If you are white collar then it's going to "disrupt" your field.

I work in tech. I got laid off last year. I wasn't at Alphabet or Amazon or anything. Much smaller company. But AI "optimization" has ravaged the tech industry and not just programmers. Admins, database specialists, network specialists, developers, you name it. Our job market is absolutely fucked.

In my county, a major metro area in the US (like, top 10) craigslist used to be the place to get real job postings. If it wasn't a recruiter then your odds of getting a callback from a job posting there is pretty high. There are plenty of postings for other fields like mechanics and tradesmen and so on. For the few tech categories: nothing in the last month. Zero postings. Not even recruiter ads. Literally nothing. It's a wasteland.

I've been told to "go back to school." I'll be 41 soon. I'm still paying off my computer science degree. It's worthless. What else should I go for? Accounting? HR? These are going to be taken by AI, too. Will it be a mistake? Sure. They don't care. They'll do it anyways.

When I got my degree my wife and I were homeless. We just got back out of the hole in the last 10 years. I was finally building savings. It'll be gone in 60 days. She was laid off on Friday. Her industry is in property finance. Another gutted industry. She has to change industries, too.

What is to be done?

    • Chronicon [they/them]
      ·
      7 months ago

      this is what I see my coworkers leaning towards. Thus far I've basically not touched one. I think I'd sooner become a bus driver, or a hermit in the woods.

        • fuckiforgotmypasswor [comrade/them,any]
          ·
          7 months ago

          its too bad the rest of his manifesto beyond the first line is borderline incomprehensible, ideologically.

          that first line though. shit goes hard.

          edit: just realized the first line of a manifesto is probably the only one people will remember. "a specter is haunting Europe..." and "the industrial revolution and its consequences..." are probably too of the most memorable lines of any political text i can remember.

    • RyanGosling [none/use name]
      ·
      7 months ago

      You don’t become an LLM expert. You convince people you’re an LLM expert and have them throw money at you