13 ms·

I'm legitimately starting to wonder what white collar workers will even do in 5-10 years. This just Year 1 of this stuff going mainstream. Careers are 25-30 ye

• drubio 3y ago
  I'm wondering the same, but for the narrower white collar subset of tech workers, what will today's UX/UI designer or API developer be doing in 5-10 years.
  • post-it 3y ago
    UX/UI designers will use AI as part of their jobs. They'll be able to work at a higher level and focus less on boilerplate. That might mean fewer UX/UI jobs, but more likely the standard for app UX will go up. Companies are always going to want to differentiate their apps. It's like how, in 2003, if your restaurant had a website with a phone number posted on it, you were ahead of the curve. Today, if your restaurant doesn't have a website with online ordering, you're going to miss out on potential customers. API developers will largely find something else to do. I've never seen a job posting for an API developer. My intuition is that even today, the number of people who work specifically as an API developer for their whole career is pretty close to zero.
    • realharo 3y ago
      Today, your restaurant's custom website largely doesn't matter, as ordering is done on delivery apps, and people visiting in person look at things like Google Maps reviews. Only reservations are not quite as consolidated yet. Similarly, in the future, there may be no more "apps" in the way we understand them today, or they may become completely irrelevant if everything can be handled by one general-purpose assistant.
  • spaceman_2020 3y ago
    Once the context window becomes large enough to swallow up the codebase of a small-mid sized company, what do all those IT workers that perform below the 50th percentile in coding tests even do? HN has a blind spot about this because a lot of people here are in the top %ile of programmers. But the bottom 50th percentile are already being outperformed by GPT-4. Org structures and even GPT-4 availability hasn't caught up, but I can't see any situation where these workers aren't replaced en masse by AI, especially if the AI is 10% of the cost and doesn't come with the "baggage" of dealing with humans. I don't think our society is prepared.
    • beepbooptheory 3y ago
      What specific test do I take to know my percentile?
      • sdenton4 3y ago
        Just roll a d100; it will be about as useful... If you roll over a 75, roll an additional d10 to find out your multiplier score (as in, a 10x programmer).
    • dragonwriter 3y ago
      > Once the context window becomes large enough to swallow up the codebase of a small-mid sized company, what do all those IT workers that perform below the 50th percentile in coding tests even do? There's a whole lot of work in tech (even specifically work "done by software developers") that isn't "banging out code to already completed specs".
      • TillE 3y ago
        Yeah I think a lot of experienced developers are so immersed in software development that they forget how complex the process is, and how much knowledge they have to even know how to ask the right questions. I mean, I thought that website frontend development would have long since been swallowed up by off-the-shelf WYSIWYG tools, that's how it seemed to be going in the late 90s. But the opposite has happened, there have never been more developers working on weird custom stuff.
  • jboy55 3y ago
    What did photographers start doing when Photoshop was released? They started using Photoshop.
    • bigyikes 3y ago
      The analogy doesn’t hold and this comment won’t age well. Photoshop doesn’t take photographs, so of course it hasn’t displaced photographers. It replaced the “shop” but the “photo” was up to the artist. The irony is, Photoshop can generate photos now, and when it gets better, it actually will displace photographers.
      • jboy55 3y ago
        Its just going to become self aware and start spitting out photographs? Every scenic view, every building, every proper noun in the world has already been photographed and is available online. Photographer as "capturer of things" has long been dead, and its corpse lies next to the 'realist painters' of the 1800s before the dawn of the photograph and the airbrush artists of the 50s, 60s and 70s. However, my newborn hasn't, hot-celebrity's wardrobe last night outside the club hasn't, the winning goal of the Leaf's game hasn't, AI can't create photos of those. And the conceptual artistic reaction to today's political climate can't, so instead of that artist taking Campbell Soup Cans and silkscreening its logo as prints, or placing the text, "Your Body is a Battle Ground" over two found stock photos of women, or perhaps an artist hiring craftspeople to create realistic sexual explicit sculptures of them having sex with an Italian porn star; an artist is just now going to ask AI to create what they are thinking as a photo, or as a 3D model. Its going to change nothing, but be a new tool, that makes it a bit easier to create art than it has been in the last 120 years, when "Craft" no longer was defacto "Art".
      • butlike 3y ago
        In the same way other photographers taking pictures have displaced each other throughout history?
    • spaceman_2020 3y ago
      Except this is the first time we have a new "generalist" technology. When Photoshop was released, it didn't reduce employment opportunities for writers, coders, 3D designers, etc. We're in truly unprecedented territory and don't really have an historical analogue to learn from.
• TrackerFF 3y ago
  Yes, imagine being a HS student now, deciding what to do 5-6-7 years from now.
  • aenis 3y ago
    The options are: - be pretty - have fine motor skills - have wealthy parents
    • huytersd 3y ago
      Pretty is nice, but not everyone wants to whore themselves on the internet.
      • tap-snap-or-nap 3y ago
        Whoring on the internet is easier and safer for mental health and wellbeing than finding a real job that pays the bills.
        • dragonwriter 3y ago
          Being an adult entertainer on the internet is a real job (and may be one that pays the bills.)
      • dragonwriter 3y ago
        Since when has everyone been able to have a job they liked?
      • rjblackman 3y ago
        there are already generative models for that anyway.
      • TeaBrain 3y ago
        It is beneficial when interviewing for just about any job.
    • 93po 3y ago
• VirusNewbie 3y ago
  Even if we get Gemini 2.0 or GPT-6 that is even better at the stuff it's good at now... you've always been able to outsource 'tasks' for cheap. There is no shortage of people that can write somewhat generic text, write chunks of self contained code, etc. This might lower the barrier of entry but it's basically a cheaper outsourcing model. And many companies will outsource more to AI. But there's probably a reason that most large companies are not just managers and architects who farm out their work to the cheapest foreign markets. Similar to how many tech jobs have gone from C -> C++ -> Java -> Python/Go, where the average developer is supposd to accomplish a lot more than perviously, I think you'll see the same for white collar workers. Software engieneering didn't die because you needed so much less work to do a network stack, the expectations changed. This is just non technical white collar worker's first level up from C -> Java.
  • spaceman_2020 3y ago
    Never underestimate management's thirst for elimiating pesky problems that come with dealing with human bodies - vacations, pregnancies, office rivalries, time zones, and heck, unionization. I suspect the real driver of the shift to AI will be this and not lower cost/efficiency.
    • dr_kiszonka 3y ago
      My strong belief is that if someone wanted to halt AI development, they should attempt to train AI replacements for managers and politicians, and publicize it.
    • unionpivo 3y ago
      > management's thirst for elimiating pesky problems that come with dealing with human bodies But that's what 95% management is for. If you don't have humans, you don't need majority of managers. And I know of plenty of asshole managers, who enjoy their job because they get to boss people around. And another thing people are forgetting. That end users AKA consumers will be able to use similar tech as well. So for something they used to hire a company for, they will just use AI, so you don't even need CEO's and financial managers in the end :) Because , if software CEO can push a button to create an app that he wants to sell, so can his end-users.
• VikingCoder 3y ago
  [Guy who draws blue ducks for a living]: DAMNIT!
  • spaceman_2020 3y ago
    He can always sell that as an NFT!
    • kookamamie 3y ago
      "Next piece we have for sale: the OG Blue Duck, from before the AI Summer age. Made by a true master of the genre. Do I hear a $100?"
    • butlike 3y ago
      Giving it away would be nicer.
      • VikingCoder 3y ago
        I hear you draw blue ducks. The exposure of putting your blue duck on my channel would be really good for you...
• moffkalast 3y ago
  Yeah it has been quite the problem to think about ever since the original release of ChatGPT, as it was already obvious where this will be going and multimodal models more or less confirmed it. There's two ways this goes: UBI or gradual population reduction through unemployment and homelessness. There's no way the average human will be able to produce any productive value outside manual labor in 20 years. Maybe not even that, looking at robots like Digit that can already do warehouse work for $25/hour.
  • spaceman_2020 3y ago
    More than efficiency and costs, I think the real driver of AI adoption in big corp will be the reduction of all the baggage human beings bring. AI will never ask for sick days, will never walk in with a hangover, never be unproductive because their 3 month old baby kept them up all night... An AI coder will always be around, always be a "team player", always be chipper and friendly. That's management's wet dream.
    • moffkalast 3y ago
      I don't think humans will stay competitive long enough for that to even matter, frankly. It's a no brainer to go for the far cheaper, smarter, and most importantly a few magnitudes faster worker. On the offshoot that we hit some sort of inteligence ceiling and don't get ASI tier models in the next few years then that will definitely do it though. Companies start going from paying lots of local workers to paying a few select corporations what's essentially a SAAS fee (some are already buying ChatGPT Plus for all employees and reducing headcount) which accumulates all the wealth that would've gone to the workers into the hands of those renting GPU servers. The middle class was in decline already, but this will surely eradicate it.
      • spaceman_2020 3y ago
        Well anecdotally, there's been a massive drop in on-campus hiring in India this year. The largest recruiters - the big IT companies (Infosys, TCS, etc.) haven't apparenlty made any hires at all.
• Barrin92 3y ago
  >What will someone entering the workforce today even be doing in 2035? The same thing they're doing now, just with tools that enable them to do some more of it. We've been having these discussions a dozen times, including pre- and post computerization and every time it ends up the same way. We went from entire teams writing Pokemon in Z80 assembly to someone cranking out games in Unity while barely knowing to code, and yet game devs still exist.
  • jprete 3y ago
    As far as I know, being a game dev is not a good career move either for the money or the work-life balance.
    • postexitus 3y ago
      It never was.
    • balder1991 3y ago
      Yeah but the point is what amount of work a game dev is able to do. The current level of games were just impossible back then or it would require a huge number of teams just to do something quite trivial today.
• samr71 3y ago
  We're just gonna have UBI
  • butlike 3y ago
    Totally. I think UBI will be the "energy meter" of the future. Like in a video game. You get xxx dollars or whatever. Buy whatever you need, but the cap is to make sure you don't act foolish. Your UBI tank gets replenished every month, but if you blow it all on a new bicycle and kitchen upgrade for your house, you can't continue on to buy a bathroom renovation or whatever. You have to wait.
    • bjorglo 3y ago
      [dead]
• arvinsim 3y ago
  Work will just move to a higher level of abstraction.
• gniv 3y ago
  Yeah, this feels like the revenge of the blue collar workers. Maybe the changes won't be too dramatic, but the intelligence premium will definitely go down. Ironically, this is created by some of the most intelligent people.
• butlike 3y ago
  Whatever you want, probably. Or put a different way: "what's a workforce?" "We need to do a big calculation, so your HBO/Netflix might not work correctly for a little bit. These shouldn't be too frequent; but bear with us." Go ride a bike, write some poetry, do something tactile with feeling. They're doing something, but after a certain threshold, us humans are going to have to take them at their word. The graph of computational gain is going to go linear, quadratic, ^4, ^8, ^16... all the way until we get to it being a vertical line. A step function. It's not a bad thing, but it's going to require a perspective shift, I think. Edit: I also think we should drop the "A" from "AI" ...just... "Intelligence."