With the lastest news of AI layoffs, I’m struggling to understand how the idea of a career still holds. If careers themselves effectively become gambles like lottery tickets, how do we maintain drive and hopes in the longterm endgame of our struggles?
I know AI as an honest utility is itself a lie to some extent, but this only aids my argument further. People’s career struggles are panning out to be valueless because of a nothing-fad that no one could have predicted.
There are certain careers that can’t be replaced by AI - anything that requires working with your hands will not be replaced by AI unless robots suddenly get invented. But if robots exist, then there’s likely bigger things to worry about than your job.
I would look for non-routine jobs that require a lot of handiwork. Non-routine because it will be hard to replace with general, non-AI automation, and handiwork because AI is currently digital only.
Carpentry, plumbing, engineering, laboratory research, teaching all likely fall into the safe category
It turns out gen AI is good at training virtual robots, which can then be embodied in robots like this guy. There’s a $16,000 Chinese version of that robot that’s a bit smaller. There’s a robot dog that GPT4 trained to balance on a beach ball, and the NVIDIA pen twirling training. I guess what I’m saying is… robots exist.