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?

  • EelBolshevikism [none/use name]
    ·
    edit-2
    27 days ago

    how the fuck would AI do philosophy or interpretive science without a human perspective

    Also I don’t think manual labor is at risk in the foreseeable future at all, the automation of it requires infrastructure which capitalists seem notoriously averse to building. There would have to be actual public funding for robot tracks and mounting points and shit

    I guess they could make a bunch of cars with robots mounted to them but I think that creates a recursive demand for mechanical labor due to the ever so slightly flawed nature of AI outputs

    • LaughingLion [any, any]
      hexagon
      ·
      26 days ago

      You think the average person is going to notice or care that philosophy is being done by AI? Listen to assholes like Jordan Peterson talk about nihilism or post modernism. Dude claims to be educated in this stuff and has no fucking idea what he's talking about and people eat it up.

      • EelBolshevikism [none/use name]
        ·
        26 days ago

        Oh yeah. I just am making a distinction between having the appearance of doing something and actually doing it.