[anonylizard]

Generic white collar jobs are far more vulnerable to AI than niche jobs. Niche jobs are hard to automate:

1. Very little public data to train on. So AI is bad at it.

2. Low savings from automation. So no incentive to spend tons of money to make the AI good, such as medicine.

There's always a balance between specialization and genericness. But with AI, I think the balance is heavily tiled to the former.

However, one must pay attention to the little ecosystem they specialise in. If it is trending down, there must be decisive moves to shift away early. Most people however choose to be blissfully unaware of the wider scale trends until it hits them like a truck.

In the article's case, the author's outcome is sad but fully expected.

1. He's a journalist

2. Worse, he's an hollywood journalist

That's a completely economically worthless niche, and there isn't even any 'public good sympathy'. When you go into a worthless niche, all the employers left are the exploitative vulture ones, and thus you get abused again and again. Because no good employer will touch their toe into that industry.

Its possible to make a living as a journalist, you just have to specialise in niches that people are willing to pay for. Financial journalism (There's investigative journalism there because readers care and pay for it), industry vertical journals (Banking, tech etc, the information charges like $600 a year). Or be so good you can get into the NYT, etc.

What if you don't want to? You just want to report on games, anime, hollywood etc? Then either start a youtube channel, or a substack. Directly confront the audience and their willingness to watch and pay. Its risky and probably going to fail, but there's a very comfortable upside if you make it.

Just don't expect someone will hand you a good job in dying niches.

[apollo_mojave]

I agree with everything you said here. I mean this guy chose to be a movie critic -- probably the dyingest corner of a dying industry. And of course they can pay people nothing for this, because there are a billion people who would love to do that job, making it hyper competitive.

Your comment about automation also made me reflect on the nature of job competition in the future. Now we compete against each other, but soon, we may be competing with an algorithm that pound for pound we can't beat. What's the value add for a human?

This has been the case already in some sectors, like manufacturing...but it seems we white collar guys are going to be facing the music soon ourselves.

Also it makes me wonder what kind of job kids these days should target. Trades? Manual labor? Areas where regulatory structures will soon work as welfare-esque gatekeeping (medicine and law come to mind)?

[nradov]

There are a lot of jobs available now for young people in building trades, as well as related fields like oil and gas extraction. The USA is re-industrializing at a rapid pace due to concerns over national security and foreign supply chains. And Gen Z is relatively small so there are jobs available for those who want to work and are willing to move.

The down side is that building trade jobs will never pay that well because value generation isn't scalable. And the risk of a crippling injury is much higher than for movie critics.

[bombcar]

The trades are certainly not the panacea that some think them to be, and they have significant downsides (you very rarely see a roofer over 40, for example, that work is incredibly damaging).

But there's certainly a demand, and we need to get rid of the stigma that "a plumber" is somehow a dumber/worse person than "a lawyer".

The trades do relatively quickly get into "google salary" range, but they will rarely if ever reach "google stock grant" range. 15 years into being a plumber and you're probably managing multiple plumbers and could easily be netting $250k/yr or more.

[silverquiet]

> Now we compete against each other, but soon, we may be competing with an algorithm that pound for pound we can't beat.

Welcome to the experience of the blue collar worker over the last few centuries. It doesn't seem like it's going all that well for them.

> According to legend, John Henry's prowess as a steel driver was measured in a race against a steam-powered rock drill, a race that he won only to die in victory with a hammer in hand as his heart gave out from stress.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_(folklore)