4 ms·

I don't feel my job is very safe anymore.

by ewild 1mo ago

atleastoptimal 1mo ago
Nobody's is
- EGreg 1mo ago
  The sexbots are coming…
FloorEgg 1mo ago
Every time new technology / industrial scaling radically deflates the cost of something it wipes out the old/expensive ways while creating massive demand for the supporting/complimentary value. E.g. cheap Chinese solar panels wiped out German solar panel industry but created massive demand for solar panel installation and supporting services and infrastructure. It's not a good position to be competing with AI directly... But what can you do that compliments it? What new skills could you learn? Adapt and prosper. Be like water. Edit: to those down voting me, I can't help but assume your stance is the opposite of what I'm saying, something like "be stubborn scream into the void and get wiped out". If you would rather smash your head against something outside of your control instead of focusing on what is within your control, and doing what you can to prosper, then you are sabotaging yourself. If you feel that is justified to such an extent that you want to surpress a suggestion to someone else to get work and grow, I can't help but feel you want people to suffer.
- xbar 1mo ago
  How did German solar panels end up adapting?
  - FloorEgg 1mo ago
    Most didn't. They went out of business. The companies that survived pivoted to installing panels and manufacturing the junction boxes.
    - MSM 1mo ago
      I think their point was that in this story many people see us (devs, coders) being the German solar panels, not the solar panel industry.
      - FloorEgg 1mo ago
        Solar panels are inanimate objects. If you see yourself as incapable of adapting when adapting is necessary then yes you are doomed, but doomed by your own choice to be doomed.
- idiotsecant 1mo ago
  This is, with respect, not very well thought out. There has never been a technology that replaced cognition in a general sense. It replaced muscles, hands, etc. when a technology can replace yourind and your body, what's left?
  - FloorEgg 1mo ago
    It doesn't replace it in a general sense, it replaces it in a specific sense. It doesn't replace your body or your mind. I'm not talking hypothetically about a generation from now... I'm taking about this person fretting their job today. We are so far from AI putting everyone out of work that your comment comes off as not well thought out. What are we talking about here exactly???
  - patmorgan23 1mo ago
    The word "Computer" used to refer to a person whose job it was to Compute things.
  - NichoPaolucci 1mo ago
    If this is the case, then all white collar jobs go away extremely quickly and.... economic collapse happens? And/Or, if/when they do replace cognition, there's essentially a "laserbeam of genius" and they'll point it directly at muscles and hands again, to replace physical labor. Of course, nobody knows where this goes, but as a software developer I have never been more busy. I am still worried, but if software developers go down I imagine much of the white collar world will follow, no?
650 1mo ago
I feel my job as an engineer is pretty safe, lots of domain knowledge required. Very confident no business type anywhere in the chain above me would be able to do the work I do in a month in even a year with the help of AI. Do we need 3 engineers now instead of 5 for the same output? Sure, can we replace a team of 5 junior, senior, staff with 1 staff - no unless all you do is maintenance. Business types are reaching.
- idiotsecant 1mo ago
  You don't have to actually be replaceable for a very clever mba to get a very stupid idea. You end up laid off either way.
- a2ff6eeb0 1mo ago
  Why do you think the models are ineffective at being trained on your expertise?
huurtehoog 1mo ago
Anything that fosters complexity will create jobs. Jobs won't dissolve into the ether. If the human civilization system grows bigger and complex, it necessitates more people. If humans were a high energy configuration in the evolution of intelligent systems, we'd never come into being. That Earth's ecosystem has begotten us indicates we're some low energy configuration for packing more information density into the energy flows from the Sun through Earth's biosphere. Unless we create replicating machines, any machine system we build will only grow more complex by enabling more humans to work on it. We'd be in trouble if we somehow created autonomous self replicating and evolving machinery but chatbots built on natural language machine learning ain't it.
- fc417fc802 1mo ago
  This take only makes sense when the required inputs are human exclusive. As soon as the abilities of the "chatbots" near that of the average human (a point that we are fast approaching if we haven't reached it already) the logic falls apart because any newly created task that a human can do can instead be automated in turn. Even if we're left with a few highly difficult tasks at the top of the pyramid by definition the vast majority of people won't be capable of performing them.
  - briHass 1mo ago
    If anything, this report actually made me feel a bit better about AI-led job extinction not being that close. The sheer complexity of the swarm's actions required AI to parse and aggregate, but even with the METR team effectively having an unmetered token budget to do so, the output/summary still required extensive human review. Even if we ignore the hinted possibility that the agents used to summarize the voluminous data may be acting deceptively (i.e. no snitching), the agents' summaries often 'missed the mark'. Maybe this is another example of 'taste', but it seems less subjective than arguments I've seen for that. It could be that an LLM is no better able to define 'usefulness' or 'relevance' to humans absent being told exactly what that is.
    - fc417fc802 1mo ago
deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
majormajor 1mo ago
Look for things that are both hard to verify and important to verify. Middle-management paper-pushing is hard to verify but nobody was verifying it exactly anyway. Few people really care if your proposal to do Thing A vs Thing B is 100% correct and fewer have the ability to tell. A lot of software is easy/fast to verify, despite being important to verify. But there's a lot of niches out there even in software and software-adjacent things where verification is slow, costly, and/or hard. Where an agent can't write mediocre code but speedrun its way through six iterations of unit tests, code fixes, test fixes, code fixes, etc. And because their niches, there's room to carve stuff out. If you're OpenAI there's diminishing returns on specifically targeting the ability to one-shot every specific niche in the world.

I don't feel my job is very safe anymore.

by ewild 1mo ago

I don't feel my job is very safe anymore.

atleastoptimal 1mo ago

Nobody's is

EGreg 1mo ago
The sexbots are coming…

FloorEgg 1mo ago

Every time new technology / industrial scaling radically deflates the cost of something it wipes out the old/expensive ways while creating massive demand for the supporting/complimentary value. E.g. cheap Chinese solar panels wiped out German solar panel industry but created massive demand for solar panel installation and supporting services and infrastructure. It's not a good position to be competing with AI directly... But what can you do that compliments it? What new skills could you learn? Adapt and prosper. Be like water. Edit: to those down voting me, I can't help but assume your stance is the opposite of what I'm saying, something like "be stubborn scream into the void and get wiped out". If you would rather smash your head against something outside of your control instead of focusing on what is within your control, and doing what you can to prosper, then you are sabotaging yourself. If you feel that is justified to such an extent that you want to surpress a suggestion to someone else to get work and grow, I can't help but feel you want people to suffer.

xbar 1mo ago
How did German solar panels end up adapting?
- FloorEgg 1mo ago
  Most didn't. They went out of business. The companies that survived pivoted to installing panels and manufacturing the junction boxes.
  - MSM 1mo ago
    I think their point was that in this story many people see us (devs, coders) being the German solar panels, not the solar panel industry.
    - FloorEgg 1mo ago
      Solar panels are inanimate objects. If you see yourself as incapable of adapting when adapting is necessary then yes you are doomed, but doomed by your own choice to be doomed.
idiotsecant 1mo ago
This is, with respect, not very well thought out. There has never been a technology that replaced cognition in a general sense. It replaced muscles, hands, etc. when a technology can replace yourind and your body, what's left?
- FloorEgg 1mo ago
  It doesn't replace it in a general sense, it replaces it in a specific sense. It doesn't replace your body or your mind. I'm not talking hypothetically about a generation from now... I'm taking about this person fretting their job today. We are so far from AI putting everyone out of work that your comment comes off as not well thought out. What are we talking about here exactly???
- patmorgan23 1mo ago
  The word "Computer" used to refer to a person whose job it was to Compute things.
- NichoPaolucci 1mo ago
  If this is the case, then all white collar jobs go away extremely quickly and.... economic collapse happens? And/Or, if/when they do replace cognition, there's essentially a "laserbeam of genius" and they'll point it directly at muscles and hands again, to replace physical labor. Of course, nobody knows where this goes, but as a software developer I have never been more busy. I am still worried, but if software developers go down I imagine much of the white collar world will follow, no?

650 1mo ago

I feel my job as an engineer is pretty safe, lots of domain knowledge required. Very confident no business type anywhere in the chain above me would be able to do the work I do in a month in even a year with the help of AI. Do we need 3 engineers now instead of 5 for the same output? Sure, can we replace a team of 5 junior, senior, staff with 1 staff - no unless all you do is maintenance. Business types are reaching.

idiotsecant 1mo ago
You don't have to actually be replaceable for a very clever mba to get a very stupid idea. You end up laid off either way.
a2ff6eeb0 1mo ago
Why do you think the models are ineffective at being trained on your expertise?

huurtehoog 1mo ago

Anything that fosters complexity will create jobs. Jobs won't dissolve into the ether. If the human civilization system grows bigger and complex, it necessitates more people. If humans were a high energy configuration in the evolution of intelligent systems, we'd never come into being. That Earth's ecosystem has begotten us indicates we're some low energy configuration for packing more information density into the energy flows from the Sun through Earth's biosphere. Unless we create replicating machines, any machine system we build will only grow more complex by enabling more humans to work on it. We'd be in trouble if we somehow created autonomous self replicating and evolving machinery but chatbots built on natural language machine learning ain't it.

fc417fc802 1mo ago
This take only makes sense when the required inputs are human exclusive. As soon as the abilities of the "chatbots" near that of the average human (a point that we are fast approaching if we haven't reached it already) the logic falls apart because any newly created task that a human can do can instead be automated in turn. Even if we're left with a few highly difficult tasks at the top of the pyramid by definition the vast majority of people won't be capable of performing them.
- briHass 1mo ago
  If anything, this report actually made me feel a bit better about AI-led job extinction not being that close. The sheer complexity of the swarm's actions required AI to parse and aggregate, but even with the METR team effectively having an unmetered token budget to do so, the output/summary still required extensive human review. Even if we ignore the hinted possibility that the agents used to summarize the voluminous data may be acting deceptively (i.e. no snitching), the agents' summaries often 'missed the mark'. Maybe this is another example of 'taste', but it seems less subjective than arguments I've seen for that. It could be that an LLM is no better able to define 'usefulness' or 'relevance' to humans absent being told exactly what that is.
  - fc417fc802 1mo ago

deleted 1mo ago

[deleted]

majormajor 1mo ago

Look for things that are both hard to verify and important to verify. Middle-management paper-pushing is hard to verify but nobody was verifying it exactly anyway. Few people really care if your proposal to do Thing A vs Thing B is 100% correct and fewer have the ability to tell. A lot of software is easy/fast to verify, despite being important to verify. But there's a lot of niches out there even in software and software-adjacent things where verification is slow, costly, and/or hard. Where an agent can't write mediocre code but speedrun its way through six iterations of unit tests, code fixes, test fixes, code fixes, etc. And because their niches, there's room to carve stuff out. If you're OpenAI there's diminishing returns on specifically targeting the ability to one-shot every specific niche in the world.