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STEM is over, IMO; even more broadly, abstract thought will soon be economically valueless, including the humanities (which can have meaningful rigor to them!)
I would say that, to the extent labor income exists in the future, it's the physical aspect that matters. Prostitute, yes; OnlyFans star, no, you'll be competing with millions of AI bots who will outcompete you on every dimension.
Hoping I'll have enough to retire by the time that transition is complete.
Even in a theoretical AI distopia/ Star Trek tier utopia people still picked those grapes up, they made the wine. The starfleet cadets drew up new plans for new and exciting shuttlecraft, they had AI too. The human element will not go away unless we are all wiped out, driven by pure preference for the human connection alone.
The mechanical turk jobs will all disappear, but I shed no tears for those kinds of sweatshops.
Reasoning from fiction about the real world is a fallacy (imaginary map vs real territory?), and science fiction says more about the time it was created as the depicted future. Old scifi imagined any household chores done by robots, but they couldn't imagine that the washing machine freed women from being housewives and the coming waves of feminism. In 60s StarTrek they couldn't get female commanding officers as women in the test viewership hated the bossy actress, in 90s Star Trek there were no gay people (not to mention transgender), and Picard was bald. In a real future with Star Trek like tech everyone will have fantastic hair and some otherkin/wolfkin will use transporter tech to degenerate themselves to furry-hybrids. And the holodeck itself is a can of worms...
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Yeah, but Star Trek is fiction, and the things you mention are why I believe that the only way it passes for progressive was because of the time it was made. People in ST are shown to posses a fanatical devotion to preserving the traditional human way of life. It's all reactionary as hell.
Which, in my opinion, is the only way humanity could ever survive the age of artificial general intelligence.
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I think it will take a while, particularly for large bureaucratic entities with entrenched market positions. Even in software engineering, a rather ridiculous amount of time is spent on coordination problems, figuring out what customers want, compliance and legal, flip-flopping management... If that overhead was previously say, 50%, even if LLMs can cut the dev time to zero, the maximum speedup is still only 2x. It's effectively an organizational version of Amdahl's law.
Organizational frictions are real. A year ago, I'd guess I spent 60% of my time writing code, the rest spent doing organizational bullshit. Now it's something like 95% organizational bullshit, and 5% prompting and reviewing LLM-generated code.
This seems temporary to me, though. Once everyone finishes shifting to LLM coding, organizations (mega corps or startups) that minimize the organizational aspects will outcompete those that don't.
The organisational "bullshit" is what maintains a causal connection between what the end user wants and what your code does. The big idea of the Torvalds/Raymond side of the open source movement is that when hackers work for themselves or each other they can cut 90% of it out. That gets you Linux. Cutting 100% of it out gets you GNU Hurd, so be careful.
That's a bit optimistic about the organizational stuff in a large org. E.g. make a Gantt chart for reporting to higher ups; convert your team's tickets into a new particular spreadsheet structure; write a design proposal for a system that's already done so it can be used for promo. They aren't entirely valueless because they give organizational legibility into otherwise opaque processes for decision makers, but they're not the pleasant part of software engineering.
Agreed. I will correct my comment to "The minority of the organisational bullshit that isn't pure waste is what maintains a causal connection between what the end user wants and what your code does."
Good software management (actually good management anywhere) is partly about protecting your team from the bits of organisational bullshit that don't align them - or protecting the whole organisation by keeping them out altogether if you are the founder. And it is hard because throwing the baby out with the bathwater produces a misaligned organisation.
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Physical aspect or legal aspect, I figure. By legal aspect I mean that for a while to come laws will probably mandate that certain social positions must be filled by humans. No AI politicians yet, although many might soon become meat proxies of AI instead of being meat proxies of teams of human staffers.
Maybe there are other aspects as well.
In STEM, it's probably mostly over for pure programmers. There's still going to be room for being a person who understands what customers want, coordinates the various aspects of the business, tracks down humans with domain knowledge to pump their knowledge out of them, and prompts the AI. But AI will probably cut more and more into that too.
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