16 ms·

Addressing the question in the title, "What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers", look at what happened to printers. That was a g

by Animats 2mo ago

Addressing the question in the title, "What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers", look at what happened to printers. That was a good skilled trade for centuries. Then it just went away. Phototypesetting took the high volume end. Desktop publishing took the low end. Computer-controlled presses took press operators. And then the newspaper business died. I've heard homeless former printers talking about the good days at the Burger King near the cable car turntable at Powell and Market. They thought they had careers. Now they're struggling to survive. Knitting is not the answer. This is a survival issue. Somehow I suspect the author inherited money.

MichaelZuo 2mo ago
Obviously there is some latent risk in choosing a career anywhere, that the demand disappears. There can’t literally be zero risk of structural demand changes.
- notsmarthuh 2mo ago
  The problem in the Western world is that switching to a different career is made almost impossible. This society pushes people out of the workforce all the time. I'm one of them. I've been "unemployed" since 2012 with apparently ZERO ability to get any kind of skilled job ever again, just due to a "zigged when I should have zagged" situation decades ago.
  - tayo42 2mo ago
    I've been curious about leaving software but it really feels impossible. Theresa no careers that you can learn on the job and you need to go back for another 4year degree to maybe get into the entry level job,no guarantee though.
    - dinkumthinkum 2mo ago
      If you a degree already, you don't necessarily have to go for four years for another degree, you will have to take the courses for your major and a small amount of additional requirements versus a first degree.
    - johnnyanmac 2mo ago
      If I could afford to go back to school for 4 years, I wouldn't be worried about finding a job right now. Besides, I hear entry level people are hit the worst right now. I better be spending half my time in college networking if I want a job. But.. Why not do that for my current field at that point?
  - soperj 2mo ago
    what were you doing in 2012?
    - notsmarthuh2 2mo ago
      [flagged]
      - shimman 2mo ago
        Community college programs are extremely cheap, and state schools are a thing. It's also not unheard of for any state workers to get lower tuition costs as a benefit. You're 40+, you have like potentially another 40+ years to live a life you want. If all it takes is a degree from a public university and some white knuckling for 4-6 years to then get the life you want to work in, is that such a burden to bare? Wouldn't you want to at least try to achieve your dreams before giving up? You have the experience and smarts to know how to succeed if you want, so why give up 4 decades before the game is over?
      - gamblor956 2mo ago
        The job market doesn't want employees, or business owners, it wants slaves. I know plenty of people who went into contracting (aka self-employment) and later found full-time jobs (frequently with clients) across multiple white collar industries, including programming. They were all in their 30s and 40s. In many cases, going the self-employment route actually made them more valuable to future employers. I also know plenty of people without a degree who went into programming. Over the years I've built my own Linux distro from scratch, developed a heavily customized version of the Chromium web browser, and other interesting stuff. If this were true you'd be gainfully employed by now. Coming out of COVID, companies were hiring people just because they knew what an IDE was. Based on your comments though, it's easy to understand why you haven't been able to find a job. I wouldn't want to work with someone as negative as you and I can't imagine anyone would want to work with someone so emotionally draining.
  - elmer2 2mo ago
    "with apparently ZERO ability to get any kind of skilled job ever again" Unless it's a criminal record holding you back, I really don't think this is the case. Since 2012, I know lots of people that changed careers.
    - underlipton 2mo ago
      Survivorship bias. You know what's as bad as a criminal record for your career prospects, in America? Being a black man. Having autism. Being over 50. Being a single mother. Being an immigrant without local credentials. Having a long employment gap. Having social anxiety. Having a physical disability. On and on. The first step to solving the problem is acknowledging the problem, not throwing earnest observations of dysfunction into the, "I know a short guy who gets lots of sex, height doesn't matter," bin.
  - dinkumthinkum 2mo ago
    What are you talking about? Why do you call out "Western world," this seems like the reflexive idea of the left that the West is some brutish downtrodden hellhole. What's weird is what you are describing is the opposite. It is much more common in the West to be able to change your career than in the East, by an enormous margin. In many places in the East, a tremendous amount of career possibilities are removed from kids from tests they take having barely begun puberty. How many Adam Steltzner's do you think there are outside of the West? What are we talking about? As far as your specific situation with 2012, I have no idea but this is not laid at the feet of the Western world.
- Rendello 2mo ago
  A broadly generalized super-automaton has long been a fantasy. Suddenly it's not so fantastical.
- nradov 2mo ago
  I'm pretty sure there's literally zero risk of structural demand changes for law enforcement. Defunding the police isn't going to happen and there's no plausible path toward automating most of the work. Security cameras and robots can only do a fraction of what will be needed.
  - slashdev 2mo ago
    Police robots and drones. You say no plausible path to automating - I beg to differ. It would get officers out of harms way. Not imminent but not zero risk either.
  - yoz-y 2mo ago
    A camera with a gun on it can go a long way though.
  - barrenko 2mo ago
    We've already defunded the police, and you can see the ramifications all over the world.
12998175 2mo ago
[dead]
Rendello 2mo ago
Farewell, Etaoin Shrdlu documents the last day of hot type at The New York Times before the digital changeover. It's one of my favourite documentaries, everything feels so vivid and alive: https://www.nytimes.com/video/insider/100000004687429/farewell-etaoin-shrdlu.html https://www.nytimes.com/video/insider/100000004687429/farewe...
- paulorlando 2mo ago
  Since you mentioned Etaoin Shrdlu and hot type / linotype... There are a lot of industries (at least historically) that have organized labor. In the UK, there was the “Wapping Dispute” in 1986 when computer technology enabled journalists to type in their copy directly, doing away with the need for workers to set type using linotype printing. Linotype was a big improvement on the older letter-by-letter typesetting and sped up composition of text 3 - 5 times compared to hand composition. Its introduction enabled a small number of machine operators to set type for multi-page newspapers, leading to an explosion of print editions in the 1900s. But in 1986, 100 years after the invention of linotype machines, they were being replaced with computerized direct input typesetting. As a result of the new process, UK print unions held a year-long strike. Result of the strike: failure. 6000 printers were fired, but there were jobs for 670 new workers who used word processing. You probably can't force your job to remain (well, I guess some people have).
  - dyauspitr 2mo ago
    Collective union Luddite opposition is one part of why there is so much of a plebeian tier pushback against unions, in the very group that should be fighting for unions with their lives. That and right wing propaganda of course.
  - noduerme 2mo ago
    I live in Oregon. Up until last year, you weren't allowed to pump your own gas in most parts of the state. The law required gas station attendants to do it, as a scheme to keep them employed. The most annoying part of this wasn't the tiny marginal cost, but that it sometimes took forever to get your gas if the attendant was busy. You'd just sit there looking at the pump you weren't allowed to put your credit card into. You can create laws to keep making work for a class of workers, but it ends up unpopular. Instead of a social safety net as it was intended, it turns into a corrupt drain on society at large, and a relative disadvantage to your economy versus those that are more ... agile, let's say. Check out e.g. the underpaid but overstaffed government bureaucracies and police forces in most Latin American countries. Giving a third of your society badge and a lousy paycheck often does more harm than good. I don't consider this observation to be right wing (per the sibling post), it's just how things work. While there's nobility in work and psychologically it's better to keep people employed, I'd just as soon give all the gas station attendants a lifelong retirement UBI so they'd get out of the way and let me pump my gas.
pj_mukh 2mo ago
Also the headline is about tech workers but the article is about Knowledge workers. I know a class of tech workers absolutely fired up about the new Industrial Revolution, they're just not on this forum or featured in lengthy navel-gazing articles like this one.
- esafak 2mo ago
  Tell us more.
- Muromec 2mo ago
  (not a native speaker) fired up as in "optimistic and enthusiastic about the new messiah" or as in "Butlearian jihadi, all AI is haram" way?
  - pj_mukh 2mo ago
    >>"optimistic and enthusiastic about the new messiah" I mean that's you agreeing with Elon Musk, I disagree, I think AI is just normal technology [1], there's a lot of us. Like tech revolutions before, it'll have huge effects on productivity alleviating major scarcities. That's boring to the algorithm, not enough conflict, but it's exciting to a lot of tech workers. No messiah's and no Jihads, just excited about going to work to make sure we can do more with less tomorrow than we can do today. [1]: https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology
    - worik 2mo ago
      Yes, it is a tool. "Normal"? It will cause huge disruption on its way to increasing efficiency, and if we maintain our freedoms, increasing welfare. But: AI cannot do your job Your boss bought AI to do your job You're fired
      - pj_mukh 2mo ago
        "AI cannot do your job Your boss bought AI to do your job You're fired" This is true only in the headlines and the loud CEO pronouncements that we for some reason take at face value. In the numbers it's almost more boring than the industrial revolution. A "white collar reshuffling" [1] the industrial revolution was not. [1]: https://www.hiringlab.org/2026/08/05/q2-labor-market-outlook-survey/ https://www.hiringlab.org/2026/08/05/q2-labor-market-outlook...
pixelready 2mo ago
The answer to this is always the one we don’t want to talk about: a robust public safety net. This is the balance to “move fast and break shit” technological disruption. It’s great to have an adaptive overall system, but disruption has a human cost. If there’s a robust public healthcare and UBI type system in place to pad the fall, people will bounce back and adapt when industries break down. If instead we stick our head in the sand and ignore the human cost so that we can temporarily enjoy maximum technological progress AND maximum wealth accumulation for shareholders, as we have been doing for the better part of a century, things will slowly break down and eventually collapse when the pace of change accelerates to the point that enough people simply can’t keep up, have nothing to lose and decide to attack the source of their misery. Bread and circuses will only distract so much.
- elmer2 2mo ago
  "If there’s a robust public healthcare and UBI type system in place to pad the fall, people will bounce back and adapt when industries break down." This would be great, in theory. The reality is that people would live on it and never work, have kids, and the same thing would happen with a new generation. As it expands, you run out of tax payers and the system collapses. A 'robust' healthcare system that the government runs is a pipe dream. "have nothing to lose and decide to attack the source of their misery. Bread and circuses will only distract so much." "If instead we stick our head in the sand and ignore the human cost so that we can temporarily enjoy maximum technological progress AND maximum wealth accumulation for shareholders, as we have been doing for the better part of a century, things will slowly break down and eventually collapse when the pace of change accelerates to the point that enough people simply can’t keep up, have nothing to lose and decide to attack the source of their misery. Bread and circuses will only distract so much." I suppose the people that are actually working will just need to get more guns.
  - Xirdus 2mo ago
    > A 'robust' healthcare system that the government runs is a pipe dream. That "pipe dream" has already been achieved by most EU countries decades ago. Sure, you might argue it's worse in quality than American healthcare and that wait times are horrible, but I guarantee you most Americans would see it as an improvement over their current situation.
RealityVoid 2mo ago
I sense there is this air around of "demand our jobs keep being relevant" - I personally feel this kind of thing holds the world backwards if it works. I think if our jobs were to become obsolete, embracing it and re-orienting oneself is the one thing that is personally effective and is morally right. But what do I know, I'm just some doofus on the internet. The irony is not lost on me on all those years where people were advised to "just learn to code, bro" in order to escape the personally threatening situation of obsolete jobs. Well, now people feel it's our turn so, "just learn to _something_ dudes"? This is all, assuming of course, that the end is nigh and our profession really is close to extinction. I personally don't buy it, but if it is, so be it.
- Tarq0n 2mo ago
  That's a fine philosophy on a personal level, but if the labor market is shocked for entire sectors there's not enough slack in the system for all of those people to adapt at once. That's how you end up with lost generations.
  - chasd00 2mo ago
    i go back to what happened to Journalism when the Internet and especially "web2.0" took off. It was hard on the industry but I don't think we have lost generations of journalists. The software biz has always expected everyone else to adapt to technological shifts at a rapid pace. I'm a dev (more of a lead/mgr these days) so my neck is on the line too but even i have to chuckle at the irony.
    - mrguyorama 2mo ago
      >It was hard on the industry but I don't think we have lost generations of journalists. We literally did. There are dramatically fewer journalists now than just a few decades ago, and everyone is constantly complaining about how bad "journalism" is now. It was definitely bad a long time ago, in the era of yellow journalism, but now "Journalists" don't even ask basic questions, don't push back in interviews at all, don't do basic "Journalism" things, so it's just another arm of the PR industry. Journalism is a great example of how bad this will go. It might look superficially like we still have some journalism right now, but we don't at all. We have a couple media orgs producing content, and they are all owned by the capitalist class explicitly, which is putting it's thumb on the scale every single day. The death of the local newsroom is part of the reason local politics have gotten so corrupt. There used to be people who's job was to go sit in local town meetings, for your local town paper, so that everybody could see when the local town council did shitty things. Another great example is how bad ESPN has become. They found that having a guy who's job it is to make wild statements to drive controversy is more profitable than just talking about basketball, so now the network is basically satire of its former self, and is made up of people who literally don't even watch sports, or care at all about it. The network spends millions of dollars on one big name who plays solitaire during games he is supposed to pay attention to. Basically all of their sports journalists are gone. Youtube of all places had to pick up the sports journalism slack, but youtube is not a good platform for real journalism either.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
1bpp 2mo ago
[flagged]
follow_the_mone 2mo ago
We remind people that Noema Magazine is owned by Berggruen Institute: https://berggruen.org/ https://berggruen.org/ Which is an AI booster: https://berggruen.org/projects/ai-visionaries https://berggruen.org/projects/ai-visionaries You cannot read these articles posing as human interest without following the money.
- Muromec 2mo ago
  Thank you for your service to community, dear stranger. o7
- epistasis 2mo ago
  Ah yes, any funding source invalidates all the arguments.... Does this article seem like an AI boosting article? Perhaps exactly the opposite? I dislike this article intensely, and disagree with it, but its lot because somehow the Berggruen Institute is shadow pushing AI here
  - neetle 2mo ago
    Counterpoint - “look at how effective AI is, it’s made everyone realise their career is for nothing!”
    - fitzroy 2mo ago
      Timeless tactic! "The Power Mac G4 is so fast that it is classified as a supercomputer by the US government, and we are prohibited from exporting it to over 50 nations worldwide," Jobs said the Apple Expo, CNN reported in September 1999. (edit: added link) https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-steve-jobs-us-export-control-marketing-moment-anthropic-2026-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-steve-jobs-us-export-c...
      - ben_w 2mo ago
        I remember that. It was export banned, wasn't it? A gigaflop being enough for a cruise missile visual guidance or something like that?
la6479 2mo ago
[dead]
teeray 2mo ago
> look at what happened to printers… I've heard homeless former printers talking about the good days So what happens is that the capital class absorbs the capital of all those workers and then they all starve. How uplifting.
- largbae 2mo ago
  Eh, chin up. The machines and/or the replaced masses will rise up and kill the capital class in the end.
  - copperx 2mo ago
    That's the fairy tale the capital class has fed us through mass media. There will be no machine uprising.
    - nephihaha 2mo ago
      The other fairy tale is when the workers rise up and create utopia. Infallible Marx didn't anticipate cybernetics.
      - goatlover 2mo ago
        Or unions, New Deals and regulations until the upper class figures out how to undo all that with decades of propaganda and buying off politicians.
IncreasePosts 2mo ago
The author "is the director of AI operations at a creative technology company".
Foobar8568 2mo ago
Fuck, there has been a class of workers who had faith in their careers? Beside Charlatans and Billionaires?
- sandworm101 2mo ago
  Lawyers
  - bonoboTP 2mo ago
    HN moment. The median lawyer isn't who you think it is.
    - sandworm101 2mo ago
      HN moment. A not-small number of commenters here are those lawyers.
- analog31 2mo ago
  I had some level of faith as a scientist. Today, I expect that scientists will be replaced by faith in AI before we're replaced by AI. Either one is a threat to my job.
- forshaper 2mo ago
  It seems like the occupations that are easiest to have faith in are generally occupations that are paid less.
- tbrownaw 2mo ago
  Probably clergy?
- stock_toaster 2mo ago
  Plumbers? With so much bullshit in the world these days, I assume plumbers will remain important. ;)
lezojeda 2mo ago
[dead]
KaiserPro 2mo ago
In the UK as weaving was mechanised it lead to huge upheavals and only narrowly avoided civil war. It changed the face of the country completely.
- zuzululu 2mo ago
  [flagged]
  - luqtas 2mo ago
    > impossible task in the present. lot of gen z can't even read or concentrate for more than 5 minutes so the old timers not even being able to open Settings of a Windows desktop /j
  - tomhow 2mo ago
    We've banned this account for continually posting inflammatory comments and ignoring our requests to stop. The guidelines require us to be kind, to avoid flamebait, and to comment without sneering/snark among other things. If you don't want to be banned, you can email us at hn@ycombinator.com and commit to observing the guidelines in future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
ericyd 2mo ago
I don't think losing faith in the value of your job is the same a losing your job due to automation.
- troyvit 2mo ago
  That's a good point. I got to hang out with a printer in Slovenia for a few hours in February and your comment made me realize how deep and strong his faith is despite the changes that automation has brought to printing. He had classes set up for kids and grown-ups to learn printing and they had a ton of cool projects to show for it. We went through all his letter blocks and he told stories about a giant building in the U.S. Northeast that was just stacked with those blocks. He loved the idea of that place and saw threats to its existence as real problems, but not as existential. Faith never came up. It was just there and that's how I know it was real.
analog31 2mo ago
Agreed. I'm a musician. Talking pictures. Then piracy, and a few things in between. Now music is either a spectacle, is carried out in private, or as a labor of love by people like myself who have some other means of support. Support that AI is now threatening.
- bonoboTP 2mo ago
  Do concerts. It's the old way. It's human and personal. It's effort though, not passive income like album sales used to be.
  - analog31 2mo ago
    Indeed, all I do is live performance. Recording is too much work. ;-)
    - bloody_bocker 2mo ago
      I also am recently coming to realization that live music is best experience, followed by recorded live music (plenty of sessions on YT that sound gorgeous and have better performances than 'normal' recordings do.
robotnikman 2mo ago
This time its the entire white collar industry though. The scale of job displacement will be at a scale never seen before. If there are no societal safety nets in place for this then I can see things going south quickly
- sysworld 2mo ago
  We need a path for people effected to be able to at least cover basic needs, while also offering some kinda training into a different role that pays. Defiantly not something most countries have setup.
  - tcrenshaw 2mo ago
    What is the different sort of roll that pays at this point?
    - abustamam 2mo ago
      Blue collar work, but obviously that labor market would get saturated pretty quickly.
- abustamam 2mo ago
  At least here in America, our politicians lose their shit if they see someone getting money without working for it (as if politicians don't already get paid for doing almost nothing). And they use scary words and rhetoric like communism and Marxism, yknow the stuff we fought wars against. What they (and their constituents) fail to realize though is that we're quickly approaching a post-work society and people won't just disappear or stop needing to eat. I keep hoping that the public would wisen up and see the writing on the wall but somehow incompetent people keep getting reelected.
- imhoguy 2mo ago
  There is article from the same site that the next US election will be about AI and how to compensate diminishing labour market https://www.noemamag.com/the-next-us-presidential-election-will-be-about-ai/ https://www.noemamag.com/the-next-us-presidential-election-w...
DragonStrength 2mo ago
My grandfather’s career was in decline before my father hit adulthood (autoworker, electronics), my father’s career (nuclear control systems engineer) was in decline from the day he established it, and I’ve never expected my new-fangled software career to be there for the next generation, but there’s a rhyme probably. I find this comparison to printers arbitrary, precious, and specious. Aren’t the armies of software engineers in tech more akin to the line-level autoworkers than artisans? The numbers would certainly suggest so. But it’s also silly to pretend such a new profession is anything akin to a generations-old trade. But maybe those tradesmen aren’t such victims either in this context? How privileged to be able to pass your profession down to the next generation! No one in my family has had that since farming, when only the oldest benefited.
api 2mo ago
I used to be a libertarian-capitalist type. The big thing that disabused me of this idea is that I also love technology and progress, and I'm not a sociopath. I increasingly believe that if we really do want to keep moving forward faster and faster, we will be forced to take one of two paths: (1) Some kind of socialism with a much bigger social safety net, probably basic income, retraining, and universal health coverage. (2) Absolute totalitarian surveillance state with drones and cameras everywhere and an iron-fist police force to suppress the constant threat of violent revolt as millions upon millions of people constantly lose their careers. This looks like dark cyberpunk, basically, and it's even kind of miserable for those at the very top. You can be rich and powerful, sure, but if you get on the wrong side of it you will be crushed. Look at what happens to oligarchs in Russia. The path to (2) is unfortunately an idea that was just, even noble in the past: the puritan work ethic and its corollaries. It's a great idea when you have a society that doesn't change much where a person can pick a vocation and make a living. It doesn't work in a society that reinvents itself completely every 10-20 years, rendering entire employment verticals totally obsolete. I think we've been able to ignore it until now. The change was still slow enough to tolerate. AI is the end of that. It's going to be the end of stable careers. Edit: I can think of a third option: (3) Tax anything that is labor-replacing for a period of time equal to the time it usually takes people to retrain. e.g. AI would be taxed for the next 10-20 years in this scenario with the tax rate decreasing each year. I greatly prefer (1) since the third option is likely to just freeze progress.
jleyank 2mo ago
Look at the disappearance of pink-collar jobs due to computerization and "do it yourself" that it enabled. There's lots of examples of whole career fields disappearing. The trick has always been to see whether and how things reappear.
- fragmede 2mo ago
  Travel agents come to mind for that. Bill Gates saw the future with and funded Expedia.com
- bentcorner 2mo ago
  Deleting career fields in and of itself is not a problem with technology, but when it's like the eye of sauron scouring workplaces and snapping jobs away (pardon the mixed universes), it starts to become a little alarming. University graduates are often considered min-bar for white-collar work hiring, so if it takes 4 years to train someone, how are people supposed to decide on a career path when it takes less time than that to completely alter the workplace? My daughter is entering her first year of nursing, a career path that she is greatly looking towards. Who says in 3 years that robotics companies don't actually deliver on their promises and completely up-end the care industry? While I think that unlikely, it's not like people aren't trying to automate nurses away.
  - harvey9 2mo ago
    The industry may be getting close to an NS-5 but the physical complexity of nursing means we would really prefer a Nexus-6.
- Rumple22Stilk 2mo ago
  There is no tech created like this. This is a literal thinking machine. And it replaces other thinking machines. You.
JackFr 2mo ago
Give the author a break he is hopefully coming to the realization that your job is not where you should find meaning. If your in a role where it might, some doctors, some teachers, etc. great for you -- that is a perk much of the world does not have. A bricklayer can be excellent at his job. He can work hard to become so (to paraphrase Inigo Mendoya). He should pride himself on this excellence, but it is unlikely he will think he was put on this earth to be a bricklayer. The despair of the the unemployed skilled laborer is that losing his livelihood imperils the things he does value, family and the ability to provide for them. In a culture where the highest goods are production so you can feed the appropriate level of hedonic consumption, and without any transcendent meaning its a rough go.
- armada651 2mo ago
  > The despair of the the unemployed skilled laborer is that losing his livelihood imperils the things he does value, family and the ability to provide for them. Isn't that exactly a concern for those who find meaning in other things than their job? If you find meaning in your job then getting paid enough to support your family is obviously important, but it is ultimately a secondary concern.
jimbobbam 2mo ago
My grandfather was a printer not to far from that Burger King, in a building now owned by the academy of art. In 1963 he had 5 children, a house in Daly City and 3 apartments across the street from Dolores park as well as a brand new home in Terra Linda. He died early, but extended family stayed in the business. It was union work, he as the youngest operator of the 4 color press. His wife my grandmother didn’t work. The printing business was cooked by the early 90s. I was laid off from Broadcom a year and a half ago- I think about the printing industry to Ai analogue all the time. I got lucky and got a job a startup making less than half of what I made before. I know much more capable and smart people laid off in the same round- that are still wondering what the hell to do.
- close04 2mo ago
  > he had 5 children, a house in Daly City and 3 apartments across the street from Dolores park as well as a brand new home in Terra Linda How well would you need to be paid now in any career to support a family like that one while accumulating that wealth already early in life? Careers can evaporate just the same but what they leave behind is vastly different from 60 years ago.
  - danans 2mo ago
    > How well would you need to be paid now in any career to support a family like that one while accumulating that wealth already early in life? The answer is that you don't do it by getting paid (as in exchanging labor for wages). You do it by finding a way to scale your wealth with other people's labor.
    - Peaches4Rent 2mo ago
      Aah, so by definition only a select few can do it
      - detourdog 2mo ago
        I would say only a few do it and they are self-selected. The ones that do it have a sense of agency that is lacking in the ones that dont do it. Some people never notice their own agency they believe it comes from outside them.
quijoteuniv 2mo ago
Isn’t it better to find out that a lot of corporate work may not have much intrinsic meaning now, rather than just before you die? At least then you get a chance to do something about it. It seems to me these changes are much more daunting if you live in a country where no job means no health insurance, and where the pay gap between skilled and unskilled work is huge. That makes an existential question about work into a very material one.
- chii 2mo ago
  > much intrinsic meaning now work should not be considered to have to have intrinsic meaning for it to be worthwhile - you merely need to make sure your pay is worthwhile. Find intrinsic meaning outside of work. The best way, imho, is to find the highest paying job you can, work super hard and earn maximally, until you built up a nest egg from which you can draw a living off indefinitely. Then, use the remaining time you have left to pursue what you find to be intrinsically rewarding.
  - kaffekaka 2mo ago
    So, the plan is to work super hard until you are ~40, only to die in a car accident at 35? Don't plan to have fun later, because later may never come.
    - testerius 2mo ago
      I think it doesn't matter when you died. You didn't exist before you were born, so you had no idea about anything. You "die" when you go to sleep. So we could say most of it doesn't matter - of course if there isn't anything after our living here.
      - swat535 2mo ago
        Yes, so you should optimize your time to have the best quality of life NOW and never later. You can die at any time.
      - 2mo ago
port11 2mo ago
The author doesn’t really address the question either. Even if I agree with them that work isn’t all that important, paying your bills and eating food is, so… ahm.
realharo 2mo ago
Maybe that's because back then it just didn't affect enough people at the same time. They weren't too big to fail.
crossroadsguy 2mo ago
> Aaron Horwath is the director of AI operations at a creative technology company where he is focused on implementing AI in a way that supports both humans and business. https://www.noemamag.com/author/aaronhorwath/ https://www.noemamag.com/author/aaronhorwath/
estearum 2mo ago
Surprised no one has made the extremely obvious observation that it took literal centuries for printing technology to eliminate the trade of printers, which could not have possibly have employed more than 0.01% of people at its peak. Compared to the potential obsolescence of 40% to 60% of the US workforce over the course of 10 - 20 years? You can argue about whether the obsolescence is real or not, but if it is, the plight of the printers is totally incomparable. Question: What happens when you drive a car at 90 mph into a concrete wall? Answer: Well, actually just this morning pulling into my parking spot, I bumped into the barrier beneath my tires. It was fine!
- fragmede 2mo ago
  It's 1.9 million out of roughly 130 million jobs in the US, putting it at about 1 to 1.5 percent. Not 0.01%
  - estearum 2mo ago
    What is?
    - sam_lowry_ 2mo ago
      IT broadly speaking is ~4.5% of the workforce in the US, 5% in the EU, last time I checked.
      - estearum 2mo ago
        Do you think IT is the only field threatened by AI? Must not spend much time talking to people in other fields.
        fragmede 2mo ago
        Ad hominem, unfounded inference, condescension/snark, and mind-reading, all in your last 11 words. Impressive!
m463 2mo ago
I found reading "The Box" about the change to containerized shipping to be an interesting way to gain perspective a huge change, from the outside. On one hand, you could see how it was rewriting shipping, then manufacturing, globalization, etc. they touched on how the unions handled things, how real estate near waterways was changed (manufacturing and warehousing), and more But on the other hand you could see how obvious it was the changes were going to happen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Box_(Levinson_book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Box_(Levinson_book)
znpy 2mo ago
> Somehow I suspect the author inherited money. Btw, from the author page: > Aaron Horwath is the director of AI operations at a creative technology company where he is focused on implementing AI in a way that supports both humans and business. There probably is some strong bias and conflict of interest in this article. I didn’t see any line saying “btw, just so you know, my paycheque is strongly bound to me pushing AI adoption in the workplace for a living (hence exacerbating all the issues i write about)”.
jambalaya8 2mo ago
Printers had taken the place of an entire cadre of non-communicating faith workers who used to sit down and painstakingly copy things by hand while being housed and fed for "free", though the variety of reading materials were hardly as large, and it took a lot longer. In all seriousness, our jobs are almost certainly going the way of AI coding things, the same way we sorta took over a bunch of unskilled women who merely punched a bunch of cards and ran punched cards through a machine to do basic calculations before computing became something else too. Before digital and electronic switching systems, you most likely didn't get work in a telephone central office unless you were more of a mechanic than a programmer. I am more worried about the fact there is nothing "next" to "strive for" or do than about the status of someone that knew the ins and outs of wax sublimation printing (though it is a cool thing).

by Animats 2mo ago

MichaelZuo 2mo ago

Obviously there is some latent risk in choosing a career anywhere, that the demand disappears. There can’t literally be zero risk of structural demand changes.

notsmarthuh 2mo ago
The problem in the Western world is that switching to a different career is made almost impossible. This society pushes people out of the workforce all the time. I'm one of them. I've been "unemployed" since 2012 with apparently ZERO ability to get any kind of skilled job ever again, just due to a "zigged when I should have zagged" situation decades ago.
- tayo42 2mo ago
  I've been curious about leaving software but it really feels impossible. Theresa no careers that you can learn on the job and you need to go back for another 4year degree to maybe get into the entry level job,no guarantee though.
  - dinkumthinkum 2mo ago
    If you a degree already, you don't necessarily have to go for four years for another degree, you will have to take the courses for your major and a small amount of additional requirements versus a first degree.
  - johnnyanmac 2mo ago
    If I could afford to go back to school for 4 years, I wouldn't be worried about finding a job right now. Besides, I hear entry level people are hit the worst right now. I better be spending half my time in college networking if I want a job. But.. Why not do that for my current field at that point?
- soperj 2mo ago
  what were you doing in 2012?
  - notsmarthuh2 2mo ago
    [flagged]
    - shimman 2mo ago
      Community college programs are extremely cheap, and state schools are a thing. It's also not unheard of for any state workers to get lower tuition costs as a benefit. You're 40+, you have like potentially another 40+ years to live a life you want. If all it takes is a degree from a public university and some white knuckling for 4-6 years to then get the life you want to work in, is that such a burden to bare? Wouldn't you want to at least try to achieve your dreams before giving up? You have the experience and smarts to know how to succeed if you want, so why give up 4 decades before the game is over?
    - gamblor956 2mo ago
      The job market doesn't want employees, or business owners, it wants slaves. I know plenty of people who went into contracting (aka self-employment) and later found full-time jobs (frequently with clients) across multiple white collar industries, including programming. They were all in their 30s and 40s. In many cases, going the self-employment route actually made them more valuable to future employers. I also know plenty of people without a degree who went into programming. Over the years I've built my own Linux distro from scratch, developed a heavily customized version of the Chromium web browser, and other interesting stuff. If this were true you'd be gainfully employed by now. Coming out of COVID, companies were hiring people just because they knew what an IDE was. Based on your comments though, it's easy to understand why you haven't been able to find a job. I wouldn't want to work with someone as negative as you and I can't imagine anyone would want to work with someone so emotionally draining.
- elmer2 2mo ago
  "with apparently ZERO ability to get any kind of skilled job ever again" Unless it's a criminal record holding you back, I really don't think this is the case. Since 2012, I know lots of people that changed careers.
  - underlipton 2mo ago
    Survivorship bias. You know what's as bad as a criminal record for your career prospects, in America? Being a black man. Having autism. Being over 50. Being a single mother. Being an immigrant without local credentials. Having a long employment gap. Having social anxiety. Having a physical disability. On and on. The first step to solving the problem is acknowledging the problem, not throwing earnest observations of dysfunction into the, "I know a short guy who gets lots of sex, height doesn't matter," bin.
- dinkumthinkum 2mo ago
  What are you talking about? Why do you call out "Western world," this seems like the reflexive idea of the left that the West is some brutish downtrodden hellhole. What's weird is what you are describing is the opposite. It is much more common in the West to be able to change your career than in the East, by an enormous margin. In many places in the East, a tremendous amount of career possibilities are removed from kids from tests they take having barely begun puberty. How many Adam Steltzner's do you think there are outside of the West? What are we talking about? As far as your specific situation with 2012, I have no idea but this is not laid at the feet of the Western world.
Rendello 2mo ago
A broadly generalized super-automaton has long been a fantasy. Suddenly it's not so fantastical.
nradov 2mo ago
I'm pretty sure there's literally zero risk of structural demand changes for law enforcement. Defunding the police isn't going to happen and there's no plausible path toward automating most of the work. Security cameras and robots can only do a fraction of what will be needed.
- slashdev 2mo ago
  Police robots and drones. You say no plausible path to automating - I beg to differ. It would get officers out of harms way. Not imminent but not zero risk either.
- yoz-y 2mo ago
  A camera with a gun on it can go a long way though.
- barrenko 2mo ago
  We've already defunded the police, and you can see the ramifications all over the world.

12998175 2mo ago

[dead]

Rendello 2mo ago

Farewell, Etaoin Shrdlu documents the last day of hot type at The New York Times before the digital changeover. It's one of my favourite documentaries, everything feels so vivid and alive: https://www.nytimes.com/video/insider/100000004687429/farewell-etaoin-shrdlu.html https://www.nytimes.com/video/insider/100000004687429/farewe...

paulorlando 2mo ago
Since you mentioned Etaoin Shrdlu and hot type / linotype... There are a lot of industries (at least historically) that have organized labor. In the UK, there was the “Wapping Dispute” in 1986 when computer technology enabled journalists to type in their copy directly, doing away with the need for workers to set type using linotype printing. Linotype was a big improvement on the older letter-by-letter typesetting and sped up composition of text 3 - 5 times compared to hand composition. Its introduction enabled a small number of machine operators to set type for multi-page newspapers, leading to an explosion of print editions in the 1900s. But in 1986, 100 years after the invention of linotype machines, they were being replaced with computerized direct input typesetting. As a result of the new process, UK print unions held a year-long strike. Result of the strike: failure. 6000 printers were fired, but there were jobs for 670 new workers who used word processing. You probably can't force your job to remain (well, I guess some people have).
- dyauspitr 2mo ago
  Collective union Luddite opposition is one part of why there is so much of a plebeian tier pushback against unions, in the very group that should be fighting for unions with their lives. That and right wing propaganda of course.
- noduerme 2mo ago
  I live in Oregon. Up until last year, you weren't allowed to pump your own gas in most parts of the state. The law required gas station attendants to do it, as a scheme to keep them employed. The most annoying part of this wasn't the tiny marginal cost, but that it sometimes took forever to get your gas if the attendant was busy. You'd just sit there looking at the pump you weren't allowed to put your credit card into. You can create laws to keep making work for a class of workers, but it ends up unpopular. Instead of a social safety net as it was intended, it turns into a corrupt drain on society at large, and a relative disadvantage to your economy versus those that are more ... agile, let's say. Check out e.g. the underpaid but overstaffed government bureaucracies and police forces in most Latin American countries. Giving a third of your society badge and a lousy paycheck often does more harm than good. I don't consider this observation to be right wing (per the sibling post), it's just how things work. While there's nobility in work and psychologically it's better to keep people employed, I'd just as soon give all the gas station attendants a lifelong retirement UBI so they'd get out of the way and let me pump my gas.

pj_mukh 2mo ago

Also the headline is about tech workers but the article is about Knowledge workers. I know a class of tech workers absolutely fired up about the new Industrial Revolution, they're just not on this forum or featured in lengthy navel-gazing articles like this one.

esafak 2mo ago
Tell us more.
Muromec 2mo ago
(not a native speaker) fired up as in "optimistic and enthusiastic about the new messiah" or as in "Butlearian jihadi, all AI is haram" way?
- pj_mukh 2mo ago
  >>"optimistic and enthusiastic about the new messiah" I mean that's you agreeing with Elon Musk, I disagree, I think AI is just normal technology [1], there's a lot of us. Like tech revolutions before, it'll have huge effects on productivity alleviating major scarcities. That's boring to the algorithm, not enough conflict, but it's exciting to a lot of tech workers. No messiah's and no Jihads, just excited about going to work to make sure we can do more with less tomorrow than we can do today. [1]: https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology
  - worik 2mo ago
    Yes, it is a tool. "Normal"? It will cause huge disruption on its way to increasing efficiency, and if we maintain our freedoms, increasing welfare. But: AI cannot do your job Your boss bought AI to do your job You're fired
    - pj_mukh 2mo ago
      "AI cannot do your job Your boss bought AI to do your job You're fired" This is true only in the headlines and the loud CEO pronouncements that we for some reason take at face value. In the numbers it's almost more boring than the industrial revolution. A "white collar reshuffling" [1] the industrial revolution was not. [1]: https://www.hiringlab.org/2026/08/05/q2-labor-market-outlook-survey/ https://www.hiringlab.org/2026/08/05/q2-labor-market-outlook...

pixelready 2mo ago

The answer to this is always the one we don’t want to talk about: a robust public safety net. This is the balance to “move fast and break shit” technological disruption. It’s great to have an adaptive overall system, but disruption has a human cost. If there’s a robust public healthcare and UBI type system in place to pad the fall, people will bounce back and adapt when industries break down. If instead we stick our head in the sand and ignore the human cost so that we can temporarily enjoy maximum technological progress AND maximum wealth accumulation for shareholders, as we have been doing for the better part of a century, things will slowly break down and eventually collapse when the pace of change accelerates to the point that enough people simply can’t keep up, have nothing to lose and decide to attack the source of their misery. Bread and circuses will only distract so much.

elmer2 2mo ago
"If there’s a robust public healthcare and UBI type system in place to pad the fall, people will bounce back and adapt when industries break down." This would be great, in theory. The reality is that people would live on it and never work, have kids, and the same thing would happen with a new generation. As it expands, you run out of tax payers and the system collapses. A 'robust' healthcare system that the government runs is a pipe dream. "have nothing to lose and decide to attack the source of their misery. Bread and circuses will only distract so much." "If instead we stick our head in the sand and ignore the human cost so that we can temporarily enjoy maximum technological progress AND maximum wealth accumulation for shareholders, as we have been doing for the better part of a century, things will slowly break down and eventually collapse when the pace of change accelerates to the point that enough people simply can’t keep up, have nothing to lose and decide to attack the source of their misery. Bread and circuses will only distract so much." I suppose the people that are actually working will just need to get more guns.
- Xirdus 2mo ago
  > A 'robust' healthcare system that the government runs is a pipe dream. That "pipe dream" has already been achieved by most EU countries decades ago. Sure, you might argue it's worse in quality than American healthcare and that wait times are horrible, but I guarantee you most Americans would see it as an improvement over their current situation.

RealityVoid 2mo ago

I sense there is this air around of "demand our jobs keep being relevant" - I personally feel this kind of thing holds the world backwards if it works. I think if our jobs were to become obsolete, embracing it and re-orienting oneself is the one thing that is personally effective and is morally right. But what do I know, I'm just some doofus on the internet. The irony is not lost on me on all those years where people were advised to "just learn to code, bro" in order to escape the personally threatening situation of obsolete jobs. Well, now people feel it's our turn so, "just learn to _something_ dudes"? This is all, assuming of course, that the end is nigh and our profession really is close to extinction. I personally don't buy it, but if it is, so be it.

Tarq0n 2mo ago
That's a fine philosophy on a personal level, but if the labor market is shocked for entire sectors there's not enough slack in the system for all of those people to adapt at once. That's how you end up with lost generations.
- chasd00 2mo ago
  i go back to what happened to Journalism when the Internet and especially "web2.0" took off. It was hard on the industry but I don't think we have lost generations of journalists. The software biz has always expected everyone else to adapt to technological shifts at a rapid pace. I'm a dev (more of a lead/mgr these days) so my neck is on the line too but even i have to chuckle at the irony.
  - mrguyorama 2mo ago
    >It was hard on the industry but I don't think we have lost generations of journalists. We literally did. There are dramatically fewer journalists now than just a few decades ago, and everyone is constantly complaining about how bad "journalism" is now. It was definitely bad a long time ago, in the era of yellow journalism, but now "Journalists" don't even ask basic questions, don't push back in interviews at all, don't do basic "Journalism" things, so it's just another arm of the PR industry. Journalism is a great example of how bad this will go. It might look superficially like we still have some journalism right now, but we don't at all. We have a couple media orgs producing content, and they are all owned by the capitalist class explicitly, which is putting it's thumb on the scale every single day. The death of the local newsroom is part of the reason local politics have gotten so corrupt. There used to be people who's job was to go sit in local town meetings, for your local town paper, so that everybody could see when the local town council did shitty things. Another great example is how bad ESPN has become. They found that having a guy who's job it is to make wild statements to drive controversy is more profitable than just talking about basketball, so now the network is basically satire of its former self, and is made up of people who literally don't even watch sports, or care at all about it. The network spends millions of dollars on one big name who plays solitaire during games he is supposed to pay attention to. Basically all of their sports journalists are gone. Youtube of all places had to pick up the sports journalism slack, but youtube is not a good platform for real journalism either.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

1bpp 2mo ago

[flagged]

follow_the_mone 2mo ago

We remind people that Noema Magazine is owned by Berggruen Institute: https://berggruen.org/ https://berggruen.org/ Which is an AI booster: https://berggruen.org/projects/ai-visionaries https://berggruen.org/projects/ai-visionaries You cannot read these articles posing as human interest without following the money.

Muromec 2mo ago
Thank you for your service to community, dear stranger. o7
epistasis 2mo ago
Ah yes, any funding source invalidates all the arguments.... Does this article seem like an AI boosting article? Perhaps exactly the opposite? I dislike this article intensely, and disagree with it, but its lot because somehow the Berggruen Institute is shadow pushing AI here
- neetle 2mo ago
  Counterpoint - “look at how effective AI is, it’s made everyone realise their career is for nothing!”
  - fitzroy 2mo ago
    Timeless tactic! "The Power Mac G4 is so fast that it is classified as a supercomputer by the US government, and we are prohibited from exporting it to over 50 nations worldwide," Jobs said the Apple Expo, CNN reported in September 1999. (edit: added link) https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-steve-jobs-us-export-control-marketing-moment-anthropic-2026-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-steve-jobs-us-export-c...
    - ben_w 2mo ago
      I remember that. It was export banned, wasn't it? A gigaflop being enough for a cruise missile visual guidance or something like that?

la6479 2mo ago

[dead]

teeray 2mo ago

> look at what happened to printers… I've heard homeless former printers talking about the good days So what happens is that the capital class absorbs the capital of all those workers and then they all starve. How uplifting.

largbae 2mo ago
Eh, chin up. The machines and/or the replaced masses will rise up and kill the capital class in the end.
- copperx 2mo ago
  That's the fairy tale the capital class has fed us through mass media. There will be no machine uprising.
  - nephihaha 2mo ago
    The other fairy tale is when the workers rise up and create utopia. Infallible Marx didn't anticipate cybernetics.
    - goatlover 2mo ago
      Or unions, New Deals and regulations until the upper class figures out how to undo all that with decades of propaganda and buying off politicians.

IncreasePosts 2mo ago

The author "is the director of AI operations at a creative technology company".

Foobar8568 2mo ago

Fuck, there has been a class of workers who had faith in their careers? Beside Charlatans and Billionaires?

sandworm101 2mo ago
Lawyers
- bonoboTP 2mo ago
  HN moment. The median lawyer isn't who you think it is.
  - sandworm101 2mo ago
    HN moment. A not-small number of commenters here are those lawyers.
analog31 2mo ago
I had some level of faith as a scientist. Today, I expect that scientists will be replaced by faith in AI before we're replaced by AI. Either one is a threat to my job.
forshaper 2mo ago
It seems like the occupations that are easiest to have faith in are generally occupations that are paid less.
tbrownaw 2mo ago
Probably clergy?
stock_toaster 2mo ago
Plumbers? With so much bullshit in the world these days, I assume plumbers will remain important. ;)

lezojeda 2mo ago

[dead]

KaiserPro 2mo ago

In the UK as weaving was mechanised it lead to huge upheavals and only narrowly avoided civil war. It changed the face of the country completely.

zuzululu 2mo ago
[flagged]
- luqtas 2mo ago
  > impossible task in the present. lot of gen z can't even read or concentrate for more than 5 minutes so the old timers not even being able to open Settings of a Windows desktop /j
- tomhow 2mo ago
  We've banned this account for continually posting inflammatory comments and ignoring our requests to stop. The guidelines require us to be kind, to avoid flamebait, and to comment without sneering/snark among other things. If you don't want to be banned, you can email us at hn@ycombinator.com and commit to observing the guidelines in future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

ericyd 2mo ago

I don't think losing faith in the value of your job is the same a losing your job due to automation.

troyvit 2mo ago
That's a good point. I got to hang out with a printer in Slovenia for a few hours in February and your comment made me realize how deep and strong his faith is despite the changes that automation has brought to printing. He had classes set up for kids and grown-ups to learn printing and they had a ton of cool projects to show for it. We went through all his letter blocks and he told stories about a giant building in the U.S. Northeast that was just stacked with those blocks. He loved the idea of that place and saw threats to its existence as real problems, but not as existential. Faith never came up. It was just there and that's how I know it was real.

analog31 2mo ago

Agreed. I'm a musician. Talking pictures. Then piracy, and a few things in between. Now music is either a spectacle, is carried out in private, or as a labor of love by people like myself who have some other means of support. Support that AI is now threatening.

bonoboTP 2mo ago
Do concerts. It's the old way. It's human and personal. It's effort though, not passive income like album sales used to be.
- analog31 2mo ago
  Indeed, all I do is live performance. Recording is too much work. ;-)
  - bloody_bocker 2mo ago
    I also am recently coming to realization that live music is best experience, followed by recorded live music (plenty of sessions on YT that sound gorgeous and have better performances than 'normal' recordings do.

robotnikman 2mo ago

This time its the entire white collar industry though. The scale of job displacement will be at a scale never seen before. If there are no societal safety nets in place for this then I can see things going south quickly

sysworld 2mo ago
We need a path for people effected to be able to at least cover basic needs, while also offering some kinda training into a different role that pays. Defiantly not something most countries have setup.
- tcrenshaw 2mo ago
  What is the different sort of roll that pays at this point?
  - abustamam 2mo ago
    Blue collar work, but obviously that labor market would get saturated pretty quickly.
abustamam 2mo ago
At least here in America, our politicians lose their shit if they see someone getting money without working for it (as if politicians don't already get paid for doing almost nothing). And they use scary words and rhetoric like communism and Marxism, yknow the stuff we fought wars against. What they (and their constituents) fail to realize though is that we're quickly approaching a post-work society and people won't just disappear or stop needing to eat. I keep hoping that the public would wisen up and see the writing on the wall but somehow incompetent people keep getting reelected.
imhoguy 2mo ago
There is article from the same site that the next US election will be about AI and how to compensate diminishing labour market https://www.noemamag.com/the-next-us-presidential-election-will-be-about-ai/ https://www.noemamag.com/the-next-us-presidential-election-w...

DragonStrength 2mo ago

My grandfather’s career was in decline before my father hit adulthood (autoworker, electronics), my father’s career (nuclear control systems engineer) was in decline from the day he established it, and I’ve never expected my new-fangled software career to be there for the next generation, but there’s a rhyme probably. I find this comparison to printers arbitrary, precious, and specious. Aren’t the armies of software engineers in tech more akin to the line-level autoworkers than artisans? The numbers would certainly suggest so. But it’s also silly to pretend such a new profession is anything akin to a generations-old trade. But maybe those tradesmen aren’t such victims either in this context? How privileged to be able to pass your profession down to the next generation! No one in my family has had that since farming, when only the oldest benefited.

api 2mo ago

I used to be a libertarian-capitalist type. The big thing that disabused me of this idea is that I also love technology and progress, and I'm not a sociopath. I increasingly believe that if we really do want to keep moving forward faster and faster, we will be forced to take one of two paths: (1) Some kind of socialism with a much bigger social safety net, probably basic income, retraining, and universal health coverage. (2) Absolute totalitarian surveillance state with drones and cameras everywhere and an iron-fist police force to suppress the constant threat of violent revolt as millions upon millions of people constantly lose their careers. This looks like dark cyberpunk, basically, and it's even kind of miserable for those at the very top. You can be rich and powerful, sure, but if you get on the wrong side of it you will be crushed. Look at what happens to oligarchs in Russia. The path to (2) is unfortunately an idea that was just, even noble in the past: the puritan work ethic and its corollaries. It's a great idea when you have a society that doesn't change much where a person can pick a vocation and make a living. It doesn't work in a society that reinvents itself completely every 10-20 years, rendering entire employment verticals totally obsolete. I think we've been able to ignore it until now. The change was still slow enough to tolerate. AI is the end of that. It's going to be the end of stable careers. Edit: I can think of a third option: (3) Tax anything that is labor-replacing for a period of time equal to the time it usually takes people to retrain. e.g. AI would be taxed for the next 10-20 years in this scenario with the tax rate decreasing each year. I greatly prefer (1) since the third option is likely to just freeze progress.

jleyank 2mo ago

Look at the disappearance of pink-collar jobs due to computerization and "do it yourself" that it enabled. There's lots of examples of whole career fields disappearing. The trick has always been to see whether and how things reappear.

fragmede 2mo ago
Travel agents come to mind for that. Bill Gates saw the future with and funded Expedia.com
bentcorner 2mo ago
Deleting career fields in and of itself is not a problem with technology, but when it's like the eye of sauron scouring workplaces and snapping jobs away (pardon the mixed universes), it starts to become a little alarming. University graduates are often considered min-bar for white-collar work hiring, so if it takes 4 years to train someone, how are people supposed to decide on a career path when it takes less time than that to completely alter the workplace? My daughter is entering her first year of nursing, a career path that she is greatly looking towards. Who says in 3 years that robotics companies don't actually deliver on their promises and completely up-end the care industry? While I think that unlikely, it's not like people aren't trying to automate nurses away.
- harvey9 2mo ago
  The industry may be getting close to an NS-5 but the physical complexity of nursing means we would really prefer a Nexus-6.
Rumple22Stilk 2mo ago
There is no tech created like this. This is a literal thinking machine. And it replaces other thinking machines. You.

JackFr 2mo ago

Give the author a break he is hopefully coming to the realization that your job is not where you should find meaning. If your in a role where it might, some doctors, some teachers, etc. great for you -- that is a perk much of the world does not have. A bricklayer can be excellent at his job. He can work hard to become so (to paraphrase Inigo Mendoya). He should pride himself on this excellence, but it is unlikely he will think he was put on this earth to be a bricklayer. The despair of the the unemployed skilled laborer is that losing his livelihood imperils the things he does value, family and the ability to provide for them. In a culture where the highest goods are production so you can feed the appropriate level of hedonic consumption, and without any transcendent meaning its a rough go.

armada651 2mo ago
> The despair of the the unemployed skilled laborer is that losing his livelihood imperils the things he does value, family and the ability to provide for them. Isn't that exactly a concern for those who find meaning in other things than their job? If you find meaning in your job then getting paid enough to support your family is obviously important, but it is ultimately a secondary concern.

jimbobbam 2mo ago

My grandfather was a printer not to far from that Burger King, in a building now owned by the academy of art. In 1963 he had 5 children, a house in Daly City and 3 apartments across the street from Dolores park as well as a brand new home in Terra Linda. He died early, but extended family stayed in the business. It was union work, he as the youngest operator of the 4 color press. His wife my grandmother didn’t work. The printing business was cooked by the early 90s. I was laid off from Broadcom a year and a half ago- I think about the printing industry to Ai analogue all the time. I got lucky and got a job a startup making less than half of what I made before. I know much more capable and smart people laid off in the same round- that are still wondering what the hell to do.

close04 2mo ago
> he had 5 children, a house in Daly City and 3 apartments across the street from Dolores park as well as a brand new home in Terra Linda How well would you need to be paid now in any career to support a family like that one while accumulating that wealth already early in life? Careers can evaporate just the same but what they leave behind is vastly different from 60 years ago.
- danans 2mo ago
  > How well would you need to be paid now in any career to support a family like that one while accumulating that wealth already early in life? The answer is that you don't do it by getting paid (as in exchanging labor for wages). You do it by finding a way to scale your wealth with other people's labor.
  - Peaches4Rent 2mo ago
    Aah, so by definition only a select few can do it
    - detourdog 2mo ago
      I would say only a few do it and they are self-selected. The ones that do it have a sense of agency that is lacking in the ones that dont do it. Some people never notice their own agency they believe it comes from outside them.

quijoteuniv 2mo ago

Isn’t it better to find out that a lot of corporate work may not have much intrinsic meaning now, rather than just before you die? At least then you get a chance to do something about it. It seems to me these changes are much more daunting if you live in a country where no job means no health insurance, and where the pay gap between skilled and unskilled work is huge. That makes an existential question about work into a very material one.

chii 2mo ago
> much intrinsic meaning now work should not be considered to have to have intrinsic meaning for it to be worthwhile - you merely need to make sure your pay is worthwhile. Find intrinsic meaning outside of work. The best way, imho, is to find the highest paying job you can, work super hard and earn maximally, until you built up a nest egg from which you can draw a living off indefinitely. Then, use the remaining time you have left to pursue what you find to be intrinsically rewarding.
- kaffekaka 2mo ago
  So, the plan is to work super hard until you are ~40, only to die in a car accident at 35? Don't plan to have fun later, because later may never come.
  - testerius 2mo ago
    I think it doesn't matter when you died. You didn't exist before you were born, so you had no idea about anything. You "die" when you go to sleep. So we could say most of it doesn't matter - of course if there isn't anything after our living here.
    - swat535 2mo ago
      Yes, so you should optimize your time to have the best quality of life NOW and never later. You can die at any time.
    - 2mo ago

port11 2mo ago

The author doesn’t really address the question either. Even if I agree with them that work isn’t all that important, paying your bills and eating food is, so… ahm.

realharo 2mo ago

Maybe that's because back then it just didn't affect enough people at the same time. They weren't too big to fail.

crossroadsguy 2mo ago

> Aaron Horwath is the director of AI operations at a creative technology company where he is focused on implementing AI in a way that supports both humans and business. https://www.noemamag.com/author/aaronhorwath/ https://www.noemamag.com/author/aaronhorwath/

estearum 2mo ago

Surprised no one has made the extremely obvious observation that it took literal centuries for printing technology to eliminate the trade of printers, which could not have possibly have employed more than 0.01% of people at its peak. Compared to the potential obsolescence of 40% to 60% of the US workforce over the course of 10 - 20 years? You can argue about whether the obsolescence is real or not, but if it is, the plight of the printers is totally incomparable. Question: What happens when you drive a car at 90 mph into a concrete wall? Answer: Well, actually just this morning pulling into my parking spot, I bumped into the barrier beneath my tires. It was fine!

fragmede 2mo ago
It's 1.9 million out of roughly 130 million jobs in the US, putting it at about 1 to 1.5 percent. Not 0.01%
- estearum 2mo ago
  What is?
  - sam_lowry_ 2mo ago
    IT broadly speaking is ~4.5% of the workforce in the US, 5% in the EU, last time I checked.
    - estearum 2mo ago
      Do you think IT is the only field threatened by AI? Must not spend much time talking to people in other fields.
      - fragmede 2mo ago
        Ad hominem, unfounded inference, condescension/snark, and mind-reading, all in your last 11 words. Impressive!

m463 2mo ago

I found reading "The Box" about the change to containerized shipping to be an interesting way to gain perspective a huge change, from the outside. On one hand, you could see how it was rewriting shipping, then manufacturing, globalization, etc. they touched on how the unions handled things, how real estate near waterways was changed (manufacturing and warehousing), and more But on the other hand you could see how obvious it was the changes were going to happen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Box_(Levinson_book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Box_(Levinson_book)

znpy 2mo ago

> Somehow I suspect the author inherited money. Btw, from the author page: > Aaron Horwath is the director of AI operations at a creative technology company where he is focused on implementing AI in a way that supports both humans and business. There probably is some strong bias and conflict of interest in this article. I didn’t see any line saying “btw, just so you know, my paycheque is strongly bound to me pushing AI adoption in the workplace for a living (hence exacerbating all the issues i write about)”.

jambalaya8 2mo ago

Printers had taken the place of an entire cadre of non-communicating faith workers who used to sit down and painstakingly copy things by hand while being housed and fed for "free", though the variety of reading materials were hardly as large, and it took a lot longer. In all seriousness, our jobs are almost certainly going the way of AI coding things, the same way we sorta took over a bunch of unskilled women who merely punched a bunch of cards and ran punched cards through a machine to do basic calculations before computing became something else too. Before digital and electronic switching systems, you most likely didn't get work in a telephone central office unless you were more of a mechanic than a programmer. I am more worried about the fact there is nothing "next" to "strive for" or do than about the status of someone that knew the ins and outs of wax sublimation printing (though it is a cool thing).