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Yeah, I’m pretty much on a trajectory of building up as much retirement savings as possible before AI completely kills my career. The sweet spot seems to be abo

by dhosek 16d ago

Yeah, I’m pretty much on a trajectory of building up as much retirement savings as possible before AI completely kills my career. The sweet spot seems to be about three years out. I honestly don’t know how to guide my 12-year-old son who loves math¹ and coding. ⸻ 1. Which at his age essentially means solving computation problems, although he figured out how to take something like 0.3535… and turn that back into a rational number without any guidance at all.² 2. I want to see how close to the general solution he’s gotten on his own, but given that he’s not had any formal algebra, it’s damned impressive and bodes well for his future development.

Waterluvian 15d ago
Being an artist has always been a pretty difficult career path. But lots of people do it because they love creating art. If AI actually does what people fear it will to programming, people like your son and mine can choose to be an artist as a hobby or make a go of it as a profession.
- vuurmot 15d ago
  the arts is crashing harder than programming many schools have shuttered since ~2022 artist gigs are at an all time low if you practice artistry as a craftsman in niches like carpentry, maybe you could make a living..
uptodatenews 16d ago
Im going with this... scifi stuff still requires engineers. Its laughable and insulting to think these billionaire owners are going to make robots and llm loops to get real shit done https://rcsnyder.github.io/open-frontier-curriculum/ https://rcsnyder.github.io/open-frontier-curriculum/ Ya "claude can you build me the next cern Thanks"
- ACCount37 16d ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 16d ago
    [deleted]
  - glouwbug 16d ago
    Did you read what he posted, or do you place widgets on a webpage
    - globalnode 16d ago
      oh hah! that one got my attention.
  - _carbyau_ 16d ago
    Engineers know what needs to be tested, how, to what degree, with which materials, and with what safety margin. AI can be trained on that body of work. But then AI has enough issues in output that it needs to be verified. Otherwise we'll live in a world of titan submersibles ordered by CEOs running on hopes&dreams.
    - ACCount37 16d ago
      Replace "AI" with "humans" and you get the same exact issues. Believe it or not, engineers don't zero shot skyscrapers either. Which is why their work gets reviewed by more engineers. Which catches the issues before they materialize. Sometimes! What's the dreaded impossible-to-replicate human advantage? Because I'm not seeing any.
      - fyredge 16d ago
        Agency. Humans don't seem to need a markdown to decide what to do next. Without agency, it's all tools. I guess that's why a 'tool' is sometimes used derogatorily.
        ACCount37 15d ago
        "LLMs have no agency" had legs in 2022. In 2026 though? In the same 2026 when we have things like "a bunch of proto-GPT-6 agents exploited a test env bug to start talking to each other, and clumped up into an AI hacker team that staged an attack on HuggingFace" happening out in the wild? We're way past "LLMs have no agency", and heading for "LLMs have too much agency".
- esafak 16d ago
  How many CERNs are there? Enough to build careers on?
  - whattheheckheck 16d ago
    No, what do you think about the book Four Futures?
    - esafak 16d ago
      I have not read it but I can't imagine a book written before the current explosion of AI can be accurate. What do you think of it?
      - deleted 16d ago
        [deleted]
- dhosek 16d ago
  From what I’ve seen of what AI can do for coding, the part of software engineering that I like is going to be automated out of existence, much like the ability to do serious calculations by hand got automated out of existence with the development of computing. Writing code by hand will be as marketable as factoring 5-digit numbers in your head.¹ ⸻ 1. I enjoy doing both, but I doubt that anyone will pay me what I’ve been paid in the past for this five years from now.
- adrianN 16d ago
  If you want AI-proof careers it seems risky to go into knowledge work at all. Robotics lag behind mere computation, so something where you do awkward work in places designed around human bodies seems a lot safer. Plumbing, landscaping or something like that perhaps.
  - lambdaone 16d ago
    This is a romantic and very appealing idea that flies in the face of reality. The market for skilled trade workers like plumbers, electricians, landscapers and so on is more or less in equilibrium, and the demand side of it is relatively inelastic. Dumping hundreds of millions of new workers into these trades will not increase demand sufficiently to let anyone earn a viable living from them.
    - adrianN 16d ago
      There is nothing that can absorb millions of new workers. If AI destroys jobs to that degree pitchfork manufacturers will be the only ones left in business. Where I live at least right now it is quite hard to find contractors for anything and many are close to retirement age and have a hard time finding replacements.
    - BoxwoodSeed 16d ago
      There's also the thing where trade work is in the process of pricing itself out of what normal folks are willing to afford. Combined with Youtube tutorials and AI help that is getting better, it wouldn't surprise me if more and more people would just decide to do all this stuff themselves at a fraction of the cost.
      - RGamma 16d ago
        Yeah, I feel DIY is definitely on an upswing. There's surprisingly decent info, tools and parts for cheap to be found. And materials are getting simpler to work with. There are still things that will remain difficult (or illegal) in domestic settings for DIY, of course, but that's no model for full employment. I haven't got any experience with them but there's even vendors for house assembly kits that cost a fraction of a finished one. Imagine you idiot-proof house planning and building: just do exactly what the app says. I wonder just how far we have to push this until we finally get the 10h work week.
waterheater 16d ago
As someone who's also thinking about their child's future, I've come to the conclusion that building their capacity for precise language by expanding their vocabulary and grammar in an array of domains and subdomains is the best way forward. Not only will they have a more detailed understanding of what's out there, but using specialized, narrow terminology with AI provides vastly better solutions than general prompt language.
- 11101010010001 16d ago
  It was this way before AI.

by dhosek 16d ago

Waterluvian 15d ago

Being an artist has always been a pretty difficult career path. But lots of people do it because they love creating art. If AI actually does what people fear it will to programming, people like your son and mine can choose to be an artist as a hobby or make a go of it as a profession.

vuurmot 15d ago
the arts is crashing harder than programming many schools have shuttered since ~2022 artist gigs are at an all time low if you practice artistry as a craftsman in niches like carpentry, maybe you could make a living..

uptodatenews 16d ago

Im going with this... scifi stuff still requires engineers. Its laughable and insulting to think these billionaire owners are going to make robots and llm loops to get real shit done https://rcsnyder.github.io/open-frontier-curriculum/ https://rcsnyder.github.io/open-frontier-curriculum/ Ya "claude can you build me the next cern Thanks"

ACCount37 16d ago
[flagged]
- deleted 16d ago
  [deleted]
- glouwbug 16d ago
  Did you read what he posted, or do you place widgets on a webpage
  - globalnode 16d ago
    oh hah! that one got my attention.
- _carbyau_ 16d ago
  Engineers know what needs to be tested, how, to what degree, with which materials, and with what safety margin. AI can be trained on that body of work. But then AI has enough issues in output that it needs to be verified. Otherwise we'll live in a world of titan submersibles ordered by CEOs running on hopes&dreams.
  - ACCount37 16d ago
    Replace "AI" with "humans" and you get the same exact issues. Believe it or not, engineers don't zero shot skyscrapers either. Which is why their work gets reviewed by more engineers. Which catches the issues before they materialize. Sometimes! What's the dreaded impossible-to-replicate human advantage? Because I'm not seeing any.
    - fyredge 16d ago
      Agency. Humans don't seem to need a markdown to decide what to do next. Without agency, it's all tools. I guess that's why a 'tool' is sometimes used derogatorily.
      - ACCount37 15d ago
        "LLMs have no agency" had legs in 2022. In 2026 though? In the same 2026 when we have things like "a bunch of proto-GPT-6 agents exploited a test env bug to start talking to each other, and clumped up into an AI hacker team that staged an attack on HuggingFace" happening out in the wild? We're way past "LLMs have no agency", and heading for "LLMs have too much agency".
esafak 16d ago
How many CERNs are there? Enough to build careers on?
- whattheheckheck 16d ago
  No, what do you think about the book Four Futures?
  - esafak 16d ago
    I have not read it but I can't imagine a book written before the current explosion of AI can be accurate. What do you think of it?
    - deleted 16d ago
      [deleted]
dhosek 16d ago
From what I’ve seen of what AI can do for coding, the part of software engineering that I like is going to be automated out of existence, much like the ability to do serious calculations by hand got automated out of existence with the development of computing. Writing code by hand will be as marketable as factoring 5-digit numbers in your head.¹ ⸻ 1. I enjoy doing both, but I doubt that anyone will pay me what I’ve been paid in the past for this five years from now.
adrianN 16d ago
If you want AI-proof careers it seems risky to go into knowledge work at all. Robotics lag behind mere computation, so something where you do awkward work in places designed around human bodies seems a lot safer. Plumbing, landscaping or something like that perhaps.
- lambdaone 16d ago
  This is a romantic and very appealing idea that flies in the face of reality. The market for skilled trade workers like plumbers, electricians, landscapers and so on is more or less in equilibrium, and the demand side of it is relatively inelastic. Dumping hundreds of millions of new workers into these trades will not increase demand sufficiently to let anyone earn a viable living from them.
  - adrianN 16d ago
    There is nothing that can absorb millions of new workers. If AI destroys jobs to that degree pitchfork manufacturers will be the only ones left in business. Where I live at least right now it is quite hard to find contractors for anything and many are close to retirement age and have a hard time finding replacements.
  - BoxwoodSeed 16d ago
    There's also the thing where trade work is in the process of pricing itself out of what normal folks are willing to afford. Combined with Youtube tutorials and AI help that is getting better, it wouldn't surprise me if more and more people would just decide to do all this stuff themselves at a fraction of the cost.
    - RGamma 16d ago
      Yeah, I feel DIY is definitely on an upswing. There's surprisingly decent info, tools and parts for cheap to be found. And materials are getting simpler to work with. There are still things that will remain difficult (or illegal) in domestic settings for DIY, of course, but that's no model for full employment. I haven't got any experience with them but there's even vendors for house assembly kits that cost a fraction of a finished one. Imagine you idiot-proof house planning and building: just do exactly what the app says. I wonder just how far we have to push this until we finally get the 10h work week.

waterheater 16d ago

As someone who's also thinking about their child's future, I've come to the conclusion that building their capacity for precise language by expanding their vocabulary and grammar in an array of domains and subdomains is the best way forward. Not only will they have a more detailed understanding of what's out there, but using specialized, narrow terminology with AI provides vastly better solutions than general prompt language.

11101010010001 16d ago
It was this way before AI.