With the lastest news of AI layoffs, I’m struggling to understand how the idea of a career still holds. If careers themselves effectively become gambles like lottery tickets, how do we maintain drive and hopes in the longterm endgame of our struggles?
I know AI as an honest utility is itself a lie to some extent, but this only aids my argument further. People’s career struggles are panning out to be valueless because of a nothing-fad that no one could have predicted.
I think in the next time it’s mostly the unskilled and office jobs. I think we still have a shortage of skilled IT professionals and people who can do more than webdevelopment and write simple python scripts. And we also have a shortage of teachers, kindergarden teachers, people who care for the elderly, doctors, psychologists. And despite AI creeping into all the fields, I still see a career there for quite some time to come. Also I don’t see an AI plumber anytime soon coming around and fixing your toilet. So I’d say handyman is a pretty safe bet.
But I’d say all the people making career decisions right now better factor that in. Joining a call center is probably not a sustainable decision any more. And some simple office or management jobs will become redundant soon. I just think big tech laying off IT professionals is more an artificially inflated bubble bursting, than AI being now able to code complex programs or do the job of an engineer.
It’s not really a gamble. We know what AI can do. And there are lists with predictions which jobs can be automated. We can base our decisions on that and I’ve seen articles in the newspapers 10 years ago. They’re not 100% accurate but a rough guide… For example we still have a shortage of train operators. And 10 years ago people said driving trains on rails is easy to automate and we shouldn’t strive for that career anymore.
It’ll likely get there. But by that time society will have changed substantially. We can watch Star Trek if we’re talking about a post-scarcity future and all the hard work is done for us. We’d need universal income for that. Or we end up in a dystopia. But I think that’s to uncertain to base decisions on.