I don’t think removing the human oversight element is a good thing.
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Thanks for pointing out the subscription, I had missed that.
And thanks for sharing your experience.
I’m not sure whether to post this here on Job Prospects for current seniors (maybe both).
It’s already been posted in the Job Prospects thread
Meanwhile, we are swamped with work. There aren’t enough engineers up here. I think AI will have a similar impact as CAD drafting. After the introduction of CAD, fewer draftsmen were needed - an engineer and one draftsman can handle most jobs, even large ones (sometimes the engineer can do his/her own drafting but a lot of times it’s more economical to use a draftsman). And now AI will help engineers streamline their calcs. But fortunately there’s no way for AI to go out in the field and figure out everything that needs to be done. I’m sure it will improve, but right now AI isn’t doing great with structural engineering questions (I’m on a couple of forums where people talk about it). I’m kind of glad we’re close to retiring, though!
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I haven’t seen anything posted about Elon Musk’s latest comments that even the most skilled human surgeons will be replaced by AI within 5 years. I had an interesting dinner conversation about this with my surgeon husband and my techie son. Husband’s response was that it’s hard to imagine given that the robotic surgery we have today is not automated - surgeons are controlling the robots. But at 55, he will probably be ready to retire before he is replaced by a robot. My son’s response was that someone should tell Elon that it is much easier to replace a CEO with AI than to replace the medical profession. Lol
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Based on my former interactions with software engineers, I am positive Elon Musk substantially underestimates how complex a human body really is. I think surgeons’ jobs are quite safe for the foreseeable future.
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Likely true with respect to surgeons. I would guess that in some fields, AI will reduce a fair bit of diagnostic work.
And junior lawyers and paralegals for sure as examples. As the article said, “five 22-year-olds with ChatGPT could do the work of 20 recent grads.” I wonder if this means we end up with the same number of partners or fewer partners when all of this shakes out.
As I think I observed earlier, the technical folks typically seem to overestimate the speed of penetration of a new technology but underestimate the breadth of penetration.
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Musk has been massively overpromising and missing for years, I would add 20 years to any prediction he makes.
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The term (AI-first company) is the latest fad, but it reflect things that are actually happening.
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I’m sure Vinod Khosla loves to be sensationalist, but here’s his prediction:
Well, isn’t that special. And people wonder why young folks don’t want to have children.
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The issue here is if we don’t have workers, then we have no economy.
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He is so full of it.
If we don’t have consumers, we will not have economy either.
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Yea. I think he is clearly being provocative. He also is probably ignoring the new jobs created. However, I read an article about a law firm that was reducing its hiring of associates. He was thinking that one junior attorney who was highly skilled with AI could do the work of five junior attorneys of old.
But, as @anomander pointed out, some of these junior attorneys could be given additional kinds of work that would make the firm more competitive with other firms. Or that work could be done by someone without a law degree.
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We called a restaurant for a reservation the other day and the Voice that first answered sounded amazingly human, but there was something about it that let me know it was a bot. I asked if it was a bot and it said it was an automated system, but that it could answer most questions. No surprise it couldn’t answer my question and I was able to get transferred to a real human but boy that sure was creepy how Human sounding that voice was.
One of my kids works in the AI field, and I asked what their opinions were about bots sounding the human versus sounding robotic. He said there were mixed opinions about it. I’m going to inquire further because it was really creepy to hear that sound so human.
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This is mostly not about white collar jobs but Amazon has installed its one millionth warehouse robot.
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Personally, I doubt it’ll replace white collar jobs. AI is making progress fast, but it’s still a computer, and it’s limited by the programmers that code them. Human intuition is something that can’t be imitated.
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that- and what kind of economy will we have - it would have no consumption - and kill everything.
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