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Co-workers at my current job ended up pivoting away from Software Engineering, particularly because they saw this coming from miles. They are aiming for Cyber-Security. I studied Software Engineering in undergrad, while i didnt pivot away from it because of AI specifically, i wouldnt be surprised if a lot of tech majors pivoted away from it because of the AI boom. With that being said, im of the opinion that the "AI will take our jobs" schtick is slightly overstated: Technology has always replaced jobs, thats how it always goes. New jobs will arise. People forget that most people were working in agriculture before the industrial revolution, all those farmers didnt just stop working, they found the newly produced jobs else ware in the economy (its actually part of the reason urbanization has increased so much!). I dont think we need to worry all that much until we have actual JARVIS/Cortana level computers running around with Terminator robotics.
I would argue that this time, it is different from the industrialization or the computer revolution.
The computer revolution was the first time the machines came for stuff which had previously required intelligence. In the niches where they were good, they totally crushed humans. Before electronics, computer was a human job. Today, I can waste more multiplications on playing a video game for an hour than humanity solved in total in 1900.
On the other hand, electronics also came with very sharp limitations. A human who might have worked as a computer in 1900 still had skills which the machines did not have, and could thus be running Excel in 1995.
This time around, it is much less clear that the median human will still have any intellectual comparative advantage over the machines. Heck, even the median MINT PhD might not find employment for their brain in 2035 any more than anyone found employment for their multiplication ability in 2000.
So your "new jobs" which will arise might well being the biodrones of an AI: wear AR goggles and simply follow instructions. Walk to the indicated rack. Unplug the indicated network cable. Plug it back in at the indicated port. Drink exactly 50ml to avoid failure from dehydration without requiring more than the minimum of bathroom breaks. An exciting day at work for the most qualified biodrones might be when they were used to replace the CPU in a machine.
I don't really disagree that this is how the arc of progress is turning, but it does seem a bit ridiculous to worry about what your job is going to be if AI attains intellectual supremacy over humans.
It seems to me that there's really only two possible paths forward; either AI remains jagged in capability like current LLM's and the standard economic arguments about technology hold, or we develop an AGI that represents a perfect labor substitute (it seems hard to believe that an intelligence-complete AGI could not develop sufficiently advanced robotics) and every economic and political assumption grounding society made under the assumption that humans are required for production starts collapsing.
Suppose for a minute that today's models will hit a wall of zero marginal returns tomorrow. This would not mean that AI agents would not still get better. After all, it seems unlikely that we have already figured out the best way an agent should split a problem into different subproblems, for example. Given that overhang, it is not obvious to me that the median office worker will still be able to earn a living using their brain in the equilibrium state.
Sure, in the long run, an AGI might prefer something more reliable than biodrones, but that might take a decade to build at scale. If you build robots, you have long, complex supply chains which will take time to fully automate and scale up (at least for an AGI which is only slightly smarter than humans are). By contrast, knowledge workers are easily replaced, once your LLM can do the job, you can spin up a zillion instances. Also, hitting the wall will mean that we will have tons of GPUs which can be bought for pennies on the dollar from the companies which were betting on FOOM.
Of course I could also be wrong and LLMs could always remain subpar compared to the median human in certain relevant intellectual skillsets. Or I could be wrong and we will get FOOM and be all turned into paperclips.
My impression is that if we don't get further step-changes in model capability, the long-term disruption to employment will be ~0%, just like the internet ended up disrupting every job and life significantly, but at the end of the day we still have a job market that looks remarkably similar.
As long as you need a human in the loop, and as long as having a more skilled human in the loop leads to better results (which is certainly true with current agentic tooling) then white collar work will be fine, even if their work looks very different to their previous job description.
It seems to me that at least in the short to medium term the white collar job model probably looks more like a pilot's job, where the computer is doing a majority of the work, but you still need humans in the loop to set the direction, intervene in and handle anything particularly out of distribution, and bear responsibility if anything goes wrong.
This seems like an oxymoron, if we do get knowledge worker drop-in replacements the bottleneck is going to be compute; the demand curve for AGI is going to be pretty much vertical.
Still, I don't disagree that in the short-term robotics will take longer to roll out than knowledge work replacements, I just really don't think white collar jobs being gone matters if we truly reach AGI; either one of the thousand doomer scenarios happens and everyone dies, or the unemployment rate ticks high enough and public outcry forces sufficient redistribution.
If AGI is is really in the cards, there's realistically nothing actionable to be done for 99.99% of the population apart from enjoying what time that's left and praying that it goes well.
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Maybe so; my post is explicitly agnostic to this. I am noting the toll of the social perception that is here today. Let’s assume it’s more than slightly overstated and straight FUD.
Still, right now articles in the MSM are openly pondering the possibility and whether there will massive economic fall out, “influencers” have viral doom posts, AI leaders go on popular podcasts and doom speculate, and then we see real world shake up’s at least being attributes to AI job displacement.
This is all happening today whether or not it’s based on hype, an my point is that this is going to affect decisions and cause aggregate mental and systemic stress in the immediate term, whether or not the tech pans out.
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Honestly I feel like security is gonna get nuked by ai before engineering. It's one thing to poke holes in something, and it's a completely different thing to build something new. You can have AI agents be a red team that never rests, and that constantly looks up new CVEs. The agents can look at all of the code being written, and flag potential flaws. And AI is already pretty good at reverse engineering and pen testing.
The thing with AI slop is that low quality code introduces debt that accumulates, and you eventually end up with something brittle and unworkable. Security has no such problems, you simply poke holes everywhere, and tell people what to do to avoid having holes.
It feels like basically the same dynamic as software engineering. It's a force multiplier for more senior staff who have good intuition about the problem space and can use agents as an army of extremely fast but error-prone interns. Cybersecurity is a very diverse field as well - the guy who sits at a desk watching a dashboard is probably screwed, while experienced vulnerability researchers are having fun being more productive than ever, plus with a whole new set of poorly secured targets in the form of vibe-coded projects.
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