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The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs
- elcapitan 6mo agoIs there a way back to calling human beings human beings and not "meat"? Or is the sociopathic Jeffrey Dahmer undertone now the new normal?
- sp527 6mo agoSure. Would you like WWII, medieval-era Christianity, or Khanate Asia?
- bythreads 6mo agostone age gets a vote from me!
- cwmma 6mo agoWhat are you talking about, the only use of meat is in "Meat Shield", a phrase that's been around a long time now.
- jjulius 6mo agoIn the article, Ctrl+F for "meat" returns 3 results, while "human" returns 8. Seems like "human" remains the dominant word of choice in this author's vernacular. Edit: Further, the only times "meat" appears is in the phrase "meat shield", which is an analogy that is very apt relative to the crux of the article. Edit 2: "People" appears 13 times!
- sebg 6mo agohumans are made of meat -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47688678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47688678
- techteach00 6mo agoThere has always been a subset of highly technical people in the software world who are anti-organic. They dislike the "meatspace" and humans and relate more with machines and software.
- elcapitan 6mo agoYeah, that was what I was refering to, no the specific part of the article. I've seen it much more here recently. Kind of disgusting and sad, but on the other hand it's good if people show their real face that way.
- fHr 6mo agoMeat pupeteering, has nothing to do with Jeffrey just state of slowly getting pushed into doing 95% of devwork with Agents.
- ai_critic 6mo ago"meatshield" has the correct connotations for that sort of work.
- crote 6mo agoThat is exactly why the term is being used. A company like Amazon doesn't treat its warehouse workers as human beings. Workers are seen as disposable: forced to piss in bottles, forced to work around the corpses of their collapsed coworkers, paid the absolute minimum possible, and replaced the second they don't operate like a perfect unfailing machine. You aren't viewed like a human, you are a tool. Cattle. A piece of meat they are forced to retain because a robot isn't quite capable of doing your task yet. The article's use of "meat shields" isn't any different. Humans are going to be hired for the sole reason of taking accountability for actions dictated by AI. They are there only because the company can't put blame on a machine and will be sued to oblivion if there's nobody to blame at all. Your existence as a person is irrelevant, they are just interested in someone with a heartbeat they can blame when stuff inevitably goes wrong.
- chii 6mo ago> someone with a heartbeat they can blame when stuff inevitably goes wrong. if said person can be blamed (and take on the liability), but cannot stop the action or audit the action, take preventative measures (which costs money) etc, then they cannot take responsibility for real and thus whether the blame falls on them on paper is irrelevant - if there's real punishment (like jail time), but no real power to enforce anything, then who would be stupid enough to take on this job? If there's no real punishment, then what does it matter that the blame on paper is there?
- cdrnsf 6mo agoSomeone who needs to feed their family given that AI CEOs predicting that their technology will either destroy the world, take everyone's jobs or both.
- thunderfork 6mo agoThere are several historical examples of this sort of job, and plenty of people who took them. For example, plenty of "editors in name only" of publications when the German government got really interested in censoring press in the 18th century.
- 6mo ago
- pmg102 6mo agohttps://archive.is/OjGox https://archive.is/OjGox
- gordonhart 6mo agoWhy post an archive link for a static site with no ads or subscriptionware?
- sebg 6mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47779352 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47779352
- gordonhart 6mo agoI see, thanks. Strange times for internet censorship in the west.
- sebg 6mo agoAgreed. If I remember correctly from the other sections of this post, I think it's a self-directed ban.
- gessha 6mo agoCan people make a soft assumption that if somebody went through the trouble of digging up an archive link, then access to the article is limited in some way?
- gordonhart 6mo agoSure, but I would likewise appreciate if you made the assumption that my question wasn't snark and that I actually wanted to learn the answer.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- dsmurrell 6mo ago"Unavailable Due to the UK Online Safety Act" - without my VPN... do you know why?
- lbotos 6mo agoaphyr may have some NSFW photos on the site IIRC which may have got the domain swept up with the new UK laws.
- nemomarx 6mo agoGeo blocking the UK satisfies any age verification, otherwise the site owner would have to check if their content is considered adult in the UK and implement something.
- nmeofthestate 6mo ago"otherwise the site owner would have to check if their content is considered adult in the UK and implement something" IMO a small blog website is not going to get pulled-up for this - it's about the author making a point. They're entitled to do so of course.
- Forgeties79 6mo agoNever know when one of your posts might gain serious traction. Not worth the risk. Very easy to find many examples of people making decisions thinking “I/we will never be big enough for that to be relevant” only to be haunted by that decision later. Classic example: partnership agreements/contracts between friends and family on small endeavors.
- nonameiguess 6mo agoThis is part 9 of a 10-part series. The author has posted every chapter to Hacker News every day for the past 9 days. Every time four of the first five or so comments are: Someone noting it is unavailable in the UK. Someone posting an archive.is link. Someone asking why the above posted an archive link to a static site. An answer that it is because the content is otherwise unavailable in the UK. Do we really need to see this every single time? I realize I am also not adding to the real discussion now as well, but Jesus Christ, this is irritating. Can we get a new rule that an author posting their own content, knowing it is unavailable in the UK, has to post their own archive link and explain why they're doing so as part of the submission?
- tele_ski 6mo agohttps://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/ Relax, not everyone sees every article everyday
- kreco 6mo agoI wish we could flag some posts (like as "tangential") instead of this archaic upvote/downvote. And obviously a way to filter in/out those flags.
- th0ma5 6mo ago[dead]
- jasonmp85 6mo ago[dead]
- pixl97 6mo ago>Can we get a new rule that an author posting their own content, knowing it is unavailable in the UK, has to post their own archive link and explain why they're doing so as part of the submission? [Author blocks link to avoid being potentially in violation of the law] You ask author to willingly provide link to again potentially be in violation of the law You do not see the irony in your question
- ai_critic 6mo agoI think that this is an interesting attempt at taxonomy, but it's a bit on the magical thinking end (and I say this as somebody that does a good amount of what's described as the incanter role). It's a combination of the author's previous witchy aesthetic (see his excellent "<x>ing the technical interview" series) and progressive labor politics (which are asymptotically doomed in the current automation push). The biggest failure of imagination, I think, is the assumption we'd use humans for most (or *any) of these jobs--for example, the work of the haruspex is better left to an LLM that can process the myriad of internal states (this is the mechanical interpretation field).
- zephyrthenoble 6mo agoAnd when the haruspex LLM fails, what do we turn to?
- mitthrowaway2 6mo agoYes, I had the same impression. I'm sympathetic to the author's perspective but I can't muster even the minimal optimism they've shown here. The "process engineers" as described would themselves quickly be replaced by an automated system. The "statistical engineers", I think, would never be able to keep up with the rate of change of the AI models, which would likely have different statistical behavior and biases in each language/context/etc with each update, and so it's unlikely anyone would pay them to develop that required deep expertise in the first place. More likely, that work would be done at an AI foundation model company -- but it would be done just once, and then incorporated into the training process.
- thrance 6mo ago> and progressive labor politics (which are asymptotically doomed in the current automation push). What do you mean exactly by this?
- jayd16 6mo agoA magic 8-ball "can process the myriad of internal states" of any questions you throw at it. But we don't use it even tho it can give us answers.
- ej88 6mo agoI am personally of the opinion that ML will end up being 'normal technology', albeit incredibly transformative. I think you can combine 'Incanters' and 'Process Engineers' into one - 'Users'. Jobs that encompass a role that requires accountability will be directing, providing context, and verifying the output of agents, almost like how millions of workers know basic computer skills and Microsoft Office. In my opinion, how at-risk a job is in the LLM era comes down to: 1: How easy is it to construct RL loops to hillclimb on performance? 2: How easy is it to construct a LLM harness to perform the tasks? 3: How much of the job is a structured set of tasks vs. taking accountability? What's the consequence of a mistake? How much of it comes down to human relationships? Hence why I've been quite bullish on software engineering (but not coding). You can easy set up 1) and 2) on contrived or sandboxed coding tasks but then 3) expands and dominates the rest of the role. On Model Trainers -- I'm not so convinced that RLHF puts the professional experts out of work, for a few reasons. Firstly, nearly all human data companies produce data that is somewhat contrived, by definition of having people grade outputs on a contracting platform; plus there's a seemingly unlimited bound on how much data we can harvest in the world. Secondly, as I mentioned before, the bottleneck is both accountability and the ability for the model to find fresh context without error.
- netcan 6mo agoIn some sense, technology is "not normal" regardless. If we think of the digitization tech revolution... the changes it made to the economy are hard to describe well, even now. In the early days, it was going to turn banks from billion dollar businesses to million dollar ones. Universities would be able to eliminate most of their admin. Accounting and finances would be trivialized. Etc. Earlier tech revolution s were unpredictable too... But at lest retrospectively they made sense. It's not that clear what the core activities of our economy even are. It's clear at micro level, but as you zoom out it gets blurry. Why is accountability needed? It's clearly needed in its context... but it's hard to understand how it aggregates.
- bobthepanda 6mo agoAccountability is really a way to address liability. So long as people can sue and companies can pay out, or individuals can go to jail, there is always going to be a question of liability; and historically the courts have not looked kindly at those who throw their hands up in the air and say “I was just following orders from a human/entity”
- Aperocky 6mo agoAs an engineer, I'm never more excited about this job. My implementation speed and bug fixing my typed code to be the bottleneck - now I just think about an implementation and it then exist - As long as I thought about the structure/input/output/testability and logic flow correctly and made sure I included all that information, it just works, nicely, with tests. Unix philosophy works well with LLM too - you can have software that does one thing well and only one thing well, that fit in their context and do not lead to haphazard behavior. Now my day essentially revolves around delivering/improving on delivering concentrated engineering thinking, which in my opinion is the pure part about engineer profession itself. I like it quite a lot.
- hombre_fatal 6mo agoI mostly agree with you. Though something I half-miss is using my own software as I build it to get a visceral feel for the abstractions so far. I've found that testability is a good enough proxy for "nice to use" since I think "nice to use" tends to mean that a subsystem is decoupled enough to cover unexpected usage patterns, and that's an incidental side-effect of testability. One concern I have is that it's getting harder to demonstrate ability. e.g. Github profiles were a good signal though one that nobody cared about unless the hiring person was an engineer who could evaluate it. But now that signal is even more rubbish. Even readmes and blog posts are becoming worse signals since they don't necessarily showcase your own communication skills anymore nor how you think about problems.
- sscaryterry 6mo agohttps://archive.is/OjGox https://archive.is/OjGox
- siliconc0w 6mo agoThe problem with AI is that it isn't like any previous technology. There may be temporary jobs to fill in the gaps but they won't be careers. The AI will do the process engineering and self optimization. The prompt witchcraft is a good example because today its totally unnecessary and doesn't actually increase performance, and they'll continue to make it easier to direct/steer the models. We're literally trying to build an intelligence to replace us.
- righthand 6mo agoWe?
- pardon_me 6mo agoThe human species. "We" doesn't include everyone and doesn't necessarily imply the process happens through collaboration and planning (conspiracy). The race to automation is happening as expected; outside any group control and bound by competition. Game theory suggests the end result is us being replaced, if we make it that far. "We" as a species are the ones making it happen.
- tomalbrc 6mo agoGood one. "We" are not Demon Sam Altman or that clown of Anthropic or Google or Microsoft
- warkdarrior 6mo agoDon't forget you are also not Meta, xAI, Mistral, Alibaba, DeepSeek, Zhipu AI, Moonshot AI, ByteDance, Baidu, 01.AI, MiniMax, or Tencent.
- righthand 6mo agoThere is a very very small percentage of humanity that’s pushing this stuff on everyone else. In fact most are saying “please stop”. “We” as a species certainly aren’t making it happen.
- simonw 6mo agoLoved that section about "meat shields". LLMs cannot be held accountable. Someone needs to be involved in decision making, with real stakes if those decisions are bad.
- jppope 6mo agothe name is very sticky too. I can't imagine not calling people taking the blame meat shields now
- chii 6mo agowhy can't the name be 'scape goat'? Since that's what they are - the "real" responsibility rests on the owners, and they happily shed it as limited liability ownership of shares.
- buildbot 6mo agoIt just makes logical sense really; the human using the tool is in the end responsible. Whether the tool is too powerful or ethical to use is an orthogonal discussion, in my opinion. Taken to the extreme, nuclear weapons still need someone fire or drop them. (We should still have discussions on safety and ethics always!)
- giaour 6mo agoData & Society put out a paper on this role back in 2019 but used the term "moral crumple zones" since they were focusing on how to assign blame in autonomous vehicle crashes: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351054898_Moral_Crumple_Zones_Cautionary_Tales_in_Human-Robot_Interaction https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351054898_Moral_Cru... "Meat shields" has a nice physicality to it, though
- aphyr 6mo agoThank you for this--I remember reading this paper when it came out, but forgot it by the time I wrote this section. Will add a citation.
- 6mo ago
- abstracthinking 6mo agoHumans will be held accountable, not machines, whatever is the technology used. The jobs you suggest are based on the state of LLM right now, this could change rapidly, considering the state of progress. These are just activities that are already done by people that work with these instruments, because they want to optimize and obtain the best/safest output from these machines.
- the_af 6mo ago> Humans will be held accountable, not machines, whatever is the technology used Isn't this addressed explicitly in TFA, in section "meat shields"? As for the rest, if you predict even the jobs described in TFA will be obsoleted by future LLMs+tools, then the future is even more dire than predicted by Aphyr, right? Fewer jobs for humans to do.
- quantified 6mo agoAll plausible, but not very transformative. Like imagining that the new jobs enabled for the automobile include automobile maintenance, tire shops, and so on. Traveling nurses, motel operators, military tanks, doordash, suburban life, beer sales at NASCAR, those were all enabled by the car (and its larger sibling the truck). Still missing are the jobs snd industries enabled by "AI" that are not themselves "AI".
- pHequals7 6mo agowe are in the times of irrational exuberance - rationality will set in soon!
- NoGravitas 6mo agoThe market can stay irrational longer than you or I can stay solvent.
- pHequals7 5mo agounfortunately true :(
- davedx 6mo agoI don't understand the title. It doesn't seem exactly clickbait but also doesn't seem to be what the article is about? Anyway: The new job types might seem overspecialized now but history shows us this is indeed what happens as new industries open up. I think these predictions look quite solid.
- dilberx 6mo ago[dead]
- keyes343 6mo agoWith AI, you just have to choose between going slow vs making a huge blunder later at some point. If you go fast, you are bound to come across AI bugs later. Then you ultimately slow down to fix them. Which takes more time. That black box will keep evolving. The AI interpreter will have to keep catching up with it.
- mrdependable 6mo agoI think the reason AI isn't going to replace CEOs, or anyone in the C suite, is pretty obvious. They see themselves as the company. Everyone else is a resource. AI is here to replace resources, just like investing in a brand new lawn mower. For them, replacing an executive with AI is like saying you're going to marry a broom.
- EGreg 6mo agoThey're just a thin layer to be replaced last. They're just arrogant enough to think they're the company, but ultimately the endgame is -- all humans become economically insignificant compared to the automated economy. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/13/meta-ai-mark-zuckerberg-staff-talk-to-the-boss https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/13/meta-ai-m...
- Gagarin1917 6mo agoI think the more likely reason would be that legally someone needs to be in charge of the business.
- mrdependable 6mo agoThat's true, too. I guess we will see if executive pay and credentials start going down. They could technically have AI make all the decisions while someone just plays the patsy.
- paulnpace 6mo agoIn the U.S., most or all states require all corporations to have a president, secretary, and treasurer.
- pixl97 6mo agoHeh, how long before someones agent starts looking for these 3 so it can run the business in the background and feeding them all the reports they need to sign.
- bustah 6mo ago[flagged]
- keeda 6mo agoI think, long term, there will be only one job comprising all these aspects. The only absolutely-minimum-required skill will be critical thinking, possibly along with data / statistical literacy for grounding. "Specialization is for insects." (Or for someone pushing the boundaries of human knowledge.)
- anonyfox 6mo agojobs that have liability coverage are the last ones to get automated. even if its not doing anything all day long in terms or "work". but someone needs to go to jail when shit goes wrong as mandate by law quite often. the "oops the computer did it" isn't a sufficient excuse in some situations, accountability is a thing. so while we mechanically could replace also CEOs with machines and arguably at times would be even better than a few humans out there, some body that can be dragged to court is mandatory no matter how good the tech gets.
- Terr_ 6mo ago> I think a part of the reason is that these roles are not just about sending emails and looking at graphs, but also about dangling a warm body over the maws of the legal system and public opinion. Spoilers for "How I Met Your Mother" ... but there's a character who has that kind of job, as a legal meat-shield. Now, ~10 years after airing, this funny clip feels like it would only need slight adjustments. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8u62HptZ6TE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8u62HptZ6TE
- anigbrowl 6mo agoI get that people like this guy's blog but seeing every single article posted here daily smacks of astroturfing.
- otiose 6mo agoAI writes the code, humans pretend to work, and middle management stares at green Slack dots all day. Meanwhile, we just live in terror of the Slack ping. The future is incredibly stupid.
- yubblegum 6mo agoSomehow ended up after reading OP earlier this morning on a trail that lead to "Alexander of Abonoteichus – The False Prophet of 2nd Century Greece" [1]. A certain Lucian of Samorsata [2] wrote up the only known bio on the man [3] and it makes for interesting reading. Now this guy was charging 1 drachma and 6 obols (apparently ~$100-150) per oracle. So that was his 'token rate'. And his clients the "fat-heads" (Lucian's phrasing not mine /g) were so taken by the scam that this guy earned up to 80,000 drachma per year! That's over 10 million bucks. For spewing b.s. As to why all this is remotely related to OP's article, his mention of lawyers getting into trouble because of using LLM output instead of their brains ... "By way of impressing the people still more, he announced that he would induce the God to speak, and give his responses without an intermediary ... These oracles were called autophones, and were not vouchsafed casually to any one, but reserved for officials, the rich, and the lavish. "It was an autophone which was given to Severiann [4] regarding the invasion of Armenia. He encouraged him with these lines: 'Armenia, Parthia, cowed by thy fierce spear, To Rome, and Tiber's shining waves, thou com'st, Thy brow with leaves and radiant gold encircled!' "Then when the foolish Gaul took his advice and invaded, to the total destruction of himself and his army by Othryades, the adviser expunged that oracle from his archives [!!!] and substituted the following: "'Vex not th' Armenian land; it shall not thrive; One in soft raiment clad shall from his bow Launch death, and cut thee off from life and light.'" [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_of_Abonoteichus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_of_Abonoteichus [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucian_of_Samosata https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucian_of_Samosata [3]: https://topostext.org/work/337 https://topostext.org/work/337 [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Sedatius_Severianus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Sedatius_Severianus
- anilgulecha 6mo agoI think "articulator" is a better term than "incanter" - specially with the recent SOTA models. The previous ones suffered from things like - special magic phrases improving performance on benchmarks, but this has gotten significantly reduced - can't remember the last time I used those hacks. Right now the skill is clearly explaining in plain English your needs. Which means clarity of purpose, and then articulating it to LLM is the skill. English + critical thinking.
- NoGravitas 6mo agoMy place of work has a substantial class of employees who are going to be turned into Meat Shields. They have been understaffed since forever, leading to long turnaround times on their essential service. The management's plan is to have LLMs produce the documents that these employees would have produced, and have the employees sign off on them and be held responsible for their output.