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.
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 don’t understand what you mean, how is saying you need to change from one sector to another contrary to saying some sectors are more under pressure from AI than others?
It’s the same thing using different words.
What I mean is I think people will have change their career paths towards fields that are less affected by AI replacement than their current one.
As to your situation, I don’t exactly know where you have tried, and why you aren’t getting hired. But the change may have to be more drastical than taking a certain course hoping to meet the requirements of the same job openings you were going for before.
And the health care sector isn’t perfect either, but it has a lot going for it. One being the certainty of increasing demands – or at least for the next twenty years or so – because of an aging population. Not many sectors have that kind of thing going for them. Another could be solar panel installer or something similar.
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.
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.
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.
Technically that’s the parents’ job as much as the teachers’. Just need to push for parents to shoulder more of the load.
Sounds like a wonderful plan.
But even a simple chatbot like ChatGPT is very reactive and can pretend very well to understand reasoning, just like a teacher.
Pretend. Yes. Thank you.
Teaching may be aided by AI. Just like books, blackboards, curriculums, videos, power points etc.
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
You told me I was praising AI. Then what do you call this? Guess each accusation is an admission in disguise…
Good news then, because AI is literally 100% experience, 0% hard verifiable data
Not the experience I was talking about. AI has read a lot of books. That’s it.
It’s already what teachers are advocating for, since they have too much responsibility currently, and parents often don’t have a big enough role in their kids lives.
Pretend. Yes. Thank you. Teaching may be aided by AI.
Yes, and that’s enough functionally. Actual understanding is not necessary if you can fake it to the point that people actually think AI is cognitive. Hell, did you read that article about Richard Dawkins now thinking Claude is conscious?
Just like books, blackboards, curriculums, videos, power points etc.
You do realize that videos and power points aren’t interactive and can’t generate their own lesson plans or grade tests, but AI can, right? You can see how that’s different, right?
You told me I was praising AI. Then what do you call this? Guess each accusation is an admission in disguise…
You were praising AI for causing people to be unemployed, essentially. I’m saying AI’s a danger to our society because while it’s still not conscious and in its current form never will be, it can displace large amounts of jobs because it’s good enough. It will be used by capitalists to restructure society so we can all be in relative poverty.
Not the experience I was talking about. AI has read a lot of books. That’s it.
LLMs have read a lot of books. There are other types of AI. Every day at work by interfacing with IT systems, you’re providing training material for future AI solutions in your field. They might not be LLMs at all. The contracts to train them off your patient data may not exist yet. But they will. Probably it’ll be Palantir sucking up to your government to get it. UK’s NHS is already letting Palantir hoover up healthcare data.
But good thing we can get rid of many doctors and teachers eventually, like you said about us engineers. We’ll need them for actually meaningful work in the trades and the hospitality industry.
Please stick to one thread. I’m not reading three different ones.
Yes, and that’s enough functionally. Actual understanding is not necessary if you can fake it to the point that people actually think AI is cognitive. Hell, did you read that article about Richard Dawkins now thinking Claude is conscious?
No it’s not LOL. Like you can pretend to be a very coginitvely smart and important person, but reality is different.
People say a lot of things. Now we get to make memes about them.
You do realize…
Yes. I realize a lot of stuff. Maybe if you challenge yourself a bit more you could have figured that out yourself. I also realize books don’t have moving images like a video and that a laptop is not a blackboard. Thank you.
You were praising AI for causing people to be unemployed, essentially.
So in your line of thinking, if I say it’s a good thing that the oil crisis accelerated the transition to renewable energy, am I praising Trump and the Irani regime?
If I tell you it’s a good thing Europe is improving their defence, am I praising Putin or Trump?
But good thing we can get rid of many doctors and teachers eventually, like you said about us engineers. We’ll need them for actually meaningful work in the trades and the hospitality industry.
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.
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.
That was not the question you asked. Health care is only one of the options. Go ask an LLM for some more ideas that are more to your liking if you don’t have the imagination yourself.
It was. I literally said challenging. I can only do jobs that use the brain, because otherwise I’ll want to kill myself. These jobs no longer exist at the entry level in most fields. I don’t think we’ll even have junior doctors or lawyers for long, let alone engineers and such.
Like I said, I have a job already, but many others like me will have to work jobs they hate for the rest of their lives. I can’t be the only one who feels existential dread at factory labour type jobs (which includes the ones you described in healthcare, I don’t see them being significantly different from working in an Amazon warehouse once you’ve been doing it long enough to be desensitised to the whole “at least I’m helping people” thing which just isn’t enough eventually).
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.
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 don’t understand what you mean, how is saying you need to change from one sector to another contrary to saying some sectors are more under pressure from AI than others?
It’s the same thing using different words. What I mean is I think people will have change their career paths towards fields that are less affected by AI replacement than their current one.
As to your situation, I don’t exactly know where you have tried, and why you aren’t getting hired. But the change may have to be more drastical than taking a certain course hoping to meet the requirements of the same job openings you were going for before.
And the health care sector isn’t perfect either, but it has a lot going for it. One being the certainty of increasing demands – or at least for the next twenty years or so – because of an aging population. Not many sectors have that kind of thing going for them. Another could be solar panel installer or something similar.
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.
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.
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?
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 software engineers solve. Yet junior engineers are no longer finding jobs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sounds like a wonderful plan.
Pretend. Yes. Thank you. Teaching may be aided by AI. Just like books, blackboards, curriculums, videos, power points etc.
You told me I was praising AI. Then what do you call this? Guess each accusation is an admission in disguise…
Not the experience I was talking about. AI has read a lot of books. That’s it.
It’s already what teachers are advocating for, since they have too much responsibility currently, and parents often don’t have a big enough role in their kids lives.
Yes, and that’s enough functionally. Actual understanding is not necessary if you can fake it to the point that people actually think AI is cognitive. Hell, did you read that article about Richard Dawkins now thinking Claude is conscious?
You do realize that videos and power points aren’t interactive and can’t generate their own lesson plans or grade tests, but AI can, right? You can see how that’s different, right?
You were praising AI for causing people to be unemployed, essentially. I’m saying AI’s a danger to our society because while it’s still not conscious and in its current form never will be, it can displace large amounts of jobs because it’s good enough. It will be used by capitalists to restructure society so we can all be in relative poverty.
LLMs have read a lot of books. There are other types of AI. Every day at work by interfacing with IT systems, you’re providing training material for future AI solutions in your field. They might not be LLMs at all. The contracts to train them off your patient data may not exist yet. But they will. Probably it’ll be Palantir sucking up to your government to get it. UK’s NHS is already letting Palantir hoover up healthcare data.
But good thing we can get rid of many doctors and teachers eventually, like you said about us engineers. We’ll need them for actually meaningful work in the trades and the hospitality industry.
Please stick to one thread. I’m not reading three different ones.
No it’s not LOL. Like you can pretend to be a very coginitvely smart and important person, but reality is different. People say a lot of things. Now we get to make memes about them.
Yes. I realize a lot of stuff. Maybe if you challenge yourself a bit more you could have figured that out yourself. I also realize books don’t have moving images like a video and that a laptop is not a blackboard. Thank you.
So in your line of thinking, if I say it’s a good thing that the oil crisis accelerated the transition to renewable energy, am I praising Trump and the Irani regime? If I tell you it’s a good thing Europe is improving their defence, am I praising Putin or Trump?
Aww so butthurt LOL. Grow the fuck up.
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.
That was not the question you asked. Health care is only one of the options. Go ask an LLM for some more ideas that are more to your liking if you don’t have the imagination yourself.
It was. I literally said challenging. I can only do jobs that use the brain, because otherwise I’ll want to kill myself. These jobs no longer exist at the entry level in most fields. I don’t think we’ll even have junior doctors or lawyers for long, let alone engineers and such.
Like I said, I have a job already, but many others like me will have to work jobs they hate for the rest of their lives. I can’t be the only one who feels existential dread at factory labour type jobs (which includes the ones you described in healthcare, I don’t see them being significantly different from working in an Amazon warehouse once you’ve been doing it long enough to be desensitised to the whole “at least I’m helping people” thing which just isn’t enough eventually).
So that’s what you were sort of cheering for.
I answered:
Also: quit being so dramatic. If you don’t even want to try you will fail for sure.
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