If I lost my software engineering job tomorrow and was unable to find work within a few months, I have a repurposing plan ready to go. Yes it would be terrible for me economically and I'm sure there would be some sad days, but sometimes bad things happen and we have to make the best of them and move on.
At the same time I'd be applying to senior software engineering positions geared towards anything energy/nuclear and possibly datacenter tech/engineering positions as well, but I would be extremely picky. Since everyone is so obsessed with AI/productivity, the electrical grid is going to be more stressed than ever. I'd target positions with no H1B competition, cleared positions and whatnot - this isn't a crack on H1B, but I would imagine there is higher probability in getting interviews without them in the picture. BUT I'm at the whim of hiring managers and whiteboards at that point, which isn't ideal, hence the trades route mentioned first.
I love software so much and have spent the majority of my life doing it, spent all that time getting a CS Master degree and whatnot. It would be a sad day for me, but you do what you have to do. I have a family as well, so not as much mobility and time to burn as a person without.
I think this plan is specific to my situation, but I hope it helps getting a few ideas kicking around in your mind. It is definitely a stressful thing if you think about it too deeply, but I try to distance myself from that mental mode and focus more on what I would have to do if that time comes.
I.e. it created far, far more jobs than it destroyed.
After all, Gutenberg had only a modest goal of printing and selling indulgences. He didn't understand what the printing press was good for, either.
Pretty much all the jobs today did not exist before the printing press that enabled them.
It's apparently not obvious that mode access to books , learning, and literacy will improve lives
Get back to me when you need to execute that plan with millions of others joining the bread line.
Life is actually very good here and there is a lot of mobility if you have even a small amount of motivation. I feel like I'm preaching to the choir here though jacquesm - if I recall correctly (I'm not going to look at your comment history), I feel like I read once that you come from a family of first gen immigrants that experienced conditions similar to what I did when I was younger, and I would love to hear more about their/your perspective on being in a place like the USA and the opportunities it did/didn't bring.
For a while. It will be musical chairs without many chairs as a growing number of people retrain into a fixed or shrinking job pool.
Food continues to go downhill the more agritech progresses and the planets population grows. Proteins are replaced by carbs with savoury flavouring, fats are replaced by thickeners etc. Eating good food like a good cut of steak requires out bidding other people which requires income.
Any more room as part of the painting and chess class this time, or are we all maintenance again?
We see it in worker replacement, in vestigial organic structures that shrink over millinea, and in the tools and objects we keep with us in our lives.
The question, once achieving this grandiose goal, is how long, and by what mechanism, will we continue to enjoy the fruits of our labor?
Perhaps there will be a time when we may enjoy this world without the pressure of being a cog within it, but ultimately this time may be short if we are able to manifest it at all.
The unease comes from the power we lose when we cease to be the means of production, and instead become a vestigial organ on a beast much more complex than ourselves.
And that same class of people who own everything would rather kill everyone else and also destroy the planet than give up their position or allow any of the socioeconomic changes necessary to change the distribution of wealth.
I actually wonder if solving this problem - this feeling of powerlessness in the face of progress is an interesting problem to solve in our time. Plenty of people have figured this out. The Amish, people move to islands and other countries to not be part of modern progress.
"Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me. " Why not? I mean Keynes argued something like: if the Treasury filled old bottles with banknotes, buried them in disused coal mines, filled the mines with rubbish, and then left it to private enterprise to dig them up again, there would be no more unemployment and the real income of the community would probably become a good deal larger than it actually was."
But it really does feel sometimes like. Why do we feel this powerlessness to progress? Why can't we architect the world we want to have? I have really been wondering. Lots of religious groups want to revert some progress. Maybe these whole network cities folks have a point. Maybe we can have a city like pegged to the like technical and architectural standards of the victorian era.
Also - Horse shit doesn’t sound that bad. People stink in 2026 too.
But I do think, I dunno if inflection point is precisely the right concept, there will plenty of future developments I’ll be glad , but I think less and less of a percentage of our innovation is positive for general human happiness.
Big tech ceos even often talk about this sort of longtermist perspective where today’s human happiness doesnt matter, just progress toward an unknown future.
If this is what you think needs to happen and you live in the US, then you should be freaking out right now, not calmly posting takes like this. UBI is not a thing almost any current American politician is considering, and the overton window is speeding in the opposite direction.
You should not expect people to be reasonable about this. I don’t know what the answer here is, but if you want it to be UBI, you need to fight for it. The alternatives (artificial price controls, the dumb make-work policies you correctly disdained, first-amendment-breaking/privacy-violating AI bans) are out there, and if you don’t fight for the thing you want, you’re gonna get one of those.
Cost of UBI: 3,420,000,000,000
Where is $3.5 trillion going to come from?
As I remarked, the UBI math doesn't work.
Blood. If things don’t reverse course this trajectory historically leads to bloodshed.
In many respects it already has. How many people have died just this year already because businesses didn’t do what they were suppose to? Because cutting costs with no consequences is seen as the norm?
Of course nobody wants to account for those externalities and when that blood comes back on them they become scared and use government force instead. You’re seeing the trial run with ICE as we write our comments on this forum
That will change real quick if everyone loses their job to AI. But until then, yeah, it's not going to happen, and it shouldn't.
No, this is exactly my point: they will be angry, unreasonable, and thirsty for revenge. They’ll hand over freedoms like Halloween candy. How about a law where the government gets to survey your hard drive to make sure you’re not harboring an AI model? Sounds crazy, sounds insane, but in the current political climate I’d rate it more likely than UBI.
It’s going to sound naive and stupid, but I think it somehow works. There are millions of jobs here in Japan that exist for the sake of existing. Government knows, people know, workers know as well. But everyone understands that the flipside also sucks. Sure, we can say we should optimize and people need to re-learn and etc and etc. But that’s not the reality. At some point people just want to exist without worrying about 50 years down the road, or if they can feed their family tonight.
And as a gaijin living in Japan, I usually get extremely pissed off at the extreme inefficiency of Japanese companies, things that in any other country would take one month here take 5 years.
I agree with literally every point you made. Sure economy is stagnant, but I'd rather take stagnant economy than a collapsing one. I agree with a lot of things are slow, but also, most of things are just... not a big deal, at least for me? I lived in Canada, and have parts of my family living in NYC as well. For every slow government related slow things, you can find something that's also slow in the NA as well. I'm not going to mention Europe at this point, as from what I've witness from my European partner, you can find inefficiencies there as well. Again, pros and cons everywhere, just gotta pick and choose what matters to you.
The prime example for me was always driving at night in Japan and coming across some grandma waving a traffic light for construction. On the surface, it's ridiculous that she's even there - but then again she has a job and can pay her bills (presumably).
Shit might be annoyingly inefficient over there, but it does just work.
Time to downsize, "try," to stay in tech yet study to be a nurse.
My field and career of 20 years seems like a vanishing one.
But coming to this point, its absolutely unfathomable seeing the difference between these two types of things
On One hand we have cursor whose burning like 5-6 Million $ of money in trying to build a browser only for it to be riddled with bugs and literally just the money went into fire (read emsh's post and how he built better alternative)
I mean I guess I learnt something from them burning 5 million $ but I see a lot of Companies burn so much money.
My point is that all of these companies burn massive amounts of money in LLM's sometimes just for the sake of it and then some of these same companies go the other way and then fire people working.
I mean is there no way for a company to be reasonable. You worked there 8 years, You knew how things worked. Getting anyone new up and running would be hard especially given you had customer relations.
Tf they mean doing a great job but they have to lay you off? I mean, is the company doing really bad (I am considering something like tailwind happening here?) or what exactly.
But tailwind's situation was (unique?) because their business was eaten by AI itself. Not sure about your (former) company though but I hope that you can tell more specifics if possible.
The contracting company I worked for promotes on their LinkedIn their use of AI saying we created this prototype with AI in less then a day vs. years, months and days. In September they told us this is the way forward as all govt contractors are bidding for contracts with smaller teams using AI. Per that story they are telling they need to change to survive.
> The contracting company I worked for promotes on their LinkedIn their use of AI saying we created this prototype with AI in less then a day vs. years, months and days. In September they told us this is the way forward as all govt contractors are bidding for contracts with smaller teams using AI. Per that story they are telling they need to change to survive.
Thanks for providing more context, This feels much the govt. faults than the contractor but I feel like moves like these will come to bite the govt. sooner than later.
I feel like though contracting companies also might've overhyped. Like yea sure for basic things AI's fine but AI won't be fine for govt. projects & shouldn't be fine.
Govt.'s can spends an unknown amount of money on defense with literally no accountability with billions of $ literally not knowing where they went but they will try to price squeeze thigns here only to some years down the line have catastrophic event.
I mean LLM's still hallucinate and they can be poisoned. If govt.'s use LLM the aspect of poisioning becomes really important.
Chatgpt still pulls grokipedia whose primary source is X where bots can be created and spread and a certain narrative can be established.
I am pretty sure that if we see govt.s in any capacity have AI generated websites then the idea of poisoning the whole web to negatively impact the other nation becomes a good strategy for agressions between countries.
Although I may have gotten off topic but sorry to hear this that you were in such a weird and messy chopping block due to mistakes from the govts in general.
Wishing you the best in your future that things get better for ya :hug:
As you point out we've had plenty of examples in the past of jobs being displaced but (while I'm sure it always sucked to be one of the people displaced) those displacements were always relatively contained to certain industries within different time periods.
The nightmare-inducing aspect of AI-related job displacement is the possible combined breadth and speed of it, which we have absolutely never seen before.
Assuming the optimistic (from the perspective of the AI providers) AI predictions pan out the oncoming rush of AI job displacements are going to upended a lot of industries simultaneously, causing both increased uncertainty of what the (stable) other options are (the ground will be shifting everywhere, all at once) plus drastically increased competition for whatever other options do still exist when the music stops playing. I don't think it'll work out for us all to be nurses, plumbers, electricians and influencers.
> Supporting them in some way (re-training, UBI, service work, ...) seems like the only way forward.
I agree that these sorts of solutions are the rational way forward, but it just seems incredibly unlikely that this is how it is going to play out, at least in the US where we seem to be putting approximately zero political or corporate effort into planning for these possibilities. A violent class war seems far more likely of an outcome to me if we're being honest.
And what is? AI slop? There is no objective purpose to any of this, all of it is preference.
I prefer that people have a way to express themselves in a way that gives them subjective meaning, maybe a bullshit job is a good enough solution.
Management, warehouses, logistics, driving, retail/service industry, entertainment and advertising, programming/software engineering, even research and education. Potentially tens of millions of jobs in the US alone.
COMBINED with the seemingly zero discussion in mainstream politics about improving the welfare system of the country to prevent system-scale unemployment and poverty, while the profits from "efficiencies" go to the small group of already-wealthy shareholders and owners.
Everyone works 20 hours/week.
The 'problem' isn't what you think it is. The people in power are worried that lifting the boot off of the neck of the working class may result in loss of power for them.
They are right. Hence the stalemate.
That's what the TSA is in the US
If "Progress" means a massive immiserated underclass is necessary for it to proceed, then who is it for? The answer is obvious.
The people whose jobs were shipped overseas were physically stronger and less sheltered than you. If they couldn't stop it, your pencil arms and retreat into revolutionary cosplay fantasy certainly doesn't bode well for you. They weren't even fired because of an advance in technology, they were fired because we just dismantled workers rights and allowed every job to be shipped to China, Mexico, Indonesia, India, Bangladesh, the Philippines. And literally, now, the "opposition" is angrily protesting for free trade and for illegal workers with no rights; you all still don't get it.
Automation raises productivity, and creates wealth that we can choose to share, even though "we" don't. Not lowering labor standards and not allowing jobs to be shipped out to poverty stricken countries with low labor standards would have just taken compassion and not being completely self-centered for at least 5 minutes a day. Fighting when you had something to lose rather than waiting until you have nothing. I'm supposed to make up a fake job for you?
There won't even be Oxy for you to turn to. You'd better be happy with legal weed, even if you can barely afford it on your Taskrabbit income.
I stand by my point that there is no political will among the current elites for meaningful distributional policies.
For the record I am a staunch defender of worker rights in all industries and deeply despise neoliberal economics.
Geez man
But for all the talk about UBI in techbro circles, it seems to never actually translate to any meaningful political moves. Microsoft, Amazon etc are pretty happy to throw millions of dollars at politicians to ensure that they can keep building their data centers, but UBI just gets lip service.
AI and automation are rapidly erasing roles across both white and blue collar work. this is now a present present reality in almost all sectors. extrapolating this, it is clear this ongoing displacement will drive successive waves of unemployment and underemployment, placing severe strain on social contracts and accelerating societal instability. countries with strong social compacts may weather the coming storm. but others, especially those with larger population that lack "cultural ballast" >cough USA< will likely to slide into chaos, if not outright anarchy.
harder question to ponder is this: in a world where human labor is no longer the primary allocator of income and resources remain finite, sustaining nearly half of today’s global population under existing economic models begins to look fundamentally untenable. china’s one child policy starts to feel less irrational and more prescient.
beginning to think that perhaps I should be advising my kids to learn a trade on the side, as a backup plan, even as they chart their budding careers in the corporate world.
So what if my job is no longer a thing in several decades. That's the entire point.
There's infinite number of ways to make a living. My way isn't better than anyone else's.
People willing to adapt will always have opportunities awaiting them. The world is rich and fruitful.
Plus all the fun parts of computer science are still remaining to be pondered. The fun of computers is the high of the aha moment, not the coding lol
But what will happen when there is no job that can't be automated anymore ?
At the same time, what's the alternative? Progress happens. We no longer have liveries for holding horses nor horse shoe makers (not at the level we used to). We no longer have telephone operators.
Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me. Supporting them in some way (re-training, UBI, service work, ...) seems like the only way forward.
I guess maybe I can imagine making it harder to fire people so you have to find something to do with them. But that also has negative consequences. Small companies won't/can't hire because they can't make the guarantees big companies can.