The AI boom is screwing over Gen Z | ChatGPT is commandeering the mundane tasks that young employees have relied on to advance their careers.::ChatGPT is commandeering the tasks that young employees rely on to advance their careers. That’s going to crush Gen Z’s career path.
And the funny part is that ChatGPT isn’t good enough at anything to be trusted with doing it alone. You still need an expert on the subject matter to proofread anything that will be seen by the public or used to make a business decision.
You can say the same for entry level employees though. I’m not trusting anyone new to post without review.
Granted I rather the company pay someone so they can be taught and eventually become autonomous over time.
And presumably a human who works has some intention to get it right so they can prove their worth or learn or any of a million reasons to want to succeed at work.
ChatGPT is just math in a black box that spits out random language stems filtered and organized by the input parameters you choose.
presumably a human who works has some intention … to succeed at work
Which is the one in ten who really love what they do and want to go into management or oversee the process for professional fulfillment. Of the other nine, three are waiting to move to a company that pays better, two will decide they don’t like it and change careers entirely, and four really are terrible at it but HR decided they met the minimum requirements and would work for entry level wages so they’ll be in that job for the foreseeable future with zero upward growth, eventually getting bitter and doing a worse and worse job while complaining about their lack of promotion.
Not sure what industry you’re in but that sounds like a fair wages and training problem, not an ambition problem. Most people are content to advance in an industry for the sake of job security and professional development, even if they don’t have a particular passion for the specific job role, as long as they are being compensated fairly and see a path for advancement or transferable skills.
I’m architecture-adjacent, so I’m working with clients across a bunch of different market sectors, many are business owners, but my avocations are heavily into performing arts so many people I know in that group are a pretty substantial cross section of low to moderate wage, often entry level workers. I also own my business so I’ve been in the hiring and training side of things.
It’s not just Gen Z, everyone’s jobs are at risk as AI improves and automates away human labor. People who think that with exponential rate of progress of AI there will continue to be an abundance of good jobs are completely delusional. Companies hire people out of necessity, not some goodness of the heart. If machines can do everything humans can do and better, then companies will hire less people and outsource to machines. Sure there will be people working on the bleeding edge of what AI isn’t yet capable of, but that’s a bar that’s only going to get higher and higher as the performance advantage gap of humans over machines reduces.
Of course none of this would be an issue if we had an economic system that aligned technological progress with improved quality of life and human freedom, but instead we cling on to antiquated systems of the past that just disproportionately accrue wealth to a dwindling minority while leaving the rest of civilization at their mercy. Anyone with any brain or sense of integrity realizes how absurd this is, and it’s been obvious we need a Universal Basic Income for a long time. The hope I have is that Andrew Yang explained it eloquently 4 years ago and it resonated way stronger than I expected with the American population, so I think in a few years when AI is starting to automate any job where one doesn’t need a 160 IQ, people will see the writing on the wall and there will finally be the political capital to implement a UBI.
Yeah we’re quickly approaching a tipping point where people can no longer scoff at the idea of UBI. The more jobs that get automated, the fewer people working and pumping money back into the economy. This can only go on for so long before the economy completely collapses.
It’s the march of progress, but it’s coming for previously “safe” jobs. I make a good living as a consultant, but about 80-90% of my job could be automated by AI. I just went to a conference in my field and everyone in the room was convinced that they couldn’t be replaced by AI - and they’re dead wrong. By the time my small corner of industry gets fully automated I’ll be retired or, at the least, in a position where I’m the human gathering the field data and backchecking the automated workflows before it goes out the door.
political capital to implement a UBI
I applaud your optimism, and genuinely hope you’re right.
The fucked up part isn’t that AI work is replacing human work, it’s that we’re at a place as a society where this is a problem.
More automation and less humans working should be a good thing, not something to fear.
But that would require some mechanism for redistributing wealth and taking care if those who choose not to work, and everyone knows that’s communism.
So much this. The way headlines like this frame the situation is so ass-backwards it makes my brain hurt. In any sane world, we’d be celebrating the automation of mundane tasks as freeing up time and resources to improve our health, happiness, and quality of life instead of wringing our hands about lost livelihoods.
The correct framing is that the money and profits generated by those mundane tasks are still realized, it’s just that they are no longer going to workers, but funneled straight to the top. People need to get mad as hell not at the tech, but at those who are leveraging that tech to specifically to deny them opportunity rather than improving their life.
I need a beer. 😐
Exactly. This has nothing to do with AI and everything to do with UBI.
But, the rich and plebes alike will push AI as the Boogeyman as a distraction from the real enemy.
There’s this bizarre right-wing idea that if everyone can afford basic necessities, they won’t do anything. To which I say, so what? If you want to live in shitty government housing and survive off of food assistance but not do anything all day, fine. Who cares? Plenty of other people want a higher standard of living than that and will have a job to do so. We just won’t have people starving in the street and dying of easily fixable health problems.
But how will the rich people afford more submarines to commit suicide in?
Precisely, the hill to die on is to socialize the profits, not to demand we keep the shitty, injuring, repetitive task jobs that break a person’s back by 35.
You don’t protest street lights to keep the lamp lighters employed. The economy needs to change fundamentally to accommodate the fact that many citizens won’t have jobs yet need income. It won’t change, but it needs to.
So we’ll keep blaming the wrong thing, technology that eases the labor burden on humanity, instead of destroying the wealth class that demands they be the sole beneficiary of said technology and its implementation in perpetuity to the detriment of almost everyone outside the owner class. Because if we did that, we’d be filthy dirty marxist socialist commies that hate freedumb, amirite?!
This was exactly the problem that Charles Murray pointed out in the bell curve. We’re rapidly increasing the complexity of the available jobs (and the successful people can output 1000-1,000,000 times more than simple labor in the world of computers). It’s the same concept as the industrial revolution, but to a greater degree.
The problem is that we’re taking away the vast majority of the simple jobs. Even working at a fast food place isn’t simple.
That alienates a good chunk of the population from being able to perform useful work.
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If it were full of shit, then you wouldn’t be discussing the exact he pointed out in this book.
There is some racist discussion in there, but that’s secondary and doesn’t detract or impact his main point about what increasingly complex labor does to a society.
It’s not even a new thing either.
It used to be that every single piece of fabric was handmade, every book handwritten.
Humans have been losing out on labor since they realized Og was faster at bashing rocks together than anyone else.
It’s just a question of if we redistribute the workload. Like turning “full time” down to 6 days a week and eventually 5, or working hours from 12+ to 8hrs. Which inflates the amount of jobs to match availability.
Every single time the wealthy say we can’t. But eventually it happens, the longer it takes, the less likely it’s peaceful.
But eventually
There’s no eventually, people have been killed, murdered and harassed whilst fighting to make it a reality. Someone has to fight to make it happen and an “eventually” diminishes the value of the effort and risks put forth by labor activists all over the world throughout history. It didn’t happen magically, people worked really hard to make it so.
It sounds like you just don’t know what the word eventually means…
Where are you that 7 days a week 12 hour days is full time? That’s literally just always working. Standard full time in the states is 40 hour work weeks.
The past. You should probably read their comment again.
I hate this timeline
What if the headline read: “Horseless carriages are crippling stable owners and farriers”
Would you still hate this timeline?
“Horseless carriages driven around cities accelerate climatic problems”
“City growth caused by mass adoption of personal horseless carriages makes pedestrians unable to get anywhere”
So, yea, that would still be a problem
Turns out walkable cities do in fact exist despite those countries phasing out said horseless carriages.
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I was making a greater metaphorical point that society can and does adapt to new technologies
Cries in Kaczynski
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I for one can’t wait for the headline “Gen Z increasingly joining Amish, DESTROYING industries”
This is not equivalent. LLMs are not new tools, they’re just the latest parlor trick of old tools. It has more to do with crypto and NFTs than with cars. And with the confidence of hindsight, cars (indirectly via the combustion engine and fossil fuels) absolutely destroyed the planet with anthropogenic climate change. We have every reason to hate this timeline.
This is just silly lol
Lol it’s not ChatGPT screwing over Gen Z. It’s the rich business owners who care more about profits than people.
Let’s play devil’s advocate: if AI is capable of doing a job for a fraction of the cost, faster, with no mistakes, no “moods”, no sick days, then why would they hire a person? I honestly see no reason for them to do so and that concerns me.
The problem is the concept of work hasn’t shifted to keep up with the technological reality that has been created. Jobs should slowly be phased out. We need a new economical concept to take hold that doesn’t rely solely on class and fear to make it trundle along. Jobs should be what you do to grow your own fruit and veggies for fun, while the administration and maintenance of basically everything should be left to technology. Wealth and wealth accumulation should no longer exist or be seen as anything other than childish and irrelevant.
“Haha best I can do is lower wages and more homelessness”
No offense, but this sounds like the pipe dream to end all pipe dreams
Things can change very fast depending on specific circumstances. I hope you’re more wrong than you think.
I like to compare modern LLM to Excel or calculators in the past. Some years ago a company would have an in-house team of accountants. Then came Excel and now a single accountant can do the job for 10 companies. Let’s now consider programmer: currently a project manager oversees a team of programmers, most of whom are only responsible for mundane work of typing out code. With AI a single worker will be able to perform more productive than that team of programmers, because they will offload the boring work to AI and focus all their attention to what AI is perhaps incapable of.
What this article is really saying, which I agree with, is that AI improves productivity ,just like perhaps the steam engines did in the 1800’s. But this time the problem is we won’t increase the output and let the workers work more efficiently and earn more money, because it’s not manufacturing jobs which were limited by technology that this is influencing. It’s office jobs, which the economy has a pretty much fixed demand for. Workers will not improve their productivity, they will just be replaced because their work can be offloaded to a machine capable of doing that same jobs better in every significant way.
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Interesting point, I guess you are right
Can you elaborate on the “fixed demand” aspect?
From what I know as a software engineer, companies would simply make twice as much software, if their software engineers were twice as efficient. There are always requirements pushed out of scope because the complexity of the solution is growing and growing. The ability to make more complex software solutions with the same amount of engineers is not going to result in less engineers, it is just going to cause more complex software products.
Also note that more engineers has deminishing results due to communication losses. This, along with a fixed supply of engineers seems the biggest limitation to the industry to me.
From what I know as a software engineer, companies would simply make twice as much software, if their software engineers were twice as efficient.
Only if there’s demand for twice as much software. Otherwise, you make the same software twice as fast and with half as much work. Let’s go back to the example of accountants. Sure, the demand for accounting work may be somewhat increasing, but with productivity per worker increasing orders of magnitude faster than demand, the overall number of accountants shall decrease. A piece of code a junior programmer writes within a week can be obtained immediately with a tool like chatgpt simply by formulating a clear prompt – it’s not like we’re talking about better keyboards which improve your typing speed and therefore increase your productivity by 10% by letting you type code faster, it’s actually orders of magnitude!
There are always requirements pushed out of scope because the complexity of the solution is growing and growing. The ability to make more complex software solutions with the same amount of engineers is not going to result in less engineers, it is just going to cause more complex software products.
Again, sure, but wouldn’t you agree the technology will some time reach a point where more complexity is redundant? I would argue it’s sooner than later, see how smartphones and computers keep improving in their performance, but there are no technology breakthroughts anymore. Is infinite growth even possible?
Also note that more engineers has deminishing results due to communication losses. This, along with a fixed supply of engineers seems the biggest limitation to the industry to me.
Not sure what you’re getting at here, so let’s go back to your original question: what do I mean by fixed demand of the office jobs.
Doing accounting faster will not land you more gigs anymore, unless you steal some other accountants’ clients. Writing longer reports will not make your employer require you to write more of them, unless they fire your colleague who does that too. Going through motions and legal documents faster will not magically give you more legal work, unless a different legal counsel changes industry. Unlike manufacturing in the 1800s, the supply and productivity of modern jobs are not limited by technological disadvantages so much, but instead, the demand for this work is corelated with other branches of economy.
One could argue, in fact it’s an ongoing debate where I’m from (Poland): “yeah sure but when we started switching away from coal then miners were supposed to be off work as well and yet they mostly managed to find previously non-existing jobs in newly created industries and the unemployment remained low”. Right, but in that case one industry was replaced by another, workers’ productivity could be moved to doing something else. This time it’s different, because the jobs don’t change, the demand doesn’t change, instead the supply of labour (via increased, AI-fueled productivity) increases so much, that large part of the workforce is found to be straight up redundant.
Bullshit. Learn how to train new hires to do useful work instead of mundane bloat.
100% if an AI can do the job just as well (or better) then there’s no reason we should be making a person do it.
Part of the problem with AI is that it requires significant skill to understand where AI goes wrong.
As a basic example, get a language model like ChatGPT to edit writing. It can go very wrong, removing the wrong words, changing the tone, and making mistakes that an unlearned person does not understand. I’ve had foreign students use AI to write letters or responses and often the tone is all off. That’s one thing but the student doesn’t understand that they’ve written a weird letter. Same goes with grammar checking.
This sets up a dangerous scenario where, to diagnose the results, you need to already have a deep understanding. This is in contrast to non-AI language checkers that are simpler to understand.
Moreover as you can imagine the danger is that the people who are making decisions about hiring and restructuring may not understand this issue.
The good news is this means many of the jobs AI is “taking” will probably come back when people realize it isn’t actually as good as the hype implied
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Not quite. It’s more that a job that once had 5-10 people and perhaps an “expert” supervisor will just be whittled down to the expert. Similarly, factories used to employ hundreds and a handful of supervisors to produce a widget. Now, they can employ a couple of supervisors and a handful of robot technicians to produce more widgets.
The problem is, where do those experts come from? Expertise is earned through experience, and if all the entry-level jobs go away then eventually you’ll run out of experts.
Education. If education was free this wouldn’t be a problem, you could take a few more years at university to gain that experience instead of working in a junior role.
This is the problem with capitalism, if you take too much without giving back, eventually there’s nothing left to take.
You don’t get experts from education. You get experts from job experience (after education).
They don’t want to train new hires to begin with. A lot of work that new hires relied on to get a foothold on a job is bloat and chores that nobody wants to do. Because they aren’t trusted to take on more responsibility than that yet.
Arguably whole industries exist around work that isn’t strictly necessary. Does anyone feel like telemarketing is work that is truly necessary for society? But it provides employment to a lot of people. There’s much that will need to change for us to dismiss these roles entirely, but people need to eat every day.
The “not willing to train” thing is one of the biggest problems IMO. But also not a new one. It’s rampant in my field of software dev.
Most people coming out of university aren’t very qualified. Most have no understanding of how to actually program real world software, because they’ve only ever done university classes where their environments are usually nice and easy (possibly already setup), projects are super tiny, they can actually read all the code in the project (you cannot do that in real projects – there’s far too much code), and usually problems are kept minimal with no red herrings, unclear legacy code, etc.
Needless to say, most new grads just aren’t that good at programming in a real project. Everyone in the field knows this. As a result, many companies don’t hire new grads. Their advertised “entry level” position is actually more of a mid level position because they don’t want to deal with this painful training period (which takes a lot of their senior devs time!). But it ends up making the field painful to enter. Reddit would constantly have threads from people lamenting that the field must be dying and every time it’s some new grad or junior. IMO it’s because they face this extra barrier. By comparison, senior devs will get daily emails from recruiters asking if they want a job.
It’s very unsustainable.
I consider myself, at best, a medior profile in my industry (IT). ChatGPT with GPT-4 (at least the initial version of it) was completely capable of doing EVERYTHING I need to do daily for my job. And probably faster and with much fewer mistakes.
That simply tells me it’s a guarantee my job’s gone in a matter of time. Whether that’s one year or five remains to be seen, but it’s inevitable.
Otoh one of my friends is an IT teacher and there are regular issues with students blindly following dumb chatGPT advice.
Recently, one had removed their fstab directory 🤣
ChatGPT is very good at giving advice that sounds good but it still has absolutely no understanding about what it says. The quintessential child of a politician and a manager…
My gawd, zoomers are so effed. I have loads of internships but I’m sure getting a job will be so hard. My internship right now encouraged me to apply for a open job but my application was denied due to lack of experience! Granted, I still have a year left of school to do but still its government they take months to hire and by then, I’ll be close to graduating! I dunno, I’m just going to hold out hope and wish someone will hire me.
Not sure your industry, but there’s a much clearer pipeline from corporate intern to offers than government from my experience. I spent a lot of my time early career in government and I ended up wishing I hadn’t because it took so long to hear back on anything and the pay sucked. But I had equivalent jobs available to me outside of the government. If you do as well recommend trying to get another internship in the private sector - I know my company requires us to have a job open you can offer to a successful intern before you can get assigned an intern and we get judged on our conversion metrics.
Or govt contractor
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Where do you live / what kind of gov’t work is around you?
I know quite a few contracting companies, but outside of some of the big ones, I’d need to know where you are trying to work. I am in the DC/NoVa area. There are TONS of contracting companies here. From the larger ones like CACI, CGI Federal, Raytheon, Booz Allen, Deloitte, etc to literally thousands of mid/small size companies.
As far as a good “job board”, I dont really know of one other than fedbizops which I think is sam.gov now. Search for contracts that have been recently awarded near you related to IT and you’ll see which companies won. Those contractors are usually HURTING to bring on people ASAP. They’d probably hire on the spot if you can pass a background check.
Thanks for the tips! I’ll most definitely look newly awarded federal contracts then look for opportunities there.
There’s something that a person close to me said about certain tech/features that stuck with me and seems to click here, it was: “A lot of it just stops you from using your brain.”
Is this not similar to the introduction of calculators in schools? We don’t need to use our brains anymore to do the “mechanical calculation”. Instead we can offload this task to the machine and use our brain for other tasks.
Mathematics is about reasoning. Calculations and arithmetics are merely a little insiginificant part of it. I believe mental math should be encouraged at early stages of education, as it develops cognitive skills, memory and brain plasticity; all research confirm this. Sure, calculating 65*82 is tricky to do in head, but if you understand that this is equivalent to (60+5)(80+2) and work from that then it suddenly becomes approachable for everyone, you just have to reason this out in your mind. My algebra teacher once said something which perhaps translates poorly but let me try to convey what he meant: “A mediocre mathematician seeks analogies between problems, so that they can solve new problems using tools they are already familiar with. However a good mathematician seeks analogies between analogies”. Will you ever require mental math? Probably no, but consider it a workout for your brain, which creates neuroconnections which will later come in helpful when learning new stuff and needing to understand new, complex concepts quickly
Not exactly. When it comes to calculations that could be super unreasonable and impractical to do by hand (think multiple exponents on a number, or cosine, sine, and tangent as simple examples), they help reduce that tedium in the overall process of what you’re trying to do. There comes a point where it’d be absurd to do certain kinds of math by hand primarily. I’m not largely math-oriented, but even with calculators one could understand the reasoning behind certain concepts despite using a calculator to work through them. People who take calculus can understand it but still use a calculator.
To have a calculator to do your times tables instead of knowing them, or any basic stuff in the four units would be detrimental I feel, because you’d benefit in knowing those up front, and how to process them mentally.
Have you used these tools for a complicated project? I’ve played around a little and it didn’t feel like turning off my brain at all, more like working with a genius drone and figuring out how to direct its skills to my ends and constantly evaluating the 10,000 foot view to edge the project forward.
You can’t turn your brain off and use current AI. You have to be constantly watching for whenever it will happen to fabricate some innocent-looking code that is actually very destructive.
It was already happenning in things like Software Developmnt with outsourcing: all the entry level stuff was sent away to be done by people who cost a fraction of what even a Junior Dev would cost in the West, and that’s exactly the stuff that one starts one’s career with.
As someone who lives in the east where these jobs are outsourced to, it’s not like junior devs here get to work on them either. Most outsourced stuff is assigned to people higher up. The talented juniors are left sitting on the bench as retainer manpower, others are in an endless string of unpaid internships.
The job situation is more similar then you think all over the world
Bro service industry jobs and similar are booming. Train under a plumber, electrician or gassist and you will be set for years
Go where the future is…HVAC. Soon everyone is going to need AC just to survive.
Which will accelerate the destruction of the planet. Yay!
Whether you have ac or not, the planet is set on course to be destroyed unless big oil countries suddenly find their kindness to all mankind and stop drilling oil. Which is impossible.
Maybe. But if they stop drilling for petroleum, I wonder where the electricity to make the solar panels and wind turbines will come from. Oh and the polymers and plastics used to make those things. While ue use the available electricity for charging our electric cars.
Where I’m from even those jobs pay shitty salaries that haven’t kept up with the cost of living. I know electricians who can barely afford rent.
Suggesting an alternative industry as an escape from AI doesn’t work. The media tried this with the millions of truck drivers, pushing them to go into software development 5-10 years ago, as we started conversations around the impending automation of their careers.
The thought at the time, and this seemed like an accurate forecast to me, was that the tech industry would continue to grow and software engineers would be extraordinarily safe for decades to come. I was already in this profession, so I figured my career was safe for a long while.
Then a massive AI boom happened this year that I hadn’t anticipated would come for 15ish more years, and similarly AI experts are now pushing up predictions of AGI by literally decades, average estimates being under 10 years now instead of 30 years.
At the same time, the tech industry went through massive layoffs. Outsourcing, massive increases in output with generative AI automating away repetitive copy/paste programming or even slightly more complicated boilerplate that isn’t strictly copy/paste, amongst natural capitalist tendencies to want to restrict high value labor to keep it cheap.
Those people who shifted away from truck driving and towards software engineer 4+ years ago, thinking it was a “safe path” and now being told that it’s impossible to find a junior dev position might become desperate enough to change paths again. Maybe they’ll take your advice and join a trade school, only to find in 4 years we’ll hit massive advancements in robotics and AGI that allows general problem solving skills from robots in the real world.
We already have the tech for it. Boston dynamics has showcased robots that can move more than fluently enough to be a plumber, electrician, etc. Now we just need to combine generative AI with senses and the ability to process information from those senses and react (this already works with images, moving to a video feed and eventually touch/sound/etc is a next step).
While everyone constantly plays a game of chicken, trying to move around this massive reserve army of labor, we’ll see housing scalpers continue to raise rents, and cost of living becoming prohibitive for this growing class of underemployed or unemployed people. The reserve army of labor, when kept around 5-10% of the population, serves as an incentive for people to be obedient workers and not to rock the bed too much. That number growing to 20-50% is enough to rock the bed, and capitalists will advocate for what they’ve already advocated in the third world, a massive reduction or total annihilation of welfare, so millions more can starve to death.
We already have millions of people dying a year due to starvation, and nearly a billion people are malnourished due to lack of food access. Raising this number is a logical next step for capitalists as workers try to fight for a share of the automated economy.
Now we just need to combine
“Just” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. Sensor integration is currently the biggest hurdle in AI and one of the most complex but less understood areas of research. Everyone can make a magnetic sensor, anyone can make an image recognition AI, anyone can make an inverse kinematic robotic control arm. But having them integrate and coordinate together to create fluid problem analysis and motion has proven to be elusive and non-trivial. Tesla commits traffic offenses, taxi networks are brought to a halt by shirts with traffic cones on them. For things the most basic human context aware analysis can solve instantly. It has cost Boston Dynamics billions of defense budget money to create a partial solution that still requires the permanent supervision of a human operator. A full solution is not on the table in the short-term.
Not gonna read all that but alternative industries will happen ai or not.
The necessity to look for an alternative industry will happen ai or not.
And it’s not impossible to find junior tech positions what the hell are you talking about.
Also there is not a conspiracy to reduce the planetary population. And if you claim that I want proof.
If you’re not going to spend the 60 seconds it takes to read my comment, don’t bother responding. Nobody mentioned a conspiracy to cull the population, the millions of people who are dying a year from hunger or entirely curable diseases like TB aren’t dying because of some deep state conspiracy, they’re dying because it’s what’s logical in a capitalist economy. These people have no economic power, so they get no resources.
Similarly, as the economy gets further automated, workers lose economic power, and we’ll be treated with the same capitalist logic that anyone else in the world is treated with, once we have no economic power we are better off dead, and so that’s what will happen.
The position that “alternative industries will always exist” is pretty foolish, humans aren’t some exceptional supreme beings that can do something special artificial beings cannot. Maybe you’re religious and believe in a soul, and you think that soul gives you some special powers that robots will never have, but you’d be simply mistaken.
Once the entire economy is automated, there will still be two classes, owners and non-owners, instead of owners and workers. Non-owners will either seize the means of production or die per the logic of capitalism (not some conspiracy).
So what would that mean for the company itself long-term? If they’re not training up their employees, and most of the entry level is replaced by text generator work, there would be a hole as executives and managers move out of the company.
It seems like it would be a recipe for the company to implode after a few years/decades, assuming that that the managerial/executive positions aren’t replaced also.
It’s a Tragedy Of The Commons situation: each market actor expects to get the benefits of automating away entry level jobs and expects it’s going to be somebody else who keeps on training people through their junior career years so that mid and senior level professionals are available in the job market.
Since most market actors have those expectations and even those who don’t are pressured by market pressures to do the same (as paying for junior positions makes them less competitive than those who automate that work, so they’re forced to do the same), the tragedy part will eventually ensue once that “field” has kept being overgrazed for long enough.
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It’s not the tasks that matter, it’s the understanding of the basics, the implications of certain choices and the real life experience in things like “how long I thought it would take vs how long it actually took” that comes with doing certain things from start to end.
Some stuff can’t be learned theoretically, it has to be learnt as painful real life lessons.
So far there seems to be an ill-defined boundary between what AI can successfully do and what it can’t, and sadly you can’t really teach people starting past that point because it’s not even a point, it’s an area where you have to already know enough to spot the AI-made stuff that won’t work, and the understanding there and beyond is built on foundational understanding of how to use simpler building blocks and what are the implications of that.
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You clearly never worked in an expert knowledge area.
In any complex enough domain knowledge there are elements you can only ever learn from doing it for real, with real requirements, real users and real timeframes.
With my career spanning 4 countries I have yet to see somebody straight out of uni that could just drop-in and start working at mid-level, and that includes the trully gifted types who did that stuff at home for fun.
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Amazing.
How many junior professionals have you hired (or at least interviewed as domain expert) and how many have you led in your career?!
I’ll refrain from pulling rank here (I could, but having lots of experience and professional seniority doesn’t mean I know everything and besides, let’s keep it serious) so I’m just wondering what kind of engineering area do you work in (if it’s not too much to ask) and what in your career has led you to believe that formal education is capable of bridging any training gap that might form if the junior-professional-stage dissapears?
In my professional area, software development, all I’ve seen so far is that there are elements of experience which formal education won’t teach and my own experience with professional education (training courses) is that they provide you with knowledge, maybe a few techniques, but not professional insight on things like choosing which elements are best for which situation.
This is not to say that education has no value (in fact, I believe it’s the opposite: even the seemingly “too theoretical to be useful” can very much turn out to be essential in solving something highly practical: for example, I’ve used immenselly obscure knowledge of microprocessor architectures in the design of high performance distributed software systems for investment banks, which was pretty unexpected when I learned that stuff in an EE Degree). My point is that things such a “scoping a job”, “selecting the better tool for the job” and even estimating risk and acceptability of it in using certain practices for certain parts of a job, aren’t at all taught in formal education and I can’t really see the pathway in the Business Process (the expression in a Requirements Analysis sense, rather than saying it’s all a business) of Education which will result in both formalizing the teaching of such things and in attracting those who can teach it with knowledge.
Maybe the Education System can find a way of doing it, but we can hardly bet that it will and will do so before any problems from an AI-induced junior-level training gap materialises (i.e. there won’t be any pressure for it before things are blowing up because of a lack of mid-level and above professionals, by which time it there will be at least a decade of problems already in the pipeline).
I’ve actually mentored several junior and mid-level developers and have mainly made them aware of potential pitfalls they couldn’t see (often considerations which were outside the nitty gritty details of programming and yet had massive impact on what needed to be programmed), additional implications of certain choices which they weren’t at all aware of and pointed to them the judgment flaws that lead them to dead-ends, but they still need to actually have real situations with real consequences to, at an emotional-level, interiorise the value of certain practices that at first sight seem counterproductive otherwise they either don’t do it unless forced to (and we need programmers, not code monkeys that need constant surveillance) or do it as a mindless habit, hence also when not appropriate.
Maybe what you think of as “junior” is a code-monkey, which is what I think of as “people who shouldn’t even be in the profession” so you’re picturing the kind of teaching that’s the transmission of “do it like this” recipes that a typical code monkey nowadays finds via Google, whilst I’m picturing developers to whom you can say “here’s a small problem part of a big thing, come up with a way to solve it”, which is a set of practices that’s way harder to teach even in the practical classes on an Educational environment because it’s a synthetic environment with were projects have simulated needs and the consequences of one’s mistakes are way lower.
PS: Mind you, you did put me thinking about how we could teach this stuff in a formal educational context, but I really don’t have an answer for that as even one-to-one mentoring is limited if you’re not dealing with real projects, with real world users (and their real world needs and demands) and implications and real lifecycles (which are measured in years, not “one semester”). I mean, you can have learning placements in real companies, but that’s just working at a junior-level but with a different job title and without paying people a salary.
I think AI is a very good example of science advancing much faster than wisdom in society. I think as these large companies continue to implement AI to increase profits while simultaneous driving out the working class, it’s only going to further drive a wedge between the upper and lower class. I foresee a “dark age” of AI characterized by large unemployment and a renewed fight focus on human rights. We might already be seeing the early stages of this in some industries like fast food and with the Hollywood strikes.
We might already be seeing the early stages of this in some industries like fast food and with the Hollywood strikes.
It’s not even a might, we are absolutely seeing the early stages of this. The dark age will also involve vast amounts of misinformation and just plain bad information spewed out by AI writing tools because they’re great at that, which will make it more and more difficult to find true information about anything. We’re going to be snowed in by a pile of AI garbage, and it will happen faster than anyone is prepared for because speed and amplification are the whole point of these tools.
The best outcome so far is that this issue is prompting more workers to unionize.
