[aurareturn]

If I'm Gen Z, especially someone who is graduating or just graduated, I'd be very angry at AI too.

Even in our own organization, we've almost stopped hiring juniors and interns completely. We just leverage AI more and more.

So I can understand how most Gen Zs feel threatened by AI.

There are basically 2 groups who are loving AI:

* Seniors who have deep knowledge so AI is just there to help make them accomplish their goals cheaper and faster

* Gen Zs who are starting their own businesses and have embraced AI

My advice to young people is to embrace AI as fully as you can. Learn to be extremely productive with it. Learn to use it to create businesses. Burying your head in the sand hoping AI will collapse is not going to work in their favor.

PS. You can get a pretty good idea of how young people view AI on Reddit. Reddit users tend to be younger, less affluent. Save for a few subs, most of Reddit is very anti-AI. I'd guess most of them wish AI will collapse soon so they can go back to a world where human intelligence matter more.

[justonepost2]

The "businesses" created are thin wrappers that will get absorbed by the model companies faster than you can come up with them.

[dlev_pika]

Look at the last 3 years of AI startups, and it’s crazy how the big guys are folding use cases into their platforms - I cannot be the only one wondering what’s the point of developing a tool only for OpenAI et all to just incorporate the same eventually. There is no clear boundary as to what the business of the big ones is.

[LPisGood]

I feel like people said the same thing about Apple for years.

[kjkjadksj]

Apple was selling actual hardware though. Software doesn’t have that logistical moat.

[dlev_pika]

Not only that, but also they have deep monitoring of any little good idea that might get traction within their platforms. It’s trivial for them to see what’s picking up and bring in-house.

[kjkjadksj]

Yup, pretty much all quality of life upgrades in ios came from shamelessly copying popular jailbreak tweaks on cydia. Which they could do without credit since the tweaks were frowned upon in the first place.

[aurareturn]

No that's not what I meant. Plenty of GenZs are starting digital and physical businesses and leveraging AI tools.

I don't mean wrappers around Claude or OpenAI APIs.

[roadside_picnic]

This is a classic example of people misapplying the logic of the SaaS world to the AI world. If you're building software to sell, you're in trouble. The people that are finding success in this space are using AI to allow them to solve the problems they used to have to pay for software and hire people to solve.

All of the most promising companies I know today are very small and are leveraging AI to solve physical problems in the real world that just wouldn't be possible with so few people even a few years back.

[bad_haircut72]

Yeah "start a business with AI" is the new "learn to code". Like what does that even mean, do you just go to Claude "hey what business should I start?"

If starting a business was so easy, almost all of us who work salary would go do it. This advice is like, if your local football club gets shut down, just work hard enough to make into Manchester United

[9rx]

> If starting a business was so easy, almost all of us who work salary would go do it.

Would we? Starting a business is easy. Building a profitable business isn't even that hard. Wanting pleasure in our work is what stops us. Running a business generally isn't much fun. We work salary because it means we can focus on the enjoyable parts of the business, letting someone else deal with the crap.

[bad_haircut72]

This is completely wrong - Good for you if you think its so easy. I would do almost anything to get out of salary but every idea/attempt (and I have made several attempts) I have never even makes revenue let alone profit. Yet I can make 200k as a software engineer on salary.

[9rx]

> Yet I can make 200k as a software engineer on salary.

Then I dare say you've found your market fit. Tomorrow, your task is to start looking for a contractor position doing the exact same thing you are doing now. There's your business.

> but every idea/attempt (and I have made several attempts) I have never even makes revenue let alone profit.

Not even a single penny? What did these attempts look like? Were you out there knocking on doors offering to weed every flowerbed in the city? Or were you sticking to fun tasks, like programming, that made it feel like you were busy building a business but in actuality were hiding from it?

[bombcar]

Starting and running a business is an entirely different skillset from "doing the work" - even someone who could easily "be on their own" (think: plumbers, doctors, etc) really often prefer the salaried position where they don't have to think about "the business".

It's an older book, but The E-Myth Revisited is worth a read for everyone, a business is not a job. It's related, but it's not the same.

[thankyoufriend]

> We work salary because it means we can focus on the enjoyable parts of the business, letting someone else deal with the crap.

I can understand why a specialist would feel this way.

Personally, I believe that most people who work salary do it because of the job security and the health insurance.

[9rx]

When you get right down to it, collecting a salary is running a business with a client of one. So virtually everyone will start a business. I acknowledge the false dichotomy I submitted earlier.

But what you don't often see is one being willing to scale that client base to two. That is what I was trying to get at. Having two clients actually provides greater security than just one, as even if one client relieves you of your services you still have the other to help support you during the downtime. However, there is no free lunch. Two clients wanting your attention is orders of magnitude less enjoyable than just one client, and it only gets worse as you scale even bigger. There is good reason why most prefer to never scale beyond a single client.

[parliament32]

Only a small sliver of the world has to worry about health insurance. Job security, maybe.

I think the biggest component is all the crap that comes with running a business.. accounting, sales, budgets and planning, regulatory concerns, office/site management, the list goes on forever. I'm an engineer, I want to do this and leave the other jobs to people who specialize at those, not run around trying to spin a dozen plates at once. I'm sure there's a tidbit more money to be made but it's just not worth it for me.

Now, if someone can make a vibe-business platform where AI handles all the drudgery and I can stick to the tech.. that might be worth talking about.

[parliament32]

How could your "business" ever make money if any idiot with a $20 CC subscription can recreate it in a weekend? And no, "I can prompt better than them" is not a differentiator.

[daemonologist]

The idea is the opposite - "nobody" can make money selling software anymore, because software can be cheaply created by an LLM, so you want to start a business that previously would have had to buy software/software engineers in order to support some other product.

However, even if that holds true (which is a big if - right now I wouldn't want to run a business backed by vibe software), and even if there are enough such business ideas to go around, there's going to be quite a lot of turmoil in the meantime.

[RealityVoid]

I don't think that's true. SW that works is still expensive to produce. SW that kind of works is super easy to do. The money is in making SW that works. You still need expertise for that.

[parliament32]

There's a fallacy here around how software is fungible. WordPress hasn't made web developers obsolete, despite everybody having access to a $5/mo WYSIWYG-and-domains-and-hosting-bundle environment; quite the opposite, in fact.

I'm seeing the parent's point along these lines: "me and all my friends are starting businesses being the middlemen between WordPress and (people who want websites)". It's not that it won't work, it's just a shit business model.

[Herring]

Gyms still make money even though you can stay quite fit with just a good set of adjustable dumbbells, a bench, and a jump rope.

[parliament32]

I think a closer analogy is paying for a personal trainer vs working out yourself. Some people find value in that, but not many.

[Herring]

It's the gym, the trainer, the social environment, and a million other things you wouldn't think of until you have boots on the ground, eg a language model can't sign a vendor liability contract. People thought the rise of the internet would kill gyms because anyone can download the routine for an Olympic athlete for free. Turns out access to information is not the same as execution. It happened multiple times with websites/apps/Peloton. Every time fitness culture skyrocketed and gyms have benefited.

[aurareturn]

  How could your "business" ever make money if any idiot with a $20 CC subscription can recreate it in a weekend? And no, "I can prompt better than them" is not a differentiator.

If you truly believe this, you'd invest every cent you have into Nvidia, TSMC, and energy companies.

[kylehotchkiss]

Local models are going to be pretty useful by the time the current companies have to face their finances. The cost of entry will be higher end hardware though.

[everdrive]

> My advice to young people is to embrace AI as fully as you can

How will this help them? If LLMs are going to replace workers and reduce the number of available jobs, how will fully embracing an LLM help an individual? To it seems the most it could do is put them ahead of people who won't embrace LLMs ... but if everyone took this advice then the advice would certainly do nothing.

[bogzz]

Conversely, it's possible that honing your actual skills by minimizing reliance on LLMs could become a very valuable trait in the coming future. But in that case, you'd be burning fewer tokens and you wouldn't be contributing to LLM company userbase growth which is a bad thing to do.

[DaSHacka]

Meh, there are still fields AI can't touch, going into those is a much better idea than trying (in vain) to use the Job Replacer 5000 in such a manner that won't eventually leave you without a job.

We've always had offshoring too, and the same concerns exist there. The more corporate companies use it, and either eventually get burned and revert back, or just hold on for dear life as they circle the toilet.

Curious how these companies will fare when there are no senior-level candidates left to replace the ones that are retiring in a few years. I guess everyone's hoping AI will be good enough to just replace the entire field, as one final "fuck you" to the generations that follow, from the generations that had everything and pulled up the ladder.

[PaulHoule]

Well I post a lot of articles about grippers and agricultural robots that almost never get upvoted so if you don't know about these things I blame y'all.

I think if you want to change the world robots that can pick strawberries and change bedpans are it. People like to gush about "more Nobel prize research" an such but Nobel prizes are valuable because a limited number are given out, not because the research is valuable in and of itself. (e.g. Kuhn would tell you normal science is "apply for grant - write paper - repeat")

[antonvs]

Kuhn wouldn't tell you that because that cycle wasn't yet fully dominant when he wrote SSR, although the framework was in place for it.

[dismalaf]

The fields that "AI can't touch" are shit fields that have already been decimated by globalism and immigration. Like cool, farmers, cooks, baristas, plumbers and manual labourers are safe from AI for now. But most paths to a middle class lifestyle are being closed off...

[HappyHacker731]

You're right and it's actually even worse than that. If X% of the white collar jobs get replaced by ai that means there are X% more people competing for the "safe" jobs. Over time the "safe" jobs will pay less and less adjusted for inflation because the job displacement is increasing the labor supply making your labor less valuable.

[georgemcbay]

The "safe" jobs will get squeezed in two ways.

Like you said there will be more people trying to do those jobs causing devaluation on the supply side, but at the same time overall demand will drop because there will be less people with comfortable white-collar jobs that make up a lot of the demand for the work those jobs perform.

[HappyHacker731]

Exactly. I've been thinking about the demand issue for a while now too. It makes me think either the frontier labs are really "move fast and break things" cultists that truly don't care about any second order effects, or they're 100% convinced "asi" will subsume all forms of labor. If you permanently remove a massive chunk of labor from the white collar sector that will cause a massive drop in consumer spending, which will impact company revenue, which will in turn put pressure on their ability to spend on the ai causing the displacement in the first place. Unless they monopolize all labor and cause a paradigm shift in how economies fundamentally work I don't see how they're not just shooting themselves in the foot.

[bluefirebrand]

> It makes me think either the frontier labs are really "move fast and break things" cultists that truly don't care about any second order effects, or they're 100% convinced "asi" will subsume all forms of labor

Either one of these shows they are anti social, anti human sociopaths that only care about enriching themselves at the cost of anything else

[throwaway290]

> My advice to young people is to embrace AI as fully as you can

It's game theory. If you betray ASAP you get to monetize others who hold out.

It works until you yourself get ousted the same way. So the most enthusiastic people are old enough that they leverage their status and won't face the consequences in their lifetime OR young enough that they don't understand the proposition, have nothing to lose and when they look around and see everybody doing it they have no other choice except to do the same

If everybody took a stance against corps stealing our work and reselling it to us then we would 100% prevail but what are principles against personal profit...

"we need to work more and help train the llms of superrich to make the same money" became the new "we will have more free time and more money thanks to AI" but everybody is too busy trying to outrace the next guy so no one noticed.