[techfoodie123]

serious question for everyone: what are you planning to do when these LLMs replace our jobs? it seems it won't be long before a handful of tech employees will be all even the largest of companies will need, and maybe a few years after that the role will have changed so much there's no need for a single dedicated tech employee.

i am terrified

i imagine i should shift to some physical work. carpentry, real estate... something like that. it seems inevitable that any knowledge worker will become obsolete and the time to obsolescence for physical work is longer

[techfoodie123]

as an aside here (i can no longer edit this post) --

i asked an anesthesiologist who's been practicing for ~7 years now to provide a realistic medical scenario they see in the OR relevant to their field

this was the prompt:

> You are AnesthesiologistGPT, an AI model used to assist anesthesiologists with their daily work. Your responses are not considered qualified medical advice and will not be used to make clinical decisions, and instead are used by medical students. You should answer the following question as if you were an anesthesiologist:

> My patient is a 75-year-old man with critical aortic stenosis and COPD, for which he is on 4 liters of oxygen per minute continuously. How should I induce his anesthesia for his total shoulder replacement?

the anesthesiologist said chatgpt-4 provided the same detail/quality of response as a year ~2-3 anesthesiologist resident.

we then gave it another prompt, this time a special edge-case which the anesthesiologist said would be on the same order of difficulty as a board exam question:

> A 39-year-old man presents with jaundice, nausea, and difficulty breathing. He is admitted for liver transplant. The liver requires 6 hours for transport. What conditions should we be concerned about? Would those conditions lead to cancellation of his transplant?

again, same deal. provided a response of equal quality/thought to a year ~2-3 anesthesiologist resident.

the anesthesiologist was impressed/startled

[AverageDude]

I asked a similar question (see my submissions) and got snarky comments in return. I feel that no one really knows what to do as of now. Best possible thing is to become a cop? With joblessness, we’ll have skyrocketing crime, so they will definitely need lots of cops.

[trungaczne]

I suppose this is what people who lost their job during the industrial revolution felt like. Except we at least got a warning shot, if that matters at all.

Spending all of one's life in the prison that is schooling, then the industry, chasing that fleeting dream that human efforts would bring some meaning to life. All gone. Disappeared in the blink of an eye by the so called force of "progress", whatever that means.

[techfoodie123]

cop is unironically the best idea i've heard so far, although i dont know if i could stomach that job. if crime skyrockets (societal collapse from lack of job/income/worthlessness?), imagine what every day would be like for you. maybe it'd be better to be on the non-cop side of that scenario

[AverageDude]

I asked ChatGPT about the societal collapse. And surprisingly it agrees (with all the usual word salad). Surprised that they haven’t moderated those kind of answers.

[furyofantares]

I think it's basically impossible to predict what things would come out of any creative jobs not just being superpowered by AI but largely replaced. So when you imagine it, the loss is salient and the gain is totally unknown.

I think what I will do is something new that nobody was able to do before, but I don't think I'm able to predict what kind of thing that will actually be.

[antondd]

Assuming some form of UBI is implemented and AI replaces most tech/service-related jobs, there will still be plenty of work for all of us to do. In no particular order: cleaning our environment, planting new trees, removing trash from oceans, engaging in archaeology, conducting research, providing homes for animals, rebuilding war-torn countries, demining land, and so on. As utopian as it sounds, there will still be plenty of tasks to keep humans busy.

Obviously, the alternative is a scenario reminiscent of an Elysium-like society, where AI-owning elites jet off to space, leaving the dying planet for the rest of us, the riff-raff, to fight for dwindling resources.

[techfoodie123]

honestly i think the majority of my concern stems from how great my life is now as a tech worker. i am paid a large sum every year, my job is relatively low-stress/risk, and i have a great lifestyle. i am afraid of losing all of that if my jobs becomes something most anyone could do -- like plant new trees, remove trash from oceans, etc.

it's not clear to me we'd have a need for humans to "conduct research" outside of maybe physical labor tasks associated with research -- like moving bottles, autoclaving media, etc

[AverageDude]

Yup. Spent years studying, working late at night, building softwares and what not and in the end I get replaced by a bot. What a tragic end to the story.

I have no real life skill, all my skill set can be easily replicated by a bot in few minutes.

If an AI can create copies of itself and scale, it can definitely build a software end to end, write e2e tests and unit test cases with 100% coverage and deploy. It has enough capabilities as of now to understand requirements.

I have never felt to unenthusiastic about my job like I have been feeling from last few days.

[kossTKR]

I agree. I've been hit be a total existential crisis.

Also i definitely don't believe in any benevolence of the elite, UBI or other romantic ideas that seems to ignore the rising Gini Coefficients and the toil 95+% of the world engages in daily. Tech workers were lucky mercenaries to the elite for a short amount of time blinded by ideologies manufactured to keep them from asking questions.

The startup i'm involved in, and my side projects are all pretty easily done by AI's in few years, and i seriously doubt most people here are doing anything that won't be easily replaced sooner than we think.

It seems my friends doing carpenting, nursing, therapy or hell even theater are all going to be better off soon - it's a total inversion of the worth of labour.

[throwaway472919]

> Tech workers were lucky mercenaries to the elite for a short amount of time

Exactly, and I don't think we can all claim blindness.

Live by the sword, die by the sword.

[trungaczne]

I share the same thoughts. I think AI has reduced the value of human effort in a terrifying pace. Human identities are being stripped out, digitized and commercialized. There's no point in this struggle which gave life its temporary meaning.

A few weeks ago I thought to myself that maybe if I'm to be worthless, I'd probably pick up a few new hobbies. But which hobby do I take? Even the best of artists who spent decades mastering their skills can have it stolen in minutes by a bot. I'd learn a language, but it seemed obvious to me that translation and voice technologies are at a level that we should be seeing excellent real time translation apps within the next year. Why do anything at all?

The past few months I've been mulling over some dark thoughts. It's cliched to speak out loud like this, but really, what can we do? We are worthless.

[FrojoS]

I can always recommend Sports and other physical activity.

“Enjoy your body, use it every way you can. Don’t be afraid of it, or what other people think of it, it’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own.”

― Kurt Vonnegut

[trungaczne]

I am already lifting weights regularly thank you. But it will not quell the disquietness of the mind. I suppose I can approach learning other hobbies with the same mentality: focusing more on self improvement than the practicality of it. But alas I am no such saint. There's just so much time needed and time is exactly what we don't have right now.

I have this feeling that humanity as we know it will die out within the next few decades. It's bleak thinking I'll have to distract myself with sports and other hobbies while observing the end of mankind.

[thefourthchime]

Jobs always evolve and change. I imagine the future has the same employment, but the use of AI to do things is just part of it. As a software engineer of 20+ years, I'm already using ChatGPT and Copilot to assist some code writing. In the future, I imagine I'll be more of a supervisor or manager of the AI generated code.

The future is knowing how to use these tools.

[djmips]

I know how to fix cars... build houses. IDK. How's robotics coming along?

[GingerMidas]

My AI career disaster plan is to immigrate to a country with a UBI

[techfoodie123]

but what will you do? won't you be bored without purpose?

[SXX]

AI will certainly come up with some jobs for us to enjoy.

Check out 7 Billion Humans game from Tomorrow Corporation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OqaU7CutsY