How I keep up with AI progress

Indeed just get out of tech and make a new living! Tech jobs are declining and will continue then fall off a cliff with one doing the job ten use to. Followed by other white collar and blue collar (AMazons warehouse robots) jobs.

Happily canceled my GPT Plus this week; personally not gonna feed that beast any longer! As well it can not generate maps (create road trip travel maps showing distance between locations to share with friends, a creek tubing map route & etc) at all like Gemini can for free.

> Tech jobs are declining and will continue then fall off a cliff with one doing the job ten use to.

This would increase employment ceteris paribus. That's like saying inventing new programming languages is bad because they're too productive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

That's right, there are no carpenters or lumberjacks anymore because power tools were invented

>> one doing the job ten use to.

> This would increase employment ceteris paribus.

This might be true, but if it is, the one "doing the job ten use[d] to" would not actually being doing the same kind of work at all, and so therefore might not be the same people or even same kind of people. Even if we do Jevons ourselves out of this situation, it might still spell employment disaster for mid level coders, while increasing employment for product managers.

Obviously AI is different. While LLMs are more of a power tool now, the future trendline points towards something that (possibly) replaces us. That's the entire concern right? I mean everyone knows this.

Is this not obvious?

Why do people hide behind this ridiculous analogy: "That's right, there are no carpenters or lumberjacks anymore because power tools were invented"

???

I mean sure the analogy is catchy and makes surface level sense, but can your brain do some analysis outside the context of an analogy??? It makes no sense that all of AI can be completely characterized by an analogy that isn't even accurate yet people delusionally just regurgitate the analogy most fitting with the fantasy reality they prefer.

There are lots of careers that used to be widespread but are now extremely niche because of technological change. For example, most careers relating to horses.

sure. But why is digging one’s head in the sand a good strategy? To be clear i’m not advocating for trying to keep up all the time. You gotta live life too. But “ejecting” completely is dumb.

Are you saying that when the sewing machine was invented, it would be in the employees interest to not learn how to use it? Or when the computer was invented, it’s not in the employees interest to learn how to use it?

Even if you are a software engineer and are fired / laid off / pushed out of the industry because of AI, knowing how to use AI, its risks, etc is still helpful. It’s a skill you can hopefully use in your next career, whatever you pivot to. Unless you pivot to manual labor.

Thinking otherwise is shortsighted.

So say you are a startup are you going to now hire a designer or use WAY Less Expensive & quicker AI to design logos, website, an app, etc? Print design.. all types of design it can do.

So You and all other people like to save money are going to continue spend the same thousands on such a resource when AI can do what they do in a few minutes or more for WAY LESS? UX Design was supposedly a growing field ... not at anymore! Definitely one can do the same thing in that field that 10 did.

Further, future mobile AI devices will pull the information and put it all on the lock screen of your AI device visualizing the data in a fun new way. Technology that makes things simpler and more magical get adopted yet visits to websites will significantly decline.

For federal workers who have lost their jobs they are feeling this pain competing for jobs against each other and now AI. It will only get worse for designers because it's now cheaper and faster to use AI to design logos, sites, apps to even including do vibe coding for the front end development to possibly the backend but that's not my specialty yet no doubt I vibe coded front-ends.

Exactly hence why i said its probably wise to not pursue tech unless your an AI researcher PhD level already, striving for such in school studies and or leveling up your skills in AI.

Indeed that's the case, but it's sort of what software engineers signed up for anyway. I don't know if people are expecting to go their whole careers without learning a new stack / language. Maybe they are?

What would the "horse" equivalents be in this AI tech shift? Legit question - getting reasonable answers here might help us understand where we are going.

For sure it is not computers. Or software systems. We will for sure have way more of those. "Code" is more unclear, there will for sure be more of it - but for sure less human-hours per line of code. So the roles there will change quite a bit, though unclear exactly how. More focus on systems, business rules, specification, I suspect. Translations (between human languages) seems like a thing that is highly risky. It seems that it could go the way of the horse, automated translations being 99% of the volume eventually?

What exactly do you mean by replace? Replace in particular roles (causing the humans to shift into new roles), or replace as in nothing useful left for humans to do? Those are two very different trajectories.

So far in the industrial revolution we have been experiencing the first. Waves of automation that displaces workers in one role, and then new roles open up for humans (often involving the machines). I believe that for the foreseeable future human + AI tools (symbiosis) will be a much stronger than AI alone. Of course it will tend towards more and more AI per human over time. The same way modern manufacturing is "machine tending", where a few workers might supervise a factory that outputs what would have taken thousands of workers in the past. If the thing being produced is has unrealized demand, then we would expect that being able to do it more effectively would just mean more production, possibly to the extent that the same or even more humans are needed to produce it. So the real questions are - which things does humanity have a lot more demand for (2-1000x) - and can be made more effective with AI in the loop / on the team. And the flip side, which things are we near max demand for, and can also be made more effective with AI. Jobs in those areas are going to be decimated, move away as quickly as possible.