Have any of these articles actually addressed HOW software developers are supposed to retrain for good jobs? Personally I have neither the money nor the years to go back to college to get a livable job.
I know some people whose work was already almost completely eliminated by AI (language translation) and they're not doing great. Reality is there's no-one out there looking out for you except yourself and very close family/friends.
Oh yes, when LLMs fail at translating they don't make a visible error. They fill up with inferred meaning. Translators can only be replaced by LLMs if there's no consequence attached to the meaning of what's being translated.
It could. But I'm not confident there will be a broad recognition of the fact if things become much worse than they are, or of the cause, or that there will be a desire to make things be better. There has been a long decline in quality in favor of optimizing for monetization and engagement, predating LLMs. But I do think there will be some pullback in things that actually matter if not in the SaaS FOTM.
kinda. there'd still be a lot less demand for software devs than there used to be, a lot of people would still be jobless/would have to pivot to some other career.
So obviously each college is different. And your experience is not mine.
But my college did not train me to get a job the first time. Indeed they explicitly explained to us that that was not their goal. That was helpful because up to then we did think they were doing job training.
What they actually set out to do was make us "smarter" people. In the sense that they taught us to analyze problems, work in teams, find creative solutions. They taught us about research and critical thinking, and logic and so on. How to hypothesize, test, evaluate, adapt.
You don't need to go back to college to learn all that again. You already know it. Skills are easily, and quickly taught and learned. That's the easy part. The hard part is approaching a job as a problem to solve- how and where to add value. Value people will pay for.
Look around you. See unmet needs. Figure out what you need to do to meet those needs. That's the real challenge we face going into this next era.
I don't know where you are, but when I hire mechanical engineers, I hire them from universities with accredited engineering programs. It's actually a legal requirement for the job in my jurisdiction. And if those engineers decide they want to become daycare teachers or knee surgeons, they do have to go back to university and re-train, even though they already learned how to think the first time.
You're right. There are several occupations which have legal entry requirements. You can't be a doctor without getting a medical degree.
However the number of professions that require a formal degree is very small. (And notably, programming is not one of them.) If you take any large group of random people and asked them, you'd find close to all are not required to have a formal certification.
Generally yes, people with (any) degree are more hirable to (any) job. The skills getting a degree are generally useful, and make a candidate more employable. But if you already have one, you already have that.
Is that true for healthcare careers that don't have abysmal quality of life? All of the nurses I've known are working 60 hour weeks, night shifts, etc.
If you're unemployed, you won't need to pay 2 grand/month for someone else to watch your children, and you don't have to pay San Francisco rents if you're not working there.
I suppose you've got a point; if the middle class of Americans constantly have their careers destroyed, eventually we'll return to a third world sort of existence where childcare is provided by extended relatives.
However, most people in America can't rely on grandparents for childcare. One reason is we have children much older than people in the third world do - if two generations have children at age 38, it's not very reasonable to be expecting a 76 year old to provide child care.
And I suspect disaster to have correlated chances of killing parents or grandparents or children. i.e. if you've become a parent there's a good chance your parents did too.
Our own lived experiences are likely outliers, since developed countries have different outcomes than the past.
I don't think "just give up your existing community and move" is a viable option. That defeats the whole point since at that point the retraining isn't allowing you to maintain your quality of life.
I'm assuming you're talking about people born in SF? Because the rest have already demonstrated a willingness to give up their community once in the pursuit of quality of life.
Equally, if you are in SF you're about to feel the pain you've caused to the locals by moving there. Somewhat harshly, I could suggest that you didn't care about their existing community when you priced them out of their neighborhoods.
So here's the rub. SF is somewhat different. It is a company town. If you don't work for the company you're moving. Sorry. There's certainly nothing else that can pay you the same money.
On the up side, there are lots send lots of cheaper places to live. And chances are you can find a good job there doing something that adds value to that community.
It is a viable option. "Quality of life" is a luxury and programmers no longer belong to the class that can afford it. Do what everyone else does and go wherever the jobs are and live at whatever quality the market decides that you deserve.
I think you are missing the point of the discussion. The idea behind "just retrain" rhetoric is effectively "new technology won't destroy people's quality of life because they can just retrain!". If quality of life isn't maintained, then there is no reason to retrain at all, people can just get a minimum wage job and live in poverty.
The rhetoric was a lie. Capitalists lie. That new technology always creates a surplus of newer, better jobs and quality of life always improves for everyone was a lie. That you can "just retrain" and everything will remain the same was a lie.
Even if you "retrain" your quality of life will go down because the market value of your life will go down as automation and AI improve, unless you're a member of the capitalist class. Which, if you need to work for a living at all, you aren't. No matter what you do unless you're personally wealthy your quality of life will go down. That's just what an efficient market does to most people, and AI is going to make the market brutally efficient.
I wonder how many sectors this will have to happen to until workers realize that nobody's safe. I was shocked to see journalists at major firms peddling the 'just learn to code' line a few years back, given how much their industry had contracted in the decades before.
Quality of life during the Industrial Revolution dropped considerably for most of the working population, but afterwards saw big improvements. You seem to be implying that life now is worse than before the IR. Are you? If not, in what way was the loss of jobs to mechanisation then more acceptable than it is now?
The overall quality of life improved through and thanks to IR. But the quality of life of the people most affected, and their children, and their children's children - did not do so well.
Technological progress automating away jobs lifts humanity as a whole, but it absolutely fucks over the people whose jobs got automated away, and the families of those people, and the communities they live in.
San Francisco is where the jobs are, and dropping your entire social network on the floor at exactly the moment you need it the most to help you is not good advice.
Former tech workers can ask for advice from non-tech people who previously had to leave because they could no longer afford rising costs that happened due to influx of well paid IT jobs.
No, it isn't. This is an incredibly modern phenomenon. We see examples of peoples moving en masse throughout history, yes, but the idea that everyday individuals should expect to leave their community is an incredibly recent one. Such would have seemed monstrous to people even a few hundred years ago. Fun fact: Socrates wasn't actually sentenced to death, he was sentenced to death or exile, and chose death over having to leave his home behind.
The entire colonization of the planet by humans from 250,000BC to today would argue otherwise
We’re physically built to be mobile - the extent you can take your community with you has always been relevant
I’m sitting in Virginia USA with 50% of my neighbors being migrant families of 5+ people usually across three generations
I’m not sure what data you’re working with. In fact there a whole lot of ignorant politicians that want to stop migration precisely because of how valuable of a tool it is.
Some humans moved their families from somewhere that they weren't safe, to somewhere that they could be safe, with the intention of settling there and building a living space their great-grandkids could be proud of.
Some humans lived nomadically, moving all the time, as a way of life.
Being forced to do the second because nowhere is stable enough to do the first is what we're talking about.
Migrating is one thing, having to migrate another.
no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here
Only $2.5K rent? That's like free these days. For what though. I rented a 4K sq ft house in Charlotte three years ago and now paying $3.5K for not a modern 2bdr in Miami proper.
The Charlotte house was (2022ish) $2.3K/month through a PE that bought out a lot of single-home houses to rent out. 2 story, 4bdr, 3 baths, a yard and a lawn, a huge deck. The area was very nice and so were the neighbors. My dog loved the deer.
It wasn't urban enough for me, for someone working remote at the time, and few growth opportunities for my wife, but I regret moving to FL. Miami has become the least affordable city in the US relative to income.
I keep telling my 22y who graduated from a university last year to go to a trade school (HVAC/ electric, plumbing). Too late for me as these require apprenticeships in the US.
My HVAC contact in FL needs a $100 just to sniff the AC/boiler closet. That is, if I can get him to show up. I don't even know if he's licensed here, but he's definitely very experienced.
Because that's how they are built in the US. I didn't need the extra space, but for the money, there wasn't much choice, really. I would have loved to rent a house half smaller at half price, but none were on the market. I barely went upstairs. My dog occupied it, at least.
I could have rented a townhouse for $300-400 less, but then there are different constraints. Small or no yard, tiny kitchens, no garage etc.
I was perfectly content with a 2200 sq ft ranch in Henderson Nevada.
That's just sad. I knew that real estate was a pain in most countries around the world, but I never realized that choice in the land of freedom was that constrained. I guess in most places it's basically: "Detached House, Large".
This works if you're interested in running a business, but what well paying work doesn't require a degree or some kind of formal training certification?
First you assume that being "interested" in the work is a requirement. I'm guessing 90% of people are doing work that doesn't interest them. But assuming that it's a requirement for you the question becomes, what are you interested in?
Second you want well-paying work. I understand. Programmers got well paid. They lived above the standard of most. It's not surprising you'd want to keep that. But "well paying" is a spectrum. It depends on your life-style, location, eating habits and so on.
And finally, lots and lots of jobs don't require a formal certification. Or one that isn't trivial to get. Ask the people you see everyday (including the software programmers, hardware designers, receptionists, assistants, book keepers, marketing and advertising people, sales, support, your vehicle mechanic and so on.) I suspect if you asked every dingle person you met in a day the ones that actually had this requirement would be a rounding error.
I know what you’re trying to say, but strictly speaking there are many examples of “hard-science” people moving towards and excelling in softer fields, while the opposite is almost never true.
There was a saying where I went to high school: “the language programme students are not better at languages, they’re just worse at math”.
The language students were however better at writing and communications in general. They ended up in sales, marketing, advertising and everywhere else.(all under threat from AI as well.)
But to further the GP question there are lots of examples of people not working in their degree in both directions. The entire computer industry was built by people without a Computer Science degree. Today huge numbers of programmers have no degree at all.
To refer back to the original post about the farrier turned mechanic. Most comments seem to miss the point. Change is coming. You can lean into the change and prosper. Or fight the change and vanish. Those with enough vision, creativity, adaptability will continue to thrive.
The same way clerical and manufacturing workers retrained when their jobs were replaced by computers/the Internet and robots. That is to say, most won’t.
People in tech change roles and careers all the time. The vast majority of role or career changes do not involve going back to college.
I would even recommend against going back to college unless someone has an extremely compelling case for a career change that requires it and the conviction to see it through.
I'm hesitant to give examples because I know every example I give will be met with objections from "But I don't want to do that job" or "What if that gets replaced by AI too?". Look around you and you can should be able to identify some adjacent roles where you at least have an understanding of what the works like and you could learn the rest by taking on gradually more responsibility.
There are a lot of jobs out there that aren't exciting, don't pay SWE level salaries, but nevertheless pay enough to support a family as evidenced by all of the people doing those jobs who support their families. Not every company or industry is interested in squeezing maximum efficiency out of their employees. I have friends in highly bureaucratic roles who care about their jobs and do it well, but their work is amazing simple and easy. It requires nothing more than being a responsible adult who can show up to the office and get things done. These jobs are everywhere and I don't think they're going to disappear.
I don't think SWE is going to disappear either, but it will look a lot different in years to come. If you can't or won't adapt to the new normal, one of those boring alternative careers might be worth pursuing.
>The vast majority of role or career changes do not involve going back to college.
That was possible pre-2022 during the famous developer labor shortage. In the current market, companies expect seniority/experience in that specific stack they use for that, no more career changers.
They either take you as a senior/expert to contribute from day one, or as a young and cheap newgrad/junior out of uni they expect to train on the job, but no more in-betweeners switching careers as they're not as experienced as the seniors on the market, nor are they as cheap and malleable as newgrads/juniors.
Sure, in theory every developer can learn at home to do anything new related, but in the current job market, companies expect X-years of proven on the job experience with their stack, no more bootcampers, and no more self-taught-at-home types. The entry bar has risen significantly. At least where I live.
Like I just saw on linkeidn a job posting from a large bank that was an hour old and it already had 100 applications, which probably means most applications are now AI botted, meaning yours will get lost in the noise and getting a call back for an actual interview is like rolling a dice.
Not saying it's impossible to change(I did a couple of times), just that's it's much more difficult than in the good times, and will most likely also come with a paycut.
To make matters even worse, if you do apply to these jobs the only thing you get back in return is your data being sold to even scummier organizations. I always use single-purpose emails for everything, so I know where things source from. Imagine my shock when a week or two after applying for jobs I started getting a steady stream of Super Intelligence emails offering to spruce up my resume, or to source leads for me, or some other sketchy service.
Everything is commercialized now. Even the discard pile of resumes can be sold for pennies. A job application isn't a job application anymore: it's a desperation signal alerting predators to come extract some value.
I guess where I'm coming from is that I currently am trying to change careers. Everything I'm finding is either a 50% pay cut or is simply unwilling to consider anyone without 5-10 years of experience in that particular industry. Since I've already built a life here I can't really just move and a 50% pay cut isn't enough to live anywhere near a comfortable life; particularly since I have medical expenses that aren't covered by insurance.
> I have friends in highly bureaucratic roles who care about their jobs and do it well, but their work is amazing simple and easy. It requires nothing more than being a responsible adult who can show up to the office and get things done. These jobs are everywhere and I don't think they're going to disappear.
I think these jobs are actually the most likely to be replaced by AI. They have resisted automation to date because there's too much fuzz in the inputs/outputs to make it feasible to computerize. LLMs solve exactly that problem.
Except for the part where they have absolutely no idea what the world is or how it works. They are good at software and math because of RLVR, but they can’t run a business.
>They are good at software and math because of RLVR
Software and Math are not the only things LLMs are fast improving on.
Astra is one of the biggest examples of this being untrue. The model is cracked at computer use and vision/spatial tasks and reasoning. Driving, Operating Robots, Video Editing, 3D modelling, graphics are all things Astra was >>> at than any other model.
>but they can’t run a business.
And it's the leader on VendingBench. Also most people cannot run a business.
Kinda true (they have a mediocre idea of how the world works), but it's surprising how close they are given their general limitations and what it took to get disruptively good at software and maths.
Like, sure, using an LLM as a CEO today will bankrupt you and some of the decisions leading to that are daft, but even despite that it's in the same "huh, interesting" kind of zone that early LLMs like InstructGPT and the first release of ChatGPT were with code. It could write short functions or small scripts for you, even then… but any attempt to go beyond that would fall over quite fast.
Astra told me I can walk to the car wash to wash my car.
Again, the improvement in coding is due to RLVR, and it does not generalize to other domains. So it is meaningless to point to examples of that improvement.
There are many ordinary behaviors and skills that are not feasible to RL at scale. The sampling efficiency is just way to low.
> Astra told me I can walk to the car wash to wash my car.
Yes, like I said, a mediocre idea of how the world works.
> Again, the improvement in coding is due to RLVR, and it does not generalize to other domains. So it is meaningless to point to examples of that improvement.
I can point at actual benchmarks for performance on business tasks. On the one hand, those lines go up; on the other, I just don't know how good those benchmarks are.
> There are many ordinary behaviors and skills that are not feasible to RL at scale. The sampling efficiency is just way to low.
Yes. A point I make myself on occasion. One of two perfectly valid ways to describe intelligence, and one by which all current machine learning really sucks.
Like, if it was fully general, the trillion or so miles that Tesla cars have driven would have obsoleted the steering wheel long ago, rather than the closest we have being (yet another) pronouncement from Musk that this new car he's not actually made available for sale won't need one.
Business self-play training could be anywhere from code to cars. I was expecting much faster progress with the cars, and much slower progress with code, so I don't know how to adjust my expectations with any other domain, including business.
It’s much harder than both code and cars because there is both more variety to the work and much work where the reward function takes months or years to resolve objectively.
Actually that's not generally true. Janitors at least work 12 months a year, many schoolteachers are paid ~9 despite being expected to work through them (on lesson prep &c).
It's possible to make low 6 figures, but a lot of pay is dependent upon length of time teaching and/or which district to get into. Good districts rarely have openings.
I'd say (not a teacher myself, but related to several) teaching is a lot more difficult than people give it credit for.
Just like everyone else. I have a feeling your definition of “livable” is not in line with the reality that most people face. You share more in common with a stay-at-home mom going back to school to become a phlebotomist than you think. It’s just pride gets in the way
Not enough buffer to take 3-5 years to rebuild a career is not the same as no buffer at all. Personally I have about a year of buffer which is no where near enough to meaningfully retrain.
Why are you assuming every white collar worker has got an inflated salary, or that they’ve had it for a while?
And actually no, I can’t afford to be unemployed for a year. On COVIDs cost of living it would have been easy. But the current cost of living I’m not able to save even with my “inflated” salary. And the savings I do have isn’t going to stretch as far.
I honestly don’t know how people save on lower incomes. I suspect they don’t. Which is why the debt crisis keeps worsening.
I’m lucky enough to have assets but once they’re sold they’re gone. And most people don’t even have that luxury.
Even if you've saved enough for 1 to 3 years of university, there's a risk that you won't get a job especially if you're getting towards 40+.
Drawing down savings is a very high risk move, since you could easily never recover those savings because you may struggle to get a job that has a better ability to save as much.
I don't get it. Didn't you live way below your means so you can save up money for retirement? I've got enough money saved to get away with being jobless for about a decade.
Not everyone's had the luxury of saving for years and years. Some people just got into the industry (remember 'learn to code'? not to mention recent graduates), others had to work their way up through lower-wage roles (e.g. contracting) just to get to a place from where they could hope to save. Other people have family to take care of and can't just throw everything into their savings.
Even back when I had to make do with $400 a month I was saving. Live out of a van to save on rent if you have to. There's always a way to live below your means and save.
Of course there are exceptions, but I don't expect those to apply to anyone commenting here.
A bizarre perspective - you seem hung up on the virtue of saving but totally disconnected from the material implications - even if you saved 50% of your income for a year at that time, you’ve finished with $2400 in the bank - how long is that going to float you? About a week in my case.
It’s plainly true that for a significant number of people, even those who satisfy your moral sensibilities around money, they won’t have had sufficient time at sufficient incomes to have enough saved for a significant period of unemployment to retrain.
If you burn through $2400 in a week, there are lots of opportunities to make changes in your life to make do with less. I'm currently living off $240 a week and that includes going to a fancy restaurant, so I could cut that number down even more if I had to.
You have no idea what my circumstances or expenses are, and in fact they’re irrelevant. You seem still to have a strange inability to see beyond your own circumstances.
You told me your expenses are $2400 a week. I told you that it is easy to get this number down since it's unlikely that you have to pay $2400 a week in life extending medications.
Live out of a van with children? Is that what you're suggesting people do? That's monstrous. You would rather put the weight of the world on a poor family's head than one iota of responsibility on the ruling class.
If the stock market drops 80% and stays there for longer than a year it's Great Depression 2.0. Retraining won't do jack shit. There'll be breadlines, governments paying people to dig ditches and build trails in national parks.
Lately I've been just thinking of hitting ALT+F4 on life for good, as a big FU to the megacorps (not that they would care, but it would give me the satisfaction at least)
There’s so much more you can do to get back at megacorps that will hurt them more than that. 1 less person in the world to oppose them is a win for them.
I’ve never met you but based on your last 10 HN comments I think the world would be worse off without you in it.
If you jump from a bridge, all it does, is that relatives of yours will receive the bill for cleaning up the blood and remains (on top of funeral etc).
I think of doing this except for suicide (which you shouldn't do) I fantasize about becoming a monk. That's a life role that can't be replaced with AI, provides meaning to yourself and to the community and guarantees you a certain amount of happiness – probably more than most jobs.
Monasteries are wary about people inquiring because they can't hack it in the world. And because monasteries are businesses of a sort, they are concerned with what a middle-aged inquirer can bring to the table financially.
That's a very broad statement; the reality depends on the specific order and monastery in question. To be sure monasteries are wary about all who inquire, thus the usual two-year neophyte period. Beyond that some will expect more from novices, other less, but there are many stories of broken people retreating to monastic life even today. Indeed many (within the Church) expound that as a key role of monasteries, providing a place for people to escape from the world. If you just want to live a Godly life, you can do that in society; monasteries are precisely the place you go to do so outside of it.
A pithy saying in both the Catholic and Orthodox traditions is that people shouldn't consider monasticism if they want to run away from the world, but rather only if they want to run towards Christ. A significant part of the discernment process is weeding out the former.
Not really sure what I should be doing on the side since AI seems to be automating a lot of work that I do as an analytics engineer. Maybe in 10 years all I'm doing is feeding in markdowns and project specs to an LLM and reading test outputs. At what point are you just a technician?
The bright side is that analytics engineer is a relatively modern job title, previously it was largely bundled in with data engineer, and before that, data scientist. So you're either already relatively early in your professional career or have adapted between programming disciplines once already.
I also (personally! I'm in data engineering for my part) feel it's one of the safer roles from an AI perspective. Yes, you'll be writing a lot less code in the future, but that's never been the particularly difficult part of your job: SQL is dead easy to use.
The difficult part is picking up all the business context and knowledge in order to work out the best ways of representing complicated and messy data for the business. AI can help to some degrees there, but if you're great at your job, your judgement is going to be built on so much business context that both can't be written down and would be too vast to feed into the model.
Sure, AI can do some of the job, but you'll always thrash it in terms of quality (whilst getting to spend less time doing the busywork of just writing your thousandth predicate of the day!). And worst comes to worst, all the business knowledge you have in your head makes moving into analytics a far more viable lateral move.
And that one is definitely AI proof. If all companies use AI for their analytics, they're going to be moving largely in lockstep with each other. Humans might be far worse, but often far better, so I'd be willing to bet that through sheer randomness that over time companies using human analytics will outperform those relying on AI.
well, I suppose the same way that other people whose jobs were lost due to automation over the years were supposed to retrain for good jobs? I doubt they had the money or years to go back to college to get a livable job either.
In the past there was always demand for "unskilled" (manual) labor where displaced workers could land to without long (re)training, and possibly even gain skills on the job. But that job marked has dramatically diminished especially in the west; there are only so many burgers to be flipped. Somewhat famously during industrial revolution displaced agricultural workers (e.g. farmhands) ended up mass-migrating to cities doing factory work under extremely exploitative conditions. And that never truly got resolved, we just brushed the issue under the rug by pushing manual labor to third world countries where the problems could remain out of sight.
Because I've been looking for a new job for several months and all of them either require significant retraining or don't pay nearly enough to maintain even a similar quality of life. I don't just mean they don't pay enough for luxury. I mean they don't pay enough to live in my community without a roommate.
You retrain the same way that we told workers when we decimated the garment and manufacturing industries. You'll get the same amount of government support too.
It used to be you could just buy (for example) jeans made in America for $20. I bought such a pair back in the late 1990s. There was no need to be busy trying to "support the traditional garment industry".
Nowadays you'll be spending $40 (same price after adjusting for inflation) for something definitely not made in America, and probably of inferior quality too. Since the domestic garment industry has shrunk so much, the supply chains an economies of scale don't exist anymore to buy domestically-made garments of decent quality at those prices.
In my experience, AI has given far more leverage to software engineers than anyone else, because they have a feel for what computers can do, what's easy, what's hard, what's performant, or poorly specified, etc. Therefore I think retraining is mostly about being willing to experiment with AI-assisted workflows and not being too tied to old ways of doing things. As long as you are focused on the problems you are solving, I think you'll do okay.
What I'm more concerned about are the younger generation where all the learning tasks have been automated. I have faith that the strong, naturally curious engineering types will still learn to do great engineering, and honestly without some of the mental blocks and calcified assumptions that us greybeards have. But how do they get in the foot in the door and the reps needed to develop senior-level judgment is another question.
In some sense we need the current mania to die down and the long-term maintenance implications of heavy AI assistance to become more apparent. Basically I think we need the AI bubble to pop and then 1-2 years for things to stabilize, and then we'll recalibrate on hiring expectations and best practices for AI usage. The current AI maximalist and doomer views I think are both basically driven by capitalist incentives and wishful thinking from investors and a reality check is going to come in some form (whether technically, socially or politically).
Many of us on this site have worked directly on projects where the efficiency gains ultimately reduced or eliminated positions. If you want to exit the development field, I think the answer is probably the same as for the people whose jobs we helped eliminate.
The internet has made it easier than ever to learn new skills. You don't need college unless you're targeting a career that requires, or expects, a degree.
Maybe there will be an inversion. Lots of white collar office jobs can be partially automated, or have their efficiency greatly increased by AI. But we still don't seem to be near widely deployed robots that finish drywall
There may be an inversion as white collar jobs sink, but not because drywalling is going to get better. All of my family work in trades and it's a lot harder and less stable than we office workers like fantasize, as much as I love the ending of Office Space too. It's cyclical and sometimes there's not enough work. Cost of materials is volatile and can eat into your income. And it's skilled. Programmers tend to think everything else is easy and if you can teach yourself React then electrical should be a no-brainer. That's to say nothing of start-up costs. It was incredible that we coders could bootstrap six-figure careers with a $4000 MacBook Pro. Trades workers need a truck, you need power tools, if you're not loosey-goosey then you need insurance. All of that costs a lot.
That's for anyone joining the trade. Out-of-work middle-aged programmers with soft keyboard hands and little or no experience hanging dry wall? Why pay them any more than the 24 year old guy. AI may automate us out of our desk jobs, but the downward pressure of us transitioning to trade jobs, even at the bottom level, will only make those jobs less lucrative.
You think the drywall company is going to hire you? Why would they hire someone in middle age with no experience when there are no shortage of 20 year olds who already know the trade?
How can you not see that this time its actually different? The very need for labor is being obviated. Every technological change we had before still required a need for labor often an massive need that justified an entire city population. That is the difference. For the first time in human history, economic output is being severed from requiring maintenance of a labor pool. Considering we are that labor pool, things do not bode so well for us. As you state, look at the relative lack of abundance of candlestick makers and horeshoe makers and basket weavers and other colonial jobs. We are essentially making ourselves extinct and we don't even realize this.
There has never been a technology with the promise of obviating both knowledge and physical based labor before. Now there is. Sorry, but this is unprecedented. The hubris to imagine all will just be swell is astounding to me.
There's an off-color joke that could be made here but the real question is the speed of change - we gloss over it but there have been major changes that took centuries, and others that were quite fast, this one seems to be closer to the fast end.
We are all going to learn the hard way, this is what the economy is like for many people. Always on the precipice of losing everything and thus willing to do anything like the capital owners want it.
Whatever cushy career path you think is safe now will probably not be so safe by the time you go to university, train, land a job in it etc. The job of the future is nurse, diaper-changer, cleaner, prostitute for elderly retirees. Welcome to the aging fascist AI technoutopia.
