If by some miracle/disaster AI automated away a non-trivial percent of your profession over the next decade or so, what career would you switch into to take you through retirement?
I've been looking at switching to solar installation. The problem is whether or not that is a good move, long-term, is super regional (in the US, and I guess I'm assuming you're from the US). For the states that have incentives to pair with the federal incentives, business is booming. But for everywhere else, the return on your investment just isn't there, yet.
Also, installers seem to make little money, whereas sales staff make shitloads. So there's probably something to that if you really thought about it.
Source; We're having solar installed. Without federal and state incentives/tax breaks, the break-even point on the max system our rural cooperative will let us put up is around 30 years, with incentives, it's around 5.
I’d become a Yoga Instructor. I was certified as of a few years ago so I’d takes some classes again to renew my cert.
Lotsa folks attend yoga classes for the personal connection. Not just the spirituality or fitness. That personal connection can’t be replicated by AI so I think it’s a good choice if AI starts coming for my programming job.
This is a good point, and something yoga classes should do a better job of. It seems like they don’t generally emphasize community when that’s what many are looking for.
Game development -- AI will eventually be guidable to write code, but it likely won't have "imagination" in the next decade (and I am not worried about my finances after that)
Beer making -- Similarly, AI likely won't understand taste for quite some time
Woodworking -- When everything is mass produced by automation, I suspect people will want unique, custom, hand-made things more.
Edit: Fix format, clarify statement on next decade :-)
If its furniture you're thinking of - people want custom hand-made things now, they just can't afford them. That trend isn't going to change with increased automation.
>Beer making -- Similarly, AI likely won't understand taste for quite some time
Might be wishful thinking, presumably you can give it taste reviews from people along with chemical makeup and can predict chemical mixtures that will rank highly on taste.
> Woodworking -- When everything is mass produced by automation, I suspect people will want unique, custom, hand-made things more.
Funnily enough I’ve used AI in my woodworking to generate novel coffee table designs, write product descriptions for Etsy listings, and generate a logo.
I used DALL·E 2. I've had better success with it over Stable Diffusion. Prompt was something like "Create a vector logo for a woodworking site with a handplane and the words Burn Box Woodworking" For some reason it can never get the text correct, but it gave my a good enough logo to clean up in Photoshop.
They work on text, but could ML/AI design SimCity 2000 in a way that is fun and enjoyable? or a game like Starcraft? (In the next 10-15 years, which is the scope of this Ask HN relative to me)
It might be able to make realistic text, even storylines, but I don't think ML/AI will be able to make GOOD games without significant guidance, especially things that 'break the mold' (Portal, Black & White, the first "Sim" game, the first RTS game)
ML/AI like every tool isn’t about absolute autonomy but rather about force multiplication.
This is what happened to farming, the textile industry, manufacturing etc.
It’s not that anyone thinks that an AI would be able to develop a game or an app from scratch but how many people it would displace by automating things from code generation to UI design and art assets creation.
We still have farmers, however their farms tend to be much larger and there are far fewer farmhands than there were 50 years ago let alone 100 or 150 before the Industrial Revolution kicked into high gear.
Ironically the productivity of AI/ML is quite likely going to open the door for many people the tech part of the tech community was quite often dismissive off - as in “I’m a big picture type of person and I can instinctively know how good looks like but I lack the knowledge to make my dream a reality”.
Whilst plenty of people that think they are like that often fall quite far from that even those who don’t like the Jobs of the world tend to be quite divisive individuals that too many people tend to dismiss as charlatans that failed upwards.
Overall I don’t think that an apocalypse is coming down at least not yet, however I don’t actually mind the fact that there might be more opportunity for people who really want to focus on the problem rather than people who just seem to know what the solution is or should be and find a problem that fits it.
And if AI can get to a spot where it can actually help people iterate solutions in a rapid and cheap manner it can really change how a lot of industries operate.
Also ironically a lot of other far less glorious IT professions are probably safe, old school sysadmins and infrastructure folks seem to be able to demand far higher wages than ever before which is what happens when 9 out of 10 new people in “IT” these days know how to package a hello world app that has 4GB of Node.JS dependencies and write the helm charts and TF deployment code which probably has more lines than the original Windows NT kernel but can’t calculate a subnet mask or know what MAC address is…
Game development is an interesting one. Looking at the bulk of recent triple-A titles, most of those feel so unimaginative and secondary that I can only assume AI already took over that field. :)
All your top picks have "innovation as a requirement for success" in common. AI is meant to reproduce outcomes, which means that innovation isn't something an AI can do. Or can it?
It must be really hard work being a baker, it's very labour intensive and you sell each item pretty cheaply. I guess it's hard to make money. I'm always so happy in France to see every village having it's own bakery which is always busy. Even in the UK we have a great scene in village bakeries making cakes, bread and sausage rolls and pies and pasties. It's one of the finer things in life :-)
Exactly, we like to jokes that it was set us apart from the barbarian.
A lot of excellent memory are associated with bakery. Late at night / super early. Bringing croissant to a new girl that spend the night. Tea with grandma…. You name it.
And joke aside, in France a village goes to another category when the last boulangerie close.
Their is bread in the US, you find good bakery. But the posh and exclusive aspect of it ruins it for me. I’m not driving 15min to buy a 4$ baguettes.
And yes. It’s a taxing job. You are out of synch with normal people.
Right now baker are suffering greatly from increased energy prices. I hope we put them on full life support of cash if needed. That’s worth it.
The career I’m already moving towards – technical leadership. Swap programmers with AI and the really fun part of designing and building software systems remains the same.
Honestly the work is very similar. Much of what I do these days is conveying ideas to fuzzy intelligences, getting their feedback and suggestions, iterating, and making sure the final product is coherent, does what it says, and fits the longer term vision.
Turns out you can get a lot more done by keeping 5 people on track than you can by banging code on a keyboard.
When the internet empowered more people to do the lawyers’ grunt work, compensation became bimodal. There is more value in being on the high end, but less on doing the grunt work.
I think that’s gonna happen with other professions. Including ours (engineering). If you’re doing grunt work – be afraid. If you’re doing high level work – rejoice, it’s about to get easier.
You see this same effect in design for example. An art/design director’s job is about to get easier. The designer making the 5000th billboard for $Brand based on a style guide … could be tough.
That theory is floating around on HN since a few month.
I find it appealing, to an extend.
Even if AI wrote most of the code, who check for completeness and is on prod support ?
I’m not 100% convinced that legal grunt work translate to software grunt work ( I don’t know about real engineering)
It may, but 20 years in that industry make me think that a legal PDF compiling jurisprudence is easier to “maintain” than any sizeable system.
That being said : it the AI output perfect, flawless and 100% up services, you don’t need human to know how the sausage is made. ( until it broke )
Question for you : what is engineering grunt work ? I’m not sure where I stand at this point. Working in giant structure make you feel like a cog, but I’m far removed from my earlier year problematic.
Are we assuming there'll still be a big group of people with non-eaten professions and money to buy stuff?
Or that all the world's wealth is concentrated with 3 guys, so I have to find a career that serves them?
If every job of IT-Security is obsolete (including exploit dev, reverse engineering, pentesting) I would prefer a job in drug discovery preferably as a bioinformatician. I can't believe AI is able to find cures against every kind of cancer (even if I wish).
Landlord, author, and a youtube channel (a hybrid of Colin Furze's mad tech and Primitive Technology's silently building and showing is something I'd want to watch and have not yet found).
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 153 ms ] threadhttps://www.goodreads.com/quotes/685736-modern-elevators-are...
Also, installers seem to make little money, whereas sales staff make shitloads. So there's probably something to that if you really thought about it.
Source; We're having solar installed. Without federal and state incentives/tax breaks, the break-even point on the max system our rural cooperative will let us put up is around 30 years, with incentives, it's around 5.
Lotsa folks attend yoga classes for the personal connection. Not just the spirituality or fitness. That personal connection can’t be replicated by AI so I think it’s a good choice if AI starts coming for my programming job.
Game development -- AI will eventually be guidable to write code, but it likely won't have "imagination" in the next decade (and I am not worried about my finances after that)
Beer making -- Similarly, AI likely won't understand taste for quite some time
Woodworking -- When everything is mass produced by automation, I suspect people will want unique, custom, hand-made things more.
Edit: Fix format, clarify statement on next decade :-)
1. Micro brew or craft brewing of some kind, Or at the very least an obsession with beer
2. Swing dancing
3. Frisbee golf
4. Cooking
As an engineer myself my hobbies don't intersect unfortunately:
1. Juggling and card manipulation
2. Sparta running training
3. Piano composition
4. Aviation
Might be wishful thinking, presumably you can give it taste reviews from people along with chemical makeup and can predict chemical mixtures that will rank highly on taste.
Funnily enough I’ve used AI in my woodworking to generate novel coffee table designs, write product descriptions for Etsy listings, and generate a logo.
I find GPT models to perform very well on this task. ChatGPT is the best right now but even small models like GPT J 6B are good.
It might be able to make realistic text, even storylines, but I don't think ML/AI will be able to make GOOD games without significant guidance, especially things that 'break the mold' (Portal, Black & White, the first "Sim" game, the first RTS game)
This is what happened to farming, the textile industry, manufacturing etc.
It’s not that anyone thinks that an AI would be able to develop a game or an app from scratch but how many people it would displace by automating things from code generation to UI design and art assets creation.
We still have farmers, however their farms tend to be much larger and there are far fewer farmhands than there were 50 years ago let alone 100 or 150 before the Industrial Revolution kicked into high gear.
Ironically the productivity of AI/ML is quite likely going to open the door for many people the tech part of the tech community was quite often dismissive off - as in “I’m a big picture type of person and I can instinctively know how good looks like but I lack the knowledge to make my dream a reality”.
Whilst plenty of people that think they are like that often fall quite far from that even those who don’t like the Jobs of the world tend to be quite divisive individuals that too many people tend to dismiss as charlatans that failed upwards.
Overall I don’t think that an apocalypse is coming down at least not yet, however I don’t actually mind the fact that there might be more opportunity for people who really want to focus on the problem rather than people who just seem to know what the solution is or should be and find a problem that fits it.
And if AI can get to a spot where it can actually help people iterate solutions in a rapid and cheap manner it can really change how a lot of industries operate.
Also ironically a lot of other far less glorious IT professions are probably safe, old school sysadmins and infrastructure folks seem to be able to demand far higher wages than ever before which is what happens when 9 out of 10 new people in “IT” these days know how to package a hello world app that has 4GB of Node.JS dependencies and write the helm charts and TF deployment code which probably has more lines than the original Windows NT kernel but can’t calculate a subnet mask or know what MAC address is…
No need for AI. T-test (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student%27s_t-test) was invented more than a century ago to improve beer quality.
If you can have the idea it can generate the output. You can probably prompt it to have ideas too.
A lot of excellent memory are associated with bakery. Late at night / super early. Bringing croissant to a new girl that spend the night. Tea with grandma…. You name it.
And joke aside, in France a village goes to another category when the last boulangerie close.
Their is bread in the US, you find good bakery. But the posh and exclusive aspect of it ruins it for me. I’m not driving 15min to buy a 4$ baguettes.
And yes. It’s a taxing job. You are out of synch with normal people. Right now baker are suffering greatly from increased energy prices. I hope we put them on full life support of cash if needed. That’s worth it.
Honestly the work is very similar. Much of what I do these days is conveying ideas to fuzzy intelligences, getting their feedback and suggestions, iterating, and making sure the final product is coherent, does what it says, and fits the longer term vision.
Turns out you can get a lot more done by keeping 5 people on track than you can by banging code on a keyboard.
Not that it really matter on the long run in the context of that question
When the internet empowered more people to do the lawyers’ grunt work, compensation became bimodal. There is more value in being on the high end, but less on doing the grunt work.
I think that’s gonna happen with other professions. Including ours (engineering). If you’re doing grunt work – be afraid. If you’re doing high level work – rejoice, it’s about to get easier.
You see this same effect in design for example. An art/design director’s job is about to get easier. The designer making the 5000th billboard for $Brand based on a style guide … could be tough.
We will see though :)
Even if AI wrote most of the code, who check for completeness and is on prod support ?
I’m not 100% convinced that legal grunt work translate to software grunt work ( I don’t know about real engineering)
It may, but 20 years in that industry make me think that a legal PDF compiling jurisprudence is easier to “maintain” than any sizeable system.
That being said : it the AI output perfect, flawless and 100% up services, you don’t need human to know how the sausage is made. ( until it broke )
Question for you : what is engineering grunt work ? I’m not sure where I stand at this point. Working in giant structure make you feel like a cog, but I’m far removed from my earlier year problematic.
We have a fancy new tool. Let's play!
AlphaFold already has you beat.
I have to assume we won't be letting them fly blind