not the poor companies!!! our ENTIRE economy is based on COMPANIESSSS nooo
That took an expert?
If you don’t train juniors you don’t get seniors to fix shit or to build you more AI.
Every C-Suite think they will be able to snatch senior devs that other companies will train.
This is already the case at companies like Valve and Netflix. They “don’t hire junior devs”…
I applied for a job at Valve a couple of years ago and was told that my over decade of development experience didn’t make me senior enough.
This has been the case since way before the LLM boom but it has definitely moved into a higher gear.
They really believe that seniors will move to their slop based company after all the shit they dug themselves into. The heads of these ceos must be full of unicorn shit and rainbows.
No, they think by then there will be AGI and pick up the slack.
Narrator: there won’t / wasn’t.
The bourgeoisie no longer holds any care whatsoever for sustainability.
Quire seriously, their only goal is to obtain enough wealth and power that they won’t feel the effects of losing any of it until they die. That’s their literal goal. All hell is allowed to break loose, but only after they die.
Let the other companies be the suckers that take a loss on training juniors into seniors
You know, those other companies that also use AI instead of hiring juniors.
Not to worry just let them burn the companies down themselves
Yes. And while I’m content to laugh at them, I also took the time to learn enough to get most of the technology stock out of my 401k.
They don’t care. They only care about short term profits. Capitalism only cares about immediate profits and doesn’t plan for the long term. The management at the top know they won’t be there when the system fails. They’ll get their massive paycheques and cash out their stock long before it crashes.
They can’t care. If they don’t relentlessly pursue profit quarter after quarter, they’ll be consumed by companies who will. There is no planning for the future, only profits.
Also the system selects for mental illness so a lot of the worst offenders here literally can’t feel empathy.
Wasn’t Amazon’s whole thing for a while that they weren’t going to relentlessly pursue quarterly profits? So they can care, they just often don’t.
Walmart used to, probably still does, use other stores as welfare generators for newer stores. The reason was/is because that means the new store can undercut all local competition long enough to drive them out of business and the jack the prices afterwards. Corporations focused so heavily on lying, cheating, and stealing do not do anything out of the good ess of their hearts.
Funny thing, Walmart tried to do exactly that when they were trying to get a foothold in germany, but failed massively, lol.
Companies can bleed ridiculous amounts of money if it means that they can push competition out of the market. Couple less profitable, or even negative, quarters are fine, if they’re expecting good enough return for that investment. So, they’re still firmly on track with maximum profit hunting, sometimes it just takes some money to make even more money.
see The People’s Republic of Walmart
I worked in the energy industry for over a decade and a half and I was amazed at how every CEO we had (because they rotated out every couple of years) seemed to only pick the actions that made stort term money while royally screwing over the next CEO’s tenure. And the crazy part was everyone knew this was happening. Some CEOs even stated the quiet part out loud.
The onus is on us, we senior tech workers, to gouge the absolute shit out of future companies to show them the error of their ways.
o7
Gen Z? This bullshit has been ongoing since the early 00’s. Every fucking company wants applicants with 5+ years experience straight out of the gate, with training provided by anyone else but them, and to pay the new hire as if they rolled out of their High School grad through the front door. Look to Gen Y if you want to see what’s going to happen again (more self-service kiosks and useless chatbots). Many of the kids training for these jobs are going to completely abandon their chosen career track in favour of work that’s responsive to their needs - things like actually responding to applications and paying their fucking rent/mortgage. I’m finding to people in their early 20’s who’re already sick of this shit, without a clear understanding of what’s happened to the labour market.
Warning a company is like talking to a wall. It doesn’t care about tomorrow, hell, it exists on exploitation of tomorrow for today. If you expect the free market or business to save you, youre fucked.
So I’ve been utilizing the big LLMs to help increase my productivity at work. And I have to say, yes, it absolutely makes me more productive.
However, I can only be more productive because I already have 25 years of experience in my field and I am already a senior and I can guide the “AI” to what I really need help with and I can see the mistakes it makes.
There is absolutely no way someone who hasn’t already been doing this job for 25 years would be able to just sit down with an AI assistant and replace me.
And my company has not hired any associate level employees who could replace me. All my peers are 5-7 years away from retirement. I’m 11 years away from retirement.
I had a manager tell the team that an LLM said we should be able to do a technical task so we should look into that.
I died a little inside.
I also use it, but exactly I know what I am looking for and what is BS…
The problem is that it doesn’t matter how useful and irreplaceable you know you are, if a company decides it’s replacing you with AI, they’ll do it anyway. They may decide later that they were wrong, and you were right, but it doesn’t matter, you’re still unemployed.
Companies shoot themselves in the foot all the time. You can’t count on them to do the smart thing, even if it’s obvious. The second some C-Level gets these the idea that they can save money by firing a bunch of people, it’s going to happen, no matter how ill-advised.
All a LLM gives you is three virtual interns in an expert’s trenchcoat.
Yeah LLM is a useful idiot that somehow read all the programming books. It can spit out a coherent sentence yet it doesn’t understand it. Comprehension is left to the user. It’s an advanced rubber duck
I just started messing with making a server, I’ve never done it before, never really wrote code before except an Arduino blinking light. I don’t think I would have gotten the server done, at least as well or as quickly without an llm. That said, even I notice it fucking up a lot and losing the plot.
I have found it really useful in identifying useful stuff in scrap piles, one of my hobbies is scrounging so that’s been good.
I have similar experience. LLM is about as good as Google was before enshittification. All it does it replaces 10 minutes of me searching for the correct piece of documentation with 2~3 minutes of using LLM to grab the same information.
Intern could find it for me in an hour, two if he used LLM since AI works much better with jargon.
AI should replace CEOs they’re all overpaid morons
Short term gains with no regards for the future. It’s the capitalist way.
and they wonder how China keeps coming out on top
And they’ll just hire more H-1B visa employees for more and more smaller roles, and they have them in an even tighter place than they could American workers. It’s not like they’re blind to the issue. It’s the plan.
There is an ironically a huge opportunity for upheaval of corporations because they are actually giving up huge amounts of control and leverage on their part.
Like at what point is their essentially company who’s sole job being brand making and management of contracts going to be side stepped?
I think offshoring/nearshoring is booming right now. Tons of “Global Capability Centers” being built. It’s even cheaper than H-1B.
They don’t care. That’s not this quarter.
Good, let ‘em ruin themselves. We need the people in healthcare and education anyway. In the meantime, tax the companies to hell because they’ve lost all value now they’re not even “creating jobs” in your country.
Not all that great for the people who now can’t get jobs.
Take me for example. I like to think I’m a pretty good software engineer. And I actually enjoy it. I’d be a pretty bad doctor and an even worse teacher (I’m also a man so that would limit me to teaching teenagers and older anyway, nobody wants men near children in education).
Don’t give much of a fuck about the companies, but a lot of people are now denied a career path that might’ve been THE thing they’re great at and enjoy doing. This is about several different fields, of which mine is one. I’m quite lucky I got in when I did. Otherwise I’d have to start considering suicide by now because I can’t stand manual labour or customer service.
the teachers i see employed at my school when i was in HS early 2000s who are male, that have been washed out from other stem majors, or have been gatekept from those fields altogether, not a good fit it pretty much reflect thier lack of interest in teaching.
Don’t you think that’s a bit much? People committing suicide because they can’t get their favourite career path? I have never heard of it being a problem. Before computers existed there were people like you and they didn’t all commit suicide. They chose the jobs that were available. Sure it takes some adjustment and it may not be a string of everlasting highlights, but let’s not get carried away here.
Not really.
It’s all about the rate of change: neoliberal globalization has brought down wages across industries, so fewer good jobs are left, and the not-so-good ones barely keep up the same standard of living.
From a neutral historical perspective, some serious pearl-clutching about jobs is not ill-founded.
As you say, people in the past facing these circumstances didn’t all commit suicide. Yet some did it explicitly, some did it indirectly with alcohol or other vices, others just lived less fulfilling lives than they otherwise would have. Nonetheless, we are very much encouraging deaths of despair en masse with our current societal outlook.
lower wages is the least of peoples worries if they cant even find a job anymore.
Society will adapt. It always has. People can make much more meaningful contributions to society than working at a desk at some software company. Let the AI do that. Humans are way too valuable for that. Meaningfulness of the work one does is one of the most important features of work satisfaction. Not everyone needs to be a doctor, nurse or teacher. Those are just the most common examples, but there are many more meaningful jobs where you are not simply an AI in human form slaving away at a desk job.
It is also simply not true that things like suicide and addiction rates were higher in the recent past. For example, look at drug overdose rates that have risen sharply in the past decades.
You’re sweeping a lot under the rug with that first sentence: Society will adapt. Yeah sure, barring global catastrophe, it will. Doesn’t mean people won’t die and suffer in the process.
I’m making no claims about good vs. bad jobs here; people can self-actualize however they like in my book. Nor was I making any specific point about epidemiology of deaths of despair in the recent past, but I think that trend serves to illustrate the overall point.
What am I sweeping under the rug? I’m not saying that change will be easy, but I’m talking about the end result. Too many people have made the wrong choices and got fooled by companies dangling big paychecks in front of their noses to work shitty office jobs.
You insinuated that in the past, people killed themselves more and had more addiction problems due to the fact that they couldn’t get the job they wanted. That is simply not true and just guessing at things you can’t back up. I’m showed you that the opposite is true: the data only shows that deaths of despair are getting worse than before we had all these bullshit jobs. Whether that is because of them or not cannot be said, but it shows that what you’re saying is not true.
So for the last few millennia, technology has automated away mostly manual labor and created room for knowledge work. The stuff that used to require a human brain. The “slave jobs” you’re talking about.
AI has the opposite effect. Engineers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, nurses are going to be mostly worthless (surgeons will still be necessary for a while and nurses will still need to administer IVs and such, but largely anything that’s not physically interacting with a patient will be automated away quicker). Anything creative is out the window too. AI can write 500 movie scripts in the time you can write one… And we were already trending towards slop with streaming.
The jobs that are safest for now are the ones where you don’t need to use your brain but your body. Physical automatons are more expensive to buy and maintain than subscribing to some AI agent service and the workers they replace are cheaper.
Many of the jobs you mentioned, especially teachers, doctors and nurses cannot simply be replaced by AI because it doesn’t have the human aspect. A teacher needs to motivate people and be a mentor, understand kids’ reasoning and not display basic facts. We already had books for that.
AI is still very bad at solving the complex issues that doctors solve. It can’t do a physical examination and not everything is based on hard verifiable data, but also experience.
And nurses? I mean, you can think of that one for yourself.
Yes a lot of jobs are at risk. Not all are equally at risk though and “mostly worthless” is a looooong stretch.
A teacher needs to motivate people and be a mentor
Technically that’s the parents’ job as much as the teachers’. Just need to push for parents to shoulder more of the load. And who says we won’t have a specialized motivator/mentor AI in a year or two?
understand kids’ reasoning and not display basic facts. We already had books for that.
But even a simple chatbot like ChatGPT is very reactive and can pretend very well to understand reasoning, just like a teacher. And every student can ask their chatbot for help at the same time. Personally, I’m from a small town in Estonia - I can tell you that when I went to school, I had multiple teachers who for sure would’ve been inferior to 2022 ChatGPT, let alone 2026 ChatGPT or Claude. We just didn’t have better teachers available in this shithole. I’ve had an English teacher that didn’t speak English (she was actually a history teacher and a poor one at that, they just didn’t have a real English teacher to assign to us that year), an Estonian teacher that didn’t really understand Estonian… IN ESTONIA. I have no idea where they dug her up from. And over the years, I think at least two IT teachers who barely knew how to use a computer. One of the German teachers and one of the History teachers also couldn’t stop telling their personal stories. Learned nothing in either of those subjects that year. Luckily most of those horrible teachers only ended up teaching my class for one year at some point or another.
Actually the most valuable thing about school that technology can’t replace is the physical building itself containing the students. Just having a bunch of other kids your age, who are also going through what you’re going through. That’s worth more than any teacher, as we learned during COVID when kids were deprived of it.
AI is still very bad at solving the complex issues that doctors solve
AI is still very bad at solving the complex issues that software engineers solve. Yet junior engineers are no longer finding jobs.
It can’t do a physical examination
Yes, that’s what I’m saying, there will be people whose job is nothing more than to do things like that, to provide the data. Then AI can guesstimate shit, and the doctor’s job will be just to verify that the AI didn’t fuck up. There’s no need to pay a great doctor that can talk to the patient, do a physical, come up with a diagnosis and solutions if you can just pay a mediocre one that just takes liability for the AI if it fucks up. You can also pay far fewer doctors. Of course there will be radiology techs, physical examination givers (might literally become a low wage job of its own to fill out standardized tests). Etc. But you’ll just have one or two specialized employees per task, rather than someone who needs a multi year degree and needs to know everything about the human body.
not everything is based on hard verifiable data, but also experience.
Good news then, because AI is literally 100% experience, 0% hard verifiable data. Chances are you’re adding to some future AI’s experience every time you fill something out on your EMR. Especially if it connects e.g radiology data to your notes.
And nurses? I mean, you can think of that one for yourself.
I already said they’ll still exist, but their job will be a physical interface between the AI system and the patients, more than anything. Maybe this’ll take 10 years rather than 2, but it’ll happen.
Yes a lot of jobs are at risk. Not all are equally at risk though and “mostly worthless” is a looooong stretch.
The ones least at risk are, like I said, low-paid physical jobs. Also any high-end executives. CEOs do nothing of real value, but they won’t be replaced by AI because they’re friends with the directors. Parliament/congress will still be around. Of course in my country they’re talking about using AI to legislate as well. Or perhaps they’ve already started. We’re fucking doomed, yay.
Safest bet in 2026 is actually trades, because that gets you a job where you still need knowledge and experience is worth something, but you also have to be present physically. Automating a plumber or electrician is harder than automating a doctor or an engineer, that’s just how it is with modern AI. But with how many people are now unemployed, those jobs will also start paying a lot less than they used to.
Remember, for any job, it doesn’t REALLY matter if the AI can do it well, only how well it can be sold to the government, or company stakeholders, etc. If an AI can do 20% of a person’s job and the person costs 10x more than the AI to employ… That person can be laid off and other employees will have to pick up the remaining 80%, for no extra pay of course.
At the end of the day, as long as we still need jobs to live, we’re all fucked. There’s going to be no real middle class under capitalism anymore. There’s a war on many fronts and our jobs going away or getting enshittified is just one.
To be clear I don’t think anyone’s losing their existing job tomorrow. Doctor, teacher, engineer, lawyer, whatever. I think getting into any of these careers is going to be very difficult soon, the salaries for new hires in particular, but also everyone in general, will drop hard, and AI will replace humans gradually, and perhaps not completely. But all of these jobs are going to be streamlined, with AI doing most of the thinking for you, and the human being there for liability only.
I don’t fully blame them, as much as it’s a but of an extreme take. I’ve been out a job for two years. It shohld be easy enough and yet I can barely get a response and almost never get any feedback. Sometimes I get “you don’t have enough experience in this thing that only a firm like us can provide but fuck you.” And then the alternative is being told to go get exploited for minimum wage and disrespect? I did all this and now I just have to start at square one plus debt for even less money than I was getting before? And I’m good with my hands but I’m not getting a job without other experience, so I have next to nothing to go by.
Well yeah, but your situation is much worse imo. Not being able to get a job at all and not getting your favoured career path are two different things. Not working when you want to work is much more depressing. I understand that it must be hard to get a job right now. Especially if you work in a sector that is under pressure from AI. A lot of companies aren’t hiring because of it. But things will never be the same as they were before AI. So many people will need to get a different education towards a field that isn’t as threatened by AI.
“Especially if you work in a sector” is exactly what you’re saying shouldn’t matter though, no? I could probably go get hired for something pretty quickly, if I was willing.
Definitely not. I said some sectors will be more affected than others and that people who are replaced with AI can work in (other career paths like) health care or education.
There are still sectors that have a lot of job openings and of course you don’t need to become a burger flipper but #2 is health care. And I’m sure you can imagine that with an aging population the job openings will only increase. There are a lot of jobs that only require high school, or if you want a better job, take a course.
Your first comment clearly said that sometimes leaving a sector for one with more available jobs is necessary. To be honest, I don’t fully disagree, but it does make the reply to my comment a bit contrary.
Anyway, changing paths isn’t always so easy for a variety of factors, especially if you’re in a situation like myself where you get little to no feedback on why you aren’t getting hired. Spending time and money on official training that turns out wasn’t even the problem is only going to make the problem worse.
Hell, here in Canada, for sure I could consider gping into healthcare but also many provincial governments are crippling healthcare(they’re trying to break everything so it can be privatized) so it’s not really a great sounding idea. Logic and morality do not often apply to the job market, unfortunately, and that can leave a lot of people feeling completely out of control. You work to build up a career and then it disappears for no reason leavjng you to start over like you’re a teenager again except now no one will hire you because they say you’re going to expect too much.
I can guarantee they could also find a minimum wage job at McDonald’s or some such, no problem. It’s just the whole not wanting to do that that’s an issue.
Nope. I’ve read enough threads on Reddit where people can’t even get a Minimum Wage job because those are getting overwhelmed with applicants as well so those kinda jobs also have become hard to come by and require experience.
Well shit, some countries might be having it even worse then. Here at least there are still plenty of openings for grocery stores, fast food restaurants and gas stations. Pay is shit, work is grueling, but they never stop hiring. My point really was that these are the jobs we’ll have to start choosing from, as opposed to the jobs we want to do.
Find me a meaningful and challenging job that doesn’t get boring over time, that I don’t need a degree or any sort of artistic talent for.
I doubt you’ll be able to. The only job I ever held before my current career was refurbishing laptops and I can tell you most of us wanted to kill ourselves. Half the guys were on antidepressants.
What do you mean? There are plenty of jobs in health care alone that don’t require extensive training at all. They don’t get boring since you meet new people every day and it is meaningful work, which in turn is a big part of why people are satisfied with their jobs.
Edit: can the downvoters at least explain why they are downvoting? What I wrote is 100% true, unless I am missing something big here. So please enlighten me why you feel the need to downvote something so obviously true.
Doctors need an M.D. Nurse is a 4 year degree. What can you do in healthcare other than janitorial work without a degree?
Do you really think doctors and nurses are the only people who work at a hospital or in healthcare in general? Even in a hospital doctors and nurses are about half of all personnel. People need daily care, need food, need someone to help them get from one place to another, like when they need to get medical exams.
Outside of a hospital there are plenty of jobs that bring you into contact with people that don’t need an extensive degree. Maybe a couple months of training.
Those are not jobs that would give me any fulfillment whatsoever. What are the complex technical problems to solve in feeding someone? In moving them around? It’s exactly the same as factory assembly line work. A monotonous grind with no end in sight, nothing gets “done” because there’s a bunch more of the same every day until you retire.
I’m psychologically incapable of doing these types of jobs. Yes I’m medicated and no it doesn’t help too much. I have crippling ADHD. I’ve done factory work before and like I said, it makes me want to off myself. This was the type of job we were supposed to let robots handle, not the ones where we actually get to use our brains.
I also don’t see “bring you into contact with people” as a positive for a job in any way. I’ve found that any time I have to work with customers, they can be absolutely annoying idiots. Just hanging out with people I actually like is a completely different proposition. It’s just that when people need something, they rarely know what they need and you have the options of either making them angry by suggesting they’re wrong, or making them angry by letting them be wrong. To be clear, I don’t consider myself immune to this. See me walk into an automotive paint store or a doctor’s office and my questions and ideas are probably very stupid. But I make up for it by not arguing when I’m being corrected by the person that actually knows what they’re doing.
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Except healthcare and education are also getting dismantled.
And the companies aren’t being taxed.
There are a lot jobs that a computer simply cannot do, because they are not humans. Especially the ones that require human contact and interaction. Until we have a robot that can mimic a human those jobs are safe. The jobs that require you to make calculations or provide input into a computer are most at risk.
And I know the companies are being taxed, that’s why I said let’s tax them.
There are a lot jobs that a computer simply cannot do, because they are not humans.
Yes.
Until we have a robot that can mimic a human those jobs are safe.
No.
You’re assuming corporations will wait until the robots are capable of replacing humans before replacing the humans with robots.
There’s still rules and shit. Maybe not in the US, but here you can’t simply replace a nurse with a dysfunctional robot. You need to prove it works.
I wonder what country’s workforce the MIT expert was talking about when he warned or AI replacing jobs.
You’re right though, they’re not replacing nurses with AI. They’re just eliminating the positions, forcing those who are left to pick up the extra work, and closing rural hospitals.
Nowhere does he or the article mention a country and “Gen Z” sounds like a pretty broad term, don’t you think? There are more places in the world besides the US.
And anyway, I’m not talking to him, I’m talking to you. And since AI exists outside the US as much as it does in the US, what I said applies to the entire world.
Okay, that’s great for everyone outside the US who aren’t going to be losing their jobs to AI.
Not sure if that’s much of a consolation to the literally millions of people in the US who are losing their jobs, or unable to even enter into the workforce.
Can you name 5 jobs where human contact is strictly necessary and I’ll see if I can explain how AI will replace those people anyway?
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Social worker
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Psychotherapist
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Teacher
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Nurse
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Lawyer
Bonus: Diplomat
Uh the first two mostly just talk to people. Definitely getting replaced by a chatbot soon.
Teachers already use AI to create lesson plans and grade tests. There’s a huge push to use even more AI in schools. The human element of having a teacher present is valuable, but unfortunately not easily measurable in a short term study so I’m fairly sure teaching jobs will be axed. I mean you don’t have to get rid or every teacher, just increase class size 4x and you can already get rid of 75%.
Nurses, like I’ve mentioned before, will be there just to do the physical tasks. IVs, shots, etc. AI will decide what painkillers to administer, etc. Then nurses can be paid half as much and you’ll need half as many. Automate the meaningful part of the job, leave the easily trainable.
Lawyers are already using AI en masse. It’s resulting in loads of crap, but it won’t for much longer. Just need appropriate MCPs to validate citations. The issue at present is using a regular chat interface target than a tailored agent.
Diplomats (and similarly, CEOs) indeed can not be replaced. Those jobs require consuming alcohol with other parties at the negotiating table, which AI can’t do.
For most jobs, AI will just automate the thinking and decision making parts. Someone else needs to sign off and/or do the physical parts, but that means you can lay off most of the workforce and reduce the remaining part’s pay since the job is streamlined and unemployment is high.
Guys, I found Elon’s lemmy account
Yes, Elon for sure wants to tell everyone how the capitalists are replacing workers with AI and this isn’t going to end well without socialism.
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i dont think tech can suddenly switch to education/bio as easily, because you will have to go through school all over again. the vice versa might different though. other than nursing other job markets are not as available, and usually geared towards woman , as they get a large leg up in the universities through many initiatives. the cost is also more expensive assuming a person in tech decides to try to get into bio, as a post-bacc.
tech was the only good way to make a living outside of most other stem fields, which has poor prospects in thier industries.
Do you have any examples and proof about how women are “getting a leg up in the universities”?
Point is: sulking never helped anyone. Take control of your life.
ReadNot optimize shareholder valueA big, giant “no shit” moment.
Where have we seen that before? The computerisation of companies and governments in the 90s? As I recall the most junior entry level jobs went causing massive skill development problems and shortages of trained staff to fill vacancies that went on for years.
The rich hedonistic elites do not care for their lives are too short and too fast.
If all options to escape judgement are exhausted, they will just leave the server.
