I'm still trying to understand how actually replacing people with AI is supposed to work, because the quality of the outputs is still essentially trash. I do understand that in the short term capital prefers to swing its dick around to prove a point, and maybe that's all there is to it. However, I have a sneaking suspicion that AI hype is being used to cover for a very real economic slowdown that is actually driving the lack of job prospects and layoffs. Maybe capital is just hoping that AIs can do a good enough job to keep them floating until the recession is over.

If the answer is “become an LLM expert” I’m gonna scream

As a teacher, I'm keenly aware of the fact that my future is not guaranteed at all. Particularly because I'm a language teacher, which is a field that, at least in my country, is mostly driven by marketing. I'm sure that someone will figure out a way to make an AI English tutor sound like a great, cost-effective idea, and then I'm screwed. I give it about four or five years.

I know that because I used to do plenty of side gigs as a translator as well, and these have simply dried up in the past year and a half or so. Like, literally zero jobs since the dawn of ChatGPT and the like.

I'm glad I used most of that side hustle money to buy myself a whole workshop's worth of woodworking tools, and my way out will be to make high-end furniture. I still need a couple years to really get good at it, but I reckon it'll be longer until an AI chatbot can run a piece of wood through a jointer.

I'm just a few years older than you, and the thought of retraining is about as terrifying as going to war. I don't have the energy to do night classes anymore. Also the learn to code people need to self crit right now.

Learn to mine coal.

They're replaceing backbone net and database people with AI? Lol good luck when shit breals and there's no one to call.

Look for operations jobs. A CS background is invaluable because IT either is less existant or gets du bed down to push broken updates. Human-Device Interface stuff. Utilities. They arent going to AI risk 10s of thousands of lives on AI pushing physical and chemical stuff that effects an entire community. You can use that degree for far more than what you were doing. They will train you too. Might have to work some odd hours but recession proof AI resistant jobsare out there and operations communities are aging out and need replacements.

You could always go the "consultant" route too and charge exeutives their first born for a power point presentation where you create a new acronym every couple years and tell them to tie their shoes.

If it were possible to do so, the company would sell what all businesses of its kind dream about selling, creating that which all our efforts were tacitly supposed to achieve: the ultimate product – Nothing. And for this product they would command the ultimate price – Everything. This market strategy would then go on until one day, among the world-wide ruins of derelict factories and warehouses and office buildings, there stood only a single, shining, windowless structure with no entrance and no exit. Inside would be – will be – only a dense network of computers calculating profits.

I'm hedging my bets on the natural sciences being safe, at least until the current AI bubble pops. Field work is too hostile, dynamic, and chaotic for a chatbot to hallucinate. Drones probably need another 20 years to do the most menial task I do with the same attention to detail and ability to navigate complex environments like that, while the identification apps I use barely get the genus right. With your beepboop magic you'd have a special skillset in that realm. At no point in my plant science education have I ever had to take a single programming-adjacent class but all of the research involves models and computerised systems. Someone makes a lot more money than I do designing those.

lmao i just started my software engineering degree last week

Welp

there is a possibility it will work like dogshit (or you'll have to look for job in other places )

Damn I'm trying to get a masters in cybersecurity, starting to think I should just drop out.

I realized that all white collar jobs are in jeopardy when I worked on a PC refresh. All the cool scripting and imaging stuff that made me feel like a super duper smarty pants are things that can be easily replaced by AI or otherwise automated while all the low-brow grunt work like slapping a fucking asset tag sticker on an appropriate spot or removing the HDs of old PC for shredding is not so easily replaceable.

I strongly urge everyone with CS or coding background to begin studying and practicing IT tech support skills as a backup in case dev jobs don't pan out and you want to pick a job that's at least tangentially related to programming. The go-to cert for entry level IT tech support are CompTIA certs, namely A+, Network+, and Security+. You don't have to actually get the certs (A+ alone is $250+), but your knowledge and skill should be at a point where if you do decide to find an IT tech support job, you can confidently pay the cert tax and walk out with an A+ cert without wasting time and money on retests. And trust me, your tech knowledge and skill are nowhere near as good as you think they are, and being a power user^TM^ PC g*mer is completely inadequate for professional work.

At the end of the day, IT tech support is white collar work with blue collar characteristics, and the more your particular IT tech support field has those blue collar characteristics, the less it will be affected by AI. Printer guys won't have to worry about AI anytime soon (but they have to service those infernal machines known as printers). People who specialize on supporting CCTV equipment won't have to worry about AI either (but they'll have to service security cameras completely caked with bird shit).

I don't say this to undermine your point at all, but in my city at least craigslist used to be huge and is now not the go-to place for literally anything. for used junk for sale its all on facebook marketplace, apartments are a mix of housing specific sites and fb, cars are facebook and some craigslist still, job listings on there for anything besides odd jobs has been kind of a joke as long as I can remember. The big job listing sites are trash but everyone I know mostly either gets jobs through them (putting out a lot of applications) or through personal connections.

Which isnt to say the job market isnt fucked, I know a fresh grad struggling to find anything rn, but idk if CL should be your bellwether in 2024. I like it but other sites have kinda eaten its lunch it seems.

My bubble is relatively small but so far I've seen zero AI related job losses. Maybe its regional to some extent? Even here, I expect it will hit in the next year or two if the AI hype doesn't die down

crazy that this technology could be used to free humanity from wage slavery, but naturally, instead we've been put in a zero sum contest with the tech to drive down the cost of labor.

I hope you dont have to be homeless again, that really sucks, fuck capitalism!!!

I've hated every job I've ever had and idk what I'll do when you just go to a McDonald's-style kiosk to sell your car, probably go back to making sandwiches and wishing I was dead the entire time

I’m in a similar boat. I was laid off last year from my white collar job and my responsibilities were doled out between several people using ChatGPT. It took me six months to find a new job, and it pays leas than what I made five years ago for the same title. I believe my layoff would have happened regardless of LLM use, but now companies have another reason to not hire someone with my skill set (translation and writing) because the robots can do it “well enough” (total dogshit)

Already at my new job they’re talking about “integrating AI” into my work and it just feels like the noose is tightening again

Massive sympathies comrade, that really honestly sucks. Not doubting you, but are you able to offer any more details?

As someone who works for a sizeable, multinational tech company, I've thus far witnessed absolutely zero disruption from AI to any teams anywhere in our company or my physical locality. There have been a couple attempts to replace services with AI, but they've been so unreliable that they've achieved nothing. Thus far its only been a tool akin to Google, requiring knowledgeable humans to use it, that occasionally helps code things up or parse data.