so many orgs. If one cheap AI can do so much concurrently, structures optimal to the AI will be formed focused around the AI needs.
- aldarisbm 4y ago
  who checks this output ? who troubleshoot when prod is down? what about regulations? which company is the first one to have a huge data leak and blame it on AI? which legislator bans use of AI unless there are human engineers? I’ve never seen any one company be successful at streamlining their projects. I am worried about AI but I doubt this will be happen as you’re saying it.
  - crop_rotation 4y ago
    > who checks this output Code is reviewed by one more person anyways right now in most continues. So it continues same way. > who troubleshoot when prod is down A human engineer for now. The amount of time when prod is down should be low enough for this to not be a huge factor. > what about regulations the AI will do a better job of memorizing and understanding those > which legislator bans use of AI unless there are human engineers? what does this even mean. Is it ok to have one AI and 5 engineers where previously 50 were needed? Since nobody is going to have a company with 0 human engineers and only AI. > I am worried about AI but I doubt this will be happen as you’re saying it. I also doubt it happens exactly as I am saying it, but I think the possibilities are non zero.

darod 4y ago

If AI is solving everything and ultimately phasing workers out, then what exactly would you be educating your kids in? Human's limiting factor is the time that it takes them to learn something (18-27 years of education depending on the field). What job would be worth striving for? They'd be training for jobs that a future AI would be trying to phase out. This whole article just described how most of the the highest paid workers (doctors, lawyers, driving, logistics, film, music, radio, etc etc) would be automated. I don't know what you'd need a person for at that point. Feels like a race to the bottom.

kajumix 4y ago
It's sad that to think that a human's worth is defined by their job.
- throwawaysalome 4y ago
  More specifically, it's his ability to provide, which for most potential mates is his paycheck.
- tap-snap-or-nap 4y ago
  It is also sad that every other specie has already suffered before humans are starting to feel this way. There was massive biodiversity loss on this planet and most of mammalian biomass consists of humans and animals that feed humans. Humans need to retreat. We have enough tools and people improving human lives. We now need more people and tools to improve many other lives and systems on this planet.
- tnel77 4y ago
  Under our current economic system, it is. We can change that though!
lewhoo 4y ago
I think education will still be crucial in human to human relation but it remains to be seen if the value of education won't be lessened because it won't give any other edge. I really share this concern because let's face it - we're pushing ourselves for the sake of better life, better job, better X.

ultrasounder 4y ago

here is my day-day from this last Friday; 1. Made circuit boards for a Photo-diode circuit(1nA max out. welp!) with Altium previous week. 2. Got bare fabs from local fab-house. 3. Received them, did opens and shorts between power and ground. Also verified internal planes were intact(no dead copper). 4. Stuffed one board(made 5). 5. passed smoke test(huzzah!!). But op-amp output zilch. 6. Debugged the entire afternoon found out that the enable to the reference chip was "pulled-down" instead of "pulled-up". I fixed it the circuit started working and op-amp output high. In the intermeaning steps between 5 and 6, I tried searching for specific debug tasks using BingAI(I was an early adopter hihi). The results were sub-par. essentially summarizing data sheets. Went direct to the source(ChatGPT) with alarmingly same results. Hence I decided to have the data sheet on one screen and my schematic on the other and traced the connections and found out my error within say 15 minutes. Long story short, in my professional career AI is not going to be of any immediate help(in its current avatar) for the next 3-4 years. Beyond that I probably would be long retired and gone off grid.

crop_rotation 4y ago
In your case it is not going to do anything anytime soon (since your work involves interaction with the physical world). The article points out that different jobs get affected differently by changes.
cyanydeez 4y ago
Definitely, debugging is going to be a manifold problem. Particularly because it's typically not just undocumented behavior but also wrongly documented or inversely documented or it's not parallel safe, etc. Failure modes are entropic

crop_rotation 4y ago

I think even if the utopian case happen and the machine wealth get shared among people and everyone lives happy in leisure while the machine does everything, even then it would severely curtain social mobility. There will not be a way to get better outcomes in life. An even larger number of folks won't have any upward mobility. A lot of human inventions in the past 2 centuries have owed to individual drive and ambition. Once that goes away, how do anything new happens.

crop_rotation 4y ago

I think a lot of this thread (and HN in general) seems to think that their case is special and AI will not make any dent there. While this is true for many comments, it reminds of several studies that a majority of people think they are better than average in their field. We tend to view our tasks as special cases. People are trying to see how the current AI fits in their current process. However this won't be the case. The AI might improve and improve. And companies might change processes to revolve around the AI. Just like how companies change their processes to cater to ERP systems, they might change them to cater to AI systems. AI won't have to talk to 10 teams and play politics for prioritisation.

jftuga 4y ago

One job that will always be AI proof: preschool teacher.

pydry 4y ago
Not a well paid job though is it?
throwawaysalome 4y ago
That's the next job to disappear when parents have nothing else to do but raise their young.
noogle 4y ago
Parents already use technology (TV, tablet computer) to alleviate some of the burden of caring for their children. Why not use a far more engaging product?

markus_zhang 4y ago

As a non senior data engineer, I think AI can take my job already, except that it requires my company to open up its code base for AI to consume and train seniors to be better prompt engineers so that they spend less time modifying code written by AI. There are a lot of edge cases but I think the tech is already here. To escape from that fate I'm going to drill deeper into k8s, docker and Linux system programming. I know a better route is to launch a career that translates requirements from business stakeholders and develop an AI-friendly architecture so that our AI lords can conveniently code functions, scripts and programs without much interference. But throughout my career life I have tried my best to avoid that road (because I'm not interested in business), so I have to pick the second best way -- serve our AI lords by maintaining infrastructure for them, just like rhino birds serving rhinos I shall serve our AI lords faithfully in eternity, even after death when my coding skills can be consumed by them.

stormfather 4y ago
I think that's the most dangerous way to go, THB. AI is good at stuff that is very widely represented in its training data, and common pieces of infrastructure that many apps use like docker will be some of the easiest stuff to automate away. "AI, spin up a K8 with these properties like you have for 100,000 others..."
- markus_zhang 4y ago
  After seeing a demo of ChatGPT generating terraform code I have to agree with you. I'm not sure what else can I do though. Looks like AI is indeed going to be very good at everything I love to do, mostly very technical stuffs. I just fed ChatGPT with a bunch of DOS viruses and it did a good analysis. It might take me quite a few months of full time study to reach that level. Do I have to be an entrepreneur? Sigh. I have spent my whole tech life to be away from that road...

credit_guy 4y ago

Before AI can take my job, AI can be my tool. I can become more productive with AI, many times more productive than now. Then the question will not be "is AI better than credit_guy?" but "is AI alone better than credit_guy who uses AI?". If I learn how to take full advantage of AI, I have a fighting chance.

my_city 4y ago

Under the current system, millions will lose their jobs and a handful of extremely rich people will get richer: capitalists. All of this will be completely lawful: is the law of the free market. The only answer is to destroy capitalism and unite as workers. Only if we unite as proletarians, we can redistribute the inmense profits of automation and make sure to live a worthy life.

jillesvangurp 4y ago

I think the mistake a lot of people make is assuming that their job is actually important. We got a little sneak preview of that during the lock downs in the last two years when people's daily routines got disrupted a lot and a lot of day to day work either stopped happening or was reduced by a lot. It had a lot less effect than you would expect if you assume that most people do something important/essential. Most of what people do in their jobs isn't all that important. This is a result of automation that has gradually been introduced since the industrial revolution. People kept on working but the nature of what they do has become increasingly detached from things that people back in the day would have recognized as work or important. We work less than ever and lot of "work" basically involves people having meetings, managing other people, or doing things in the services industry in a complex network of interdependent tasks and processes where you might question what it actually is that we are actually doing collectively or why. Obviously, there is some value in doing these things because we're obviously doing them and getting something out of the process of doing that. At least subjectively. But what matters economically is that money changes hands and is used to create the demand for all these things. Without demand, there's no need to do a lot of the things that we do. And without that, the need to automate it also goes away. So there's this paradox that automating what we do, removes the demand for the thing (or at least downgrades its value). And it helps create demand for more valuable things we can do. Take bread for example. Rather crucial to a lot of people and it used to be the main component of a lot of people's diets. Bread now comes from factories and ever since we invented sliced bread it's been considered the best thing ever. Sliced bread (sliced by a machine) from a factory that produces bread at an industrial scale. Except we pay extra for artisanal bread that is made the old fashioned way. So we now have people with college degrees opening bakeries and selling us really expensive baked goods that they made with their own hands. Could what they do be automated? Yes, that already happened. But the whole point of what they do and why it is valuable is that it isn't. The factory bread is low value. And the bread is just part of the experience. The whole bread experience involves interacting with the amazing people that bake the bread, that knead the dough, and visiting the beautiful shops in which they do that. Add premium packaging to the mix and it makes you feel really good about spending 10$ on a loaf of bread. Can AI automate that experience. No. It might bake some bread but it won't be worth 10$. There's going to be a lot of that. People will look for activities that are valuable to others in some way. The automated stuff is inherently lower value, boring, and a commodity. And we need value creation to create demand for whatever else it is that we do for each other.