What HN commentariat doesn't realize is that many of them will be made redundant.
And "many new jobs are created" is such a bloated, empty statement in the wake of GPT4 like techs. We all know that all technological improvements in recent decades have led to more inequality. No questions about that.
LLMs, AI will lead more to that.
I do Computer Vision research for a company, and wanted to go to Academia (in US/UK/NA/EU). That's a too risky career choice now, and has always been. What if I am not as brilliant as I think and cannot meaningfully contribute to Science? (Or don't get tenure?) Wanted to do either ML + fundamental Science or Edge AI.
Thinking of going to med school. I am sure I can qualify. So thinking of preparing for that while keeping my industry job.
Another option is going into Administration, i.e. government jobs, by qualifying something called UPSC (I am in India).
I fully understand what's going on and I am under no denial that many jobs in many sectors will be made redundant and competition will skyrocket. Societal turmoil is inevitable.
I am just 23 and weighing in my options. My days are so emotional and full of dilemmas and trilemmas.
I keep myself sane by doing my job, side hustle, dogs, family, and friends. I will be depressed if I ponder too much into these.
You use your brains to solve interesting problems, at least sometimes.
And even if you are an IAS, after your district posting ends, you are just another government servant. Doing repeatative jobs, bound to an office.
Will I even like that life 20 years later?
And the income in UPSC jobs is too low. Lower than doctors or techies (I make close to an entry level IAS now).
Another point to consider is:
Once you learn programming, you are always a programmer.
Once you are a doctor, you are always a doctor.
But your status as IAS is solely tied to your job. You leave or you retire- you are a nobody again.
Honestly, I don't have enough information to decide. I am postponing making this decision as much as I can.
Thank you for your comment, anyway.
$1000/mo in 2016 purchasing power in a city like Dallas seems very unlikely to me, but I think that some meager version of UBI might happen in response to a humanitarian crisis.
I can also see guaranteed jobs rather than guaranteed income.
I am not saying it doesn't. But there is some factor n, that if the productivity increase is n times x in a short amount of time, the world will not evolve as rosily as you are thinking.
> It empowers self education, creative hacking and growth.
Again, I never said anything contrary. But making random new products for which there is no market by self education is not a bright prospect for much of humanity.
> Why are you making it sound like a disaster?
You are welcome to counter my points. I am just enumerating my view of the future.
> There's plenty of scope for AI to fill in without replacing humans.
Are you seeing the same pace of improvements I am seeing? One year ago there was no talk of any such thing, and now we have GPT4
AI might be very good for humanity as a whole over a millennium, but for individual human beings it is hard to say the same.
There are several important differences in the impact of GPT4 vs the PC, which is being quoted quite a lot as a response in this thread. People talk of other scenarios as well, but even the best case scenarios (UBI) mean the end of social mobility, which means far fewer humans will have the chance of being ambitious and climbing the social ladder. And this is not even mentioning the 2nd and 3rd order effects.