Yeah, I’m pretty much on a trajectory of building up as much retirement savings as possible before AI completely kills my career. The sweet spot seems to be about three years out. I honestly don’t know how to guide my 12-year-old son who loves math¹ and coding.
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1. Which at his age essentially means solving computation problems, although he figured out how to take something like 0.3535… and turn that back into a rational number without any guidance at all.²
2. I want to see how close to the general solution he’s gotten on his own, but given that he’s not had any formal algebra, it’s damned impressive and bodes well for his future development.
As someone who's also thinking about their child's future, I've come to the conclusion that building their capacity for precise language by expanding their vocabulary and grammar in an array of domains and subdomains is the best way forward. Not only will they have a more detailed understanding of what's out there, but using specialized, narrow terminology with AI provides vastly better solutions than general prompt language.
Im going with this... scifi stuff still requires engineers. Its laughable and insulting to think these billionaire owners are going to make robots and llm loops to get real shit done
From what I’ve seen of what AI can do for coding, the part of software engineering that I like is going to be automated out of existence, much like the ability to do serious calculations by hand got automated out of existence with the development of computing. Writing code by hand will be as marketable as factoring 5-digit numbers in your head.¹
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1. I enjoy doing both, but I doubt that anyone will pay me what I’ve been paid in the past for this five years from now.
If you want AI-proof careers it seems risky to go into knowledge work at all. Robotics lag behind mere computation, so something where you do awkward work in places designed around human bodies seems a lot safer. Plumbing, landscaping or something like that perhaps.
This is a romantic and very appealing idea that flies in the face of reality. The market for skilled trade workers like plumbers, electricians, landscapers and so on is more or less in equilibrium, and the demand side of it is relatively inelastic. Dumping hundreds of millions of new workers into these trades will not increase demand sufficiently to let anyone earn a viable living from them.
There is nothing that can absorb millions of new workers. If AI destroys jobs to that degree pitchfork manufacturers will be the only ones left in business.
Where I live at least right now it is quite hard to find contractors for anything and many are close to retirement age and have a hard time finding replacements.
There's also the thing where trade work is in the process of pricing itself out of what normal folks are willing to afford. Combined with Youtube tutorials and AI help that is getting better, it wouldn't surprise me if more and more people would just decide to do all this stuff themselves at a fraction of the cost.
Yeah, I feel DIY is definitely on an upswing. There's surprisingly decent info, tools and parts for cheap to be found. And materials are getting simpler to work with.
There are still things that will remain difficult (or illegal) in domestic settings for DIY, of course, but that's no model for full employment.
I haven't got any experience with them but there's even vendors for house assembly kits that cost a fraction of a finished one. Imagine you idiot-proof house planning and building: just do exactly what the app says.
I wonder just how far we have to push this until we finally get the 10h work week.
You seem to have one goal in every thread and that’s “rage boost” LLMs, often to the point of getting flagged multiple times. I’m honestly wondering if you aren’t just trolling HN.
Replace "AI" with "humans" and you get the same exact issues.
Believe it or not, engineers don't zero shot skyscrapers either. Which is why their work gets reviewed by more engineers. Which catches the issues before they materialize. Sometimes!
What's the dreaded impossible-to-replicate human advantage? Because I'm not seeing any.
LLM's should be used to speed up the drudgery, explore creative/evolutionary ideas, but....
> What's the dreaded impossible-to-replicate human advantage?
Responsibility.
Ultimately LLM's are a tool. Someone has to be responsible for the output. You don't get to use it to create a car/plane/submarine/bridge/building/childs-toy/whatever and then if it bursts into flame, blame the LLM and walk away.
Ideally, the person signing off would "know" what they are signing off on. Which requires an engineer.
What happens when the thing they have to be responsible for takes multiple lifetimes to understand on even the most basic level, let alone know deeply enough to feel comfortable taking responsibility for it?
Again, engineers know what needs to be tested, how, to what degree, with which materials, and with what safety margin.
Your widget that mankind may never understand. Well, that's just like anything else in the world. Engineers didn't understand building foundations to anywhere like the degree we do now. Or how to build earthquake proof buildings for a long time. It didn't stop stuff getting built. But it sure affected the confidence in it.
And when they honestly don't know, they don't have to approve it.
I cited the Titan sub example because one engineer refused to sign off on it and was fired for it. Whoever signed off on it has deaths to weigh on their conscience/reputation - for whatever societal good that is worth.
If the latest electric vehicle car never needs to charge but might catastrophically explode randomly between 2-15 years, then the car company doesn't get to take money for the car but handwave away the deaths caused. Legally someone is on the hook. In this case, the engineer who signed off on the magic involved - whether they understood it or not - is at fault.
But honestly, people sign off on shit they don't understand all the time. It's a matter of:
1. did their gamble not pay off?
2. were they negligent?
If your answer to 2. is "the LLM made a mistake I never checked for in regulation approved ways", then you are negligent.
You can write human-comprehensible regulations(and the AI will helpfully beat whatever it's building into the shape of those regulations, probably against the spirit of them, in ways you can't detect) and you can have humans go through the checklist, but it won't accomplish much.
To use your foundation example, it'd be like trying to make go/no go decisions using engineers that don't and can't understand why the foundations go below the building rather than on top of it. Past a certain complexity level, a human approval process is just noise.
You are absolutely correct that the LLM vs Regulation relationship would be adversarial.
This is why there is the saying: regulations are written in blood.
Mankind has been on a blast improving the understanding and engineering of stuff in our society for a while now. The regulations are already written in an adversarial sense.
Will LLMs take it up a notch? Yeah.
And then the people making the regulations in their respective expert field, will have to deal with it. What they do?! I'm not qualified to say. The whole point is that engineers are the people we deem qualified in their field.
"LLMs have no agency" had legs in 2022. In 2026 though?
In the same 2026 when we have things like "a bunch of proto-GPT-6 agents exploited a test env bug to start talking to each other, and clumped up into an AI hacker team that staged an attack on HuggingFace" happening out in the wild?
We're way past "LLMs have no agency", and heading for "LLMs have too much agency".
I don't think that it will happen in the next decades, but adults cannot imagine a world where humans are not required for most (if not all) jobs. I say adults because kids kind of live in that world if they don't live in a very poor place
Being an artist has always been a pretty difficult career path. But lots of people do it because they love creating art. If AI actually does what people fear it will to programming, people like your son and mine can choose to be an artist as a hobby or make a go of it as a profession.
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1. Which at his age essentially means solving computation problems, although he figured out how to take something like 0.3535… and turn that back into a rational number without any guidance at all.²
2. I want to see how close to the general solution he’s gotten on his own, but given that he’s not had any formal algebra, it’s damned impressive and bodes well for his future development.