"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." -- Upton Sinclair
It's my experience that coders, software engineers, accountants, and other STEM professionals regularly dismiss that their jobs are threatened by the encroachment of advances in AI such as deep learning and LLMs. And, unfortunately, the standard optimistic, hand-waving refrain of "There will be other jobs." denies reality that they may well make less money elsewhere, be under/unemployed, or not be able to retrain. I foresee a widening excess supply of skilled individuals who will face difficulties finding any job that either: pays enough OR where a potential employer doesn't deem them "overqualified." (In addition, almost all of the professional class bets against their own interests by being predominantly anti-union, even when they're under/haphazardly paid or overworked.)
It will take more decades, but even nursing and care will be automatable when AI and mechatronics advance sufficiently. I look forward to the kitchen and bathroom cleaning robots. These are moonshot projects that require 100M-1B and multiple decades to attain.
I am optimistic for all those professions you listed, because those are all knowledge workers.
I like that term because the vagueness is actually helpful. Ultimately these people work to become experts in various knowledge systems.
And the other thing that’s happening while AI is advancing, is that the educational system is borderline collapsing.
So what that means is that, even if AI automates a ton more coding, even if it’s capabilities keep improving, the net effect of that will still be to add more complexity: and that means the jobs of people who are doing that type of job now, are going to get more complex.
Someone has to make sure the AI data lake processor is feeding data into the chat room that displays daily metrics, for example. Now take that example and multiply it by 100, for all the new capabilities AI will create.
So maybe you don’t write the app necessarily, because AI does, but because of the fragmented nature of various vendors and services, someone still has to make sure the app talks to the DB, which talks to the AI chat bot, which does a new kind of real time metrics analysis made possible by AI. I really don’t think the demand for the type of well educated worker it takes to manage all that is being met, and won’t be for a long time to come. If you can do that work, your job will be safe.
Unfortunately, knowledge workers aren't a uniform hivemind, so your presumption is overly broad. Firstly, there is power law variance in capability for higher-ordered reasoning.
As automation increases and self-modifying systems are deployed, there is a risk of losing grasps on simplicity and understandable systems. There are increasing possibilities of clever obsfucation by complexity for intentional purposes of job security and vendor lock-in and unintentionally for facilitating machine (self-)manipulation (that sounds dirty but you know what I mean).
The number of high-income jobs is going to contract, but perhaps the high end will increase in pay in very limited numbers. I'm sure that the high end of IC7-9 will increase, perhaps with pay exceeding $10M USD/year in a few cases. I already know of people making $800-1.2M.
It's my experience that coders, software engineers, accountants, and other STEM professionals regularly dismiss that their jobs are threatened by the encroachment of advances in AI such as deep learning and LLMs. And, unfortunately, the standard optimistic, hand-waving refrain of "There will be other jobs." denies reality that they may well make less money elsewhere, be under/unemployed, or not be able to retrain. I foresee a widening excess supply of skilled individuals who will face difficulties finding any job that either: pays enough OR where a potential employer doesn't deem them "overqualified." (In addition, almost all of the professional class bets against their own interests by being predominantly anti-union, even when they're under/haphazardly paid or overworked.)
It will take more decades, but even nursing and care will be automatable when AI and mechatronics advance sufficiently. I look forward to the kitchen and bathroom cleaning robots. These are moonshot projects that require 100M-1B and multiple decades to attain.
https://www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_howard_the_wonderful_and_te... (2014)