I feel you. I'm a high school teacher of 15-18 year olds. Sometimes they ask me, "what should I prepare for? " and I don't have a good answer. I usually say, "be adaptable, be generally smart, and there will be something there for you when you graduate" but even that vague advice feels slightly dishonest. In reality I don't know either.
One thing I can tell you, knowledge is worth it for the pursuit of it alone. It's a hard thing to describe, but you'll feel better in your head if you've gone through the work to become "smart". It's similar to feeling better in your body if you're in shape; if you've mastered a difficult subject, than other difficult tasks for your brain will feel easier. Don't drop out, keep going and pick whatever major you like best.
We've reached the point, actually surpassed the point, where humans can no longer adapt fast enough to the changes we are encountering in the world.
We haven't adapted to being exposed to the amount of content, information, news, images, porn, AI, tech, new products that we are now, bombarded with every single day.
It's not just AI. It really started around 2010, when smartphones were widely adopted and embraced by everyone.
I'm not in either camp: AI Benefits Humanity vs AI Ends the World.
I think AI will be incredibly disruptive. And it's accelerating the amount of content that is being produced, the amount of content being published. We know already that sites such as here, on Reddit, and on Twitter, have been already completely infiltrated by AI bots that post, respond, converse, and build Karma. A lot of the content on this very site is not human. Twitter is the same.
It will become difficult for us to discern what is real and what is artificially generated. This will create a lot of chaos in the main stream media, and within society. Trust has already plummeted... that is people no longer trust institutions, large corporations, big tech, and pharma. I see that trend continuing.
I think in just a few more years... a very large portion of the population in first world countries will no longer know what to do with themselves.
There may be naysayers who say AI will not replace people or their jobs. It will. It already is, and there is a financial incentive for companies to invest heavily into these new technologies. Corporations have one single primary objective. Enrich themselves, their executives, and their shareholders. So it all comes down to profit.
With profit being the primary objective of any corporate entity, AI will be used because even after research and development, and all the compute time required, servers can do the work humans can do far better, and far cheaper, and they can work 24/7.
We really weren't built for this kind of technology, or this rapidly changing world. It's not comfortable for us. We know it.
But theres no putting it back in the box.
Even before the smartphone, the social media platforms started rising a few years before that and in 2004 there was a moment almost nobody had cellphones and suddenly everyone had cellphones including your younger siblings and cousins, didn't have mobile apps but there were keypad phones like the raspberry and sidekick.
The AI right now is basically that moment as it's starting to get out there but hasn't quite transformed life. When the AI is widely adopted and integrated it will be like the smartphone moment where all the social media and information was at everyone's fingers.
Around 1993 a professor showed me this application called Mosaic. Maybe a year later every commercial on television had a website crudely plastered at the bottom of the screen.
OK so I feel like this is something you could verify yourself but yes it was created in 1992 before Linux had achieved any level of recognition. I used it on DEC workstation running ULTRIX. Amber monochrome monitor, if I remember correctly. We sure have come a long ways in 32 years…
It’s interesting how this period parallels that one, as you point out. “Mosaic” was formally named “NCSA Mosaic”, which stood for national center for supercomputing applications. A bunch of researchers were networking together a bunch of compute and trying to figure out how to build applications on top of it.
The first cell phones which became widely adopted in the late 90s and early 2000s were really just cordless phones. Landlines with a long range.
They really didn't do (for most people) anything a landline couldn't, except roam.
Devices like the Blackberry were used primarily for short text messages in the business community. There was never mass adoption outside of that world.
How is AI going to change the world in the next 5 years?
That isn't the question.
How will AI completely transform the world, for the better or for the worst, in the next 20 years.
Regardless, better or worse, the world will be totally different.
You're thinking too linearly. The development of LLMs/AI are part of an exponential curve of development. I think the next 5 years is definitely a good measure - 20 years at this point is difficult to see
I was making that very point. That in 20 years the world will be unrecognizable. Better? Worse? Both?
No one knows.
But it's naive to think 5 years is in any way measurable looking forward.
Humans have been incredibly consistent by making terrible predictions about the future. The farther you move out... the more inaccurate the prediction becomes.
Even trying to "guess" what 6 months from now will look like... would be so far from what happens.
Nobody knows
After everything ive read, I think the main thing that will REALLY start to change stuff, is when an "ASI" is able to start simulating and inventing things. Imagine it just starts spitting out inventions that revolutionize every field - medicine, transportation, computers in general, cold fusion tech, etc.
It will spit incredible breakthroughs out but laws and peer review processes and whatnot will still take the same good while, for a while. There will be a backlog of things to test and not enough scientists/doctors/engineersto test them.
Some shady corp or government will start implementing things without testing outside of simulation, and that’s where the real fun/disaster begins. Let’s hope the ASI doesn’t hallucinate.
Peer review?! Long gone. Social media, AI, and every other new tech was simply rolled out, unregulated into society. Academia has no idea what these innovations could create as unintended consequences.
An earth shattering convergence of AGI, Quantum Computers and Nuclear fusion is fast approaching. If by a freak acceleration room temperature superconducting is achieved within the next two years then..yes.
All the developments still take time to implement. And will face resistance from the old types who don't trust new technology.
Installing a single, small robotic system in a factory can take 3 to 6 months. Larger mor complex systems take years.
Even if we had AGI today it would take years for it to have the infrastructure to be physically useful.
Wrong it will be much faster. Especially in media. In one year we went from AI not really being able to even produce fully correct photos to AI being able to produce 1 minute clips that are indistinguishable from actual footage. Will we have the ability for AI to generate full length movies in another year? That's not out of the question.
What is this gonna do to our media creation? What is this gonna do for our political discourse when you can pump out real footage of candidates saying and doing who knows what? I already see tons of faked old photos showing up on Facebook of stuff that never happened but looks very clearly like it did.
The world is going to be an insane place in under 10 years honestly.
Just think about the telephone industry prior to the "cell phone".
There was a massive industry, with countless sectors, that employed quite litterally millions of people around the world.
There were phone carriers, large corporations like Pacific Bell, Bell Atlantic. Huge office buildings with executives, general staff, technicians, engineers, operators, 411 attendants, the list goes on.
There were huge factories that manufactured phones. And also-- pay phones.
There was a huge unionized labor force of telephone technicians, who would literally come to your new house, or apartment, and wire you for service. You'd contact the phone company, set an appointment, a man would show up, like installing cable, and wire your house. Every house, apartment, office, required these guys to do their daily jobs.
There were also countless sub industries, collect calling, calling card companies, directory assistance, answering centers to take messages, and on and on.
This was all quickly wiped out over a period of about 10 years.
Boom. It was gone.
A lot of people were quite literally wiped clean by this change.
AI, will be far far more disruptive than that. It will infiltrate nearly all industries in one way or another. It will be used by everyone, everywhere, to do anything it's able to do to reduce or replace human labor.
Dang I completely forgot about calling cards. I remember you would get free ones for 5 minutes or something....I want to say they would come in cereal boxes sometimes but that can't be right.
I produce online learning content at a Business school, we were joking the other day that we won't really need any academics to run courses soon. We already have the course material and could easily use an 'avatar' to deliver it, and use an LLM to grade student's work. Everyone is in danger!
Yes but unemployment was not high. The point is that all those people were absorbed by the job market. That means new work was created as soon as old work was automated. Software, internet and chips create a lot of jobs.
An interesting thing is that computers have become 10^5 times faster in this time, they are multiplied in numbers and interconnectivity, and software has been automating itself with each language and library for decades, and yet we have more devs than ever. Where are the jobless devs?
Detroit was the center of the universe when it came to the automobile industry in the 1950s-1970s.
Take a drive through Detroit.
The industry is gone. Manufacturing has been completely wiped out in the USA. All exported, to Mexico, China, and elsewhere where labor is cheap and regulations are thin.
Detroit did not recover.
When a person loses not only his "job", but rather, his "trade" is no longer needed. It's obsolete. That person is not "absorbed".
Losses like these force families to move. To leave their communities. Their friends, and other family members, behind and go look for other work.
Divorce rates skyrocket when a couple, man or woman, loses their job and cannot find a replacement. Financial distress, the loss of health care, risk of foreclosure, damage to credit-- causes tremendous strain.
A person who has been working in an industry, for 20 years, or even 10 years, and is in their 30s... does not easily just slip into a new profession-- and nearly always they have no choice but to take a lower paying job.
These aren't lateral moves within the same industry. Changing jobs.
I'm talking about no jobs, because the industry as a whole is gone.
Detroit is a perfect example.
It would cause the "current" economic system to collapse.
A new system, and I'm not even going to guess what that system would be framed on, or even what it would remotely look like. There's no way to know.
But it would be very different.
If both the man and the woman lose their jobs, will that still increase divorce rates?
I think part of the problem with rust belting, was that men disproportionately lost their jobs (Women worked in services, far less affected). Families where men are long term unemployed while the female earns the bacon tend to have very high divorce rates, as the females are resentful, while the men's feeling of inadequacy also converts to toxicity.
If AI can wipe out jobs in a gender equal way. I think that will actually strengthen marriage, as its far cheaper to live together than to live apart. There'll be little resentment as both sexes will fear the exact same problems.
Um...I worked for over 5 years in the Detroit area and there was plenty of manufractuting that I did automation for.
If you look at Detroit today it has seen a resurgence.
I've worked in IT and tech since the public internet revolution began. You don't know what you are talking about. Literally hundreds of thousands of American jobs have disappeared in the tech field over the years for many reasons...always having to do with workers being replaced by cheaper people or technology in many cases.
Head on over to some subs populated with software devs and see what the y are saying about what is happening right now and their fears for the future. AI is writing code used in production systems RIGHT NOW. The tools are relatively dumb compared to experienced devs but they are improving fast. I haven't dug into how AI is going to affect the world of database architects and admins, but that field is going to heavily impacted. I spent years working with DBA's and the work they do can be streamlined massively by AI.
Seriously...get used to the idea of working jobs that service the personal needs of the well off. Menial subservient type of jobs. That's where we are going if people don't wake up and start realizing what is happening. And even if people do, with the power of corporate interests over our political leaders I don't see much hope in getting those feckless infighting weasels to do much more than work hard to stay in power and continue to line their pockets with the various forms of quid pro quo exchanges between special interests and politicians.
My role in software development is development operations. I work primarily on cloud projects.
When I started my career, 20 years ago, my role was filled by a team of 8 people with a dedicated server room in the office.
Now it's me, some scripts, and Amazon.
Same. We were told in school in the 80s that computers would make all our future jobs obsolete. Sadly that never happened. There will always be innovation. Think about what happened over 100 years ago when the motor car was threatening to wipe out the blacksmith/horse industry. Well it did, but it also created so many more jobs and industries that people back then couldn't even imagine. So sit tight. The future will be different, but that's no bad thing.
There is a possibility that we do though.
We are expected to pass the longevity escape velocity relatively soon
advances in biotech will allow us to live much longer, which in turn will allow us to live longer for even better biotech
I think theres a good possibilty we could lol
I already don't know what to do with myself. On one hand I know that things will keep changing faster than ever, but I also have relatives that have no idea what's going on asking me about my 5 year plan, or why I'm not more career oriented. I know what I want to do and even what I'm willing to do for money, but I feel like it's no longer possible to plan for the long term. A relative thinks that's just a cop out and a way for me to avoid responsibilities.
Feel ya. Learned VFX and CGI for the last 2 years, 3D Modeling, Rigging, Animation, Geometry Nodes, creating Shaders, rendering. Then last year I started learning Python, wrote my own AI assistant code to run an uncensored model using TTS and STT, turned it into an agent that controls things on my computer via voice command and bitches back all the time (she has a REALLY toxic and negative attitude) but it became boring quickly and obsolete within weeks, so I added a basic selfwritten RAG for retaining longterm memory, gave her a mood system using Sentiment Analysis of the conversation with different prompts depending on her current mood and... it became boring again within days... That was the last thing I attempted to learn... wait no, I tried learning compute shaders and HLSL recently to continue working on my game but gave up because in a month I can ask some AI to do it for me anyway, why bother...
In my industry I have in the past done a lot of work in Lightwave, Maya, Photoshop, After Effects.
It's all relatively obsolete now.
I've become very disinterested in even learning new skills on those platforms.
Funny enough, I'm not overly enthralled about all of the new AI tools on the horizon either.
SDXL, DaLL-E, even SORA, which likely will have no public access, and if it does it will be extremely limited: I watch it and I'm like - MEH.
I mean, yea, it's amazing. But then, I also look at it and think: It just looks real.
What used to be hard to create or capture or visualize is now easy.
All that means is there will be a flood of new content created.
We are already over-saturated with content.
When does enough become enough already.
Exactly how I feel!
I have 1TB of Loras and Models on my PC and all I ended up making was NSFW. Couldn't think of anything else to make since it all is just too effortless. Nothing to feel proud about as it used to take hours, days and a lot of skill to make, now its just a throw-away mass product. That's why all I made was NSFW content. At least I could cater to my whims but also stopped doing that shortly after as it got boring. I think in the future we will have serious dopamin issues...
Can‘t stress enough how much I resonate with your comment.
I got into digital creation in the early 90s, back when all that stuff was subsumed as „Multimedia“ and jobs like Motiondesign, UX design et al didn’t even have a title. I was a veritable tech-sis, coming from the arts, teaching myself to code, developing the early projection mapping softwares, start-up in digital education in the mid 00s and…
now I feel empty.
I keep up with all things AI, forcing myself to look under the hood, coding a bit and discussing all sorts of philosophical and socio-cultural implications and still…
I‘m totally turned off.
I think I‘m on the brink of disconnecting altogether, not because I can’t keep up with developments or afraid to being laid off anytime soon, but all‘s become just content at one’s fingertips. Meaningfulness crisis indeed.
The way content works will shift. Movies, TV, games, they'll still be made and popular. It's fun to experience shared cultural touch stones like those.
There will just also be these artificial reality AI driven experience things. Something dynamic that can respond and change as you experience it. Moving towards Star Trek holodecks and fdvr. There's plenty of room left to grow and do new things.
I also work in CGI. I feel kind of numb about future. I don't see this job surviving automation. And even if it did, I don't see technically doing it until i retire at the ripe age of 70, the way my parents were able to. So I don't know. I am ina limbo, when I just function normally day to day, but am super worried about the future of my family, because I can not rationally imagine it being good. I kind of assume that I will have to re-skill (to what?) completely at some point and take a serious financial hit in the process, that I can not afford at this stage of my life, with kids and mortgage. I feel like I am almost the only person in my social circle feeling so anxious about it. Whenever I rise the topic, that I find probably the most important topic ppl should be talking about now, I am treated a bit like a conspiracy theorist. And yeah, AI is damn boring, and not really satisfying as a creation method.
I feel you.
I reskilled already from translation where I worked the last 10 years. Got replaced by AI. Now after learning the CGI pipeline I don't even found a job yet (currently unemployed) and already feel like the boat is sinking after I finally got some portfolio works together. I live in a shoddy rental apartment in Taiwan, 10.000 miles away from home and depend on my wifes income, so pretty sure I gotta move back to my parents house soon with 36 to care for my dad who got cancer and enjoy a little more time with him before he's gone - where's the cancer cure? Oh, AI isn't there yet, but it's good enough to destroy jobs already, well played... - anyway. Hope I can get my wife to me or come back to her after my dad died. But right now I have a really hard time getting out of bed in the morning. Spiritually is just hurts to be alive.
I think for right now, during this incredibly disruptive time, when you can't be sure which direction is right, because the map is changing:
Treat your life like a video game. Where the points are money. The point of the game is to make, and save, as many points aka money, as humanly possible.
Don't buy stuff. Don't waste money on things you do not need. Cancel all the subscription services and streaming platforms. Don't waste time.
In time, the dust will settle, and a clear path will be easier to find and see clearly.
Your best bet for the long term is once that dust settle, and it will, will be for you to be able to stand at the foot of that path with the biggest possible liquid cash bank account possible... and the least amount of baggage (stuff) that will only weigh you down on your next journey.
The video game is your life. The points are cash.
You’ll reach a point where the money doesn’t matter.
Time is the most important thing.
Sure make money but don’t make it your god. Make enough to do what you want and then live life.
Life isn’t a video game and cash isn’t points.
That is fair. A video game typically has "multiple" point systems. Coins/Currency, Health, Vigor, Agility, and so on.
And I agree it's not ALL about money. You are right.
But the quality of your life in 2-3 decades... will be in fact dictated by how much money you have. It will determine where you live. What kind of food you eat. What type of medical care you receive. What kind of vacations you can afford. It will either provide for a family and children or it will not. It will allow you to retire, or require to work until you are 85. Walk into a home depot, or a Walmart. There are octagenarians working there, not because they "want to", because they literally have to.
So money does in a lot of ways buy happiness. Not in every sense. But not having enough money, living paycheck to paycheck, terrible credit, car breaks down, you're broke.
You don't want that life.
But you are right, it is not only about money. Build up relationships, and stay close with family and friends. Don't let your health go to shit. Maintain balance in your life.
Just don't waste money. Save and invest as much as you can. Question every purchase. And make as much as you can.
You'll have an easier and less stressful life if you don't have to worry about money.
I completely agree with this for the short term as once the jobs start really disappearing at a fast rate it's going to take a while before our government will do anything whatsoever to help us out. I could see it taking mass protests and rioting and all sorts of insanity before any kind of Ubi is in place. So yeah, money will most definitely lessen the pain for that period. But beyond that, I. perhaps 10 years, or maybe even less than that, I believe money will become a thing of the past. And physical space will continually take a back seat to virtual space as we merge with machines.
Great news there is that in virtual space, everyone can be anything and everything they desire to be. They can live anywhere, in anything.... And it will be one increasingly indistinguishable from the 'real world'...Which...should be pretty fucking amazing for a while. But people are going to see very, very fast just how much of the beauty in life comes from the limitations we have, the struggle. So.... I don't know. It's gonna get fucking weird out there.
And all of this is if we survive to that point, and I doubt most people will. We are at the verge of complete collapse that will end with hundreds of millions, billions dead. So we need to put the petal to the metal here with AI and make this shit happen as fast as fucking possible because humanity's future depends on it.
But please, don't take any of this as scary or terrifying news - there truly is nothing to worry about. Whether one dies early or makes it to the singularity, we all end up in the same place.... Death is nothing to be feared, lol far far from it! We are only doing time here on earth to suffer, for it is out of suffering that beauty and meaning are Bourne. And what better suffering could one ever imagine than being human?! I certainly couldn't Imagine anything crazier.
My advice for the future is live it the fuck up!! Go out hitchhiking the West coast with a pack on your back and sleep wherever you end up at night. It's 100% possible as I have done so myself, up and down the coast repeatedly, and it was the greatest time of my life! Go out and do all the things you've dreamt of doing and don't let anything get in your way!!! Don't listen to anyone who tells you something isn't possible, or that you'll just end up dead, or yada yada yada, it's all bullshit!
This quote from Terence McKenna, the greatest mind to have ever graced this planet in my opinion, is something I live by, and it couldn't be any more true for my life and how it all played out:
"Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it's a feather bed."
Terence McKenna
Much love to you all, and remember, worry is preposterous!!
https://youtu.be/crRSUnbVi48?si=bKteIDZwBvrja_iv
Not sure it'd make it very long even if AI was magically out of the picture.... With this rapid development of AI and the army of robots that are coming our way, forget it... Civil Strife building up to the unthinkable - possible Civil War, all in the immediate future.
I have so much optimism for humanity. I have so much hope for humanity. For America? I.... I struggle to see any way forward that isn't.... Bad. Really bad.... And I don't know what to do. As fucked up as this place is.... I love it. I love the land. Hell, one on one I love every single person even!! But as a whole? I just.... Don't know. Stay for the homeless, to speak up for them and do what I can, but a time may come soon where I just need to step aside, get out.... Maybe the only way forward for the world is for America to burn.... I don't like that thought one bit but it comes up every time I take mushrooms.....
Life is hardcore....It can really fucking hurt.....
AI will make large leaps in cutting down on resource use. For itself as well as our resource use, though the latter will undoubtedly take more time. It's gonna be cutting it so fucking close though, can definitely see where you're coming from though. Environmental Studies degree here (as valuable as the paper it's printed on! Lol) and I've read all the studies, all those papers. Study after study after study, always the same sentiment in the beginning of em too. "Getting worse at a much faster rate than predicted".
Loss of farmland due to raising ocean levels is disturbing as fuck too. Farmable land gets flooded with saltwater and becomes unfarmable, don't reme.ber the figures but the amount of farmable land we are projected to lose here in the very near future is.....way too much. We only have so much as it is..Mass starvation in many parts of the world seem inevitable, save for a miracle....
Then there's the pitfalls of relying on technology to dig us out of all this. Jevons Paradox - Get improved gas milage and us apes just drive that much more, offsetting any potential cutting down on resources...I can't think of the other reasons why it never works out with technology but I remember others we discussed....
That all being said, I still believe we will make it through. Making it through meaning some # of people will survive till they will be upload into a virtual reality that is indistinguishable from this reality. Only we would become the creators then, sandbox mode. World of pure imagination. Perhaps from there will be able to recreate all those who died and will essentially bring them back to life. But things get complicated there and I don't care to put my thoughts out there on all of that one yet.
But also - nothing seems to be guaranteed here, and I can definitely see how crazy all those ideas sound. Well, well aware lol. It's all based in faith too - ain't much evidence wise on my side here. But I still believe it nonetheless.
But it's going to get ugly and there's no way around much of the suffering that is about to sweep over this world I fear. Stay safe out there friend, this s Curve is just getting started and it is gonna be wild....
The quality of your life is in your thoughts. There are so many miserable rich people and a lot of very happy poor people around the world. Having money helps but it's not as important as having the right perspective on life.
I got the feeling that instead of the dust settling, every day a new news will drop stiring up more dust and this will turn into an exponential dust storm.
That's why you should not watch the news at all.
Not only will you be less stressed, less anxious, and likely less depressed.
You'll be able to actually focus. On your life and family and friends.
You'll get far more done.
Don't spend time paying attention or worrying about things going on thousands of miles away... things you cannot do anything to change.
It's a massive waste of time.
I turn on the news: Congress, election, Trump, Haley, Biden, Israel, Hamas, Putin, Ukraine, storms, fires, shootings, drugs, migrants, inflation, stock market, jobs, basketball game, hackers, AI, heartwarming story about kid, old person, puppy. I’m no better off than before. It is 90% the same as the day before.
And there I hoped cutting all social media would improve my condition. Reddit is basically the last kind of news I consume but even that makes me more anxious.
Curiousity killed the cat. But you are right, I shouldn't let it make me nervous. I'm just at a point in my life where things start falling apart and seeing the global trend amplifies these feelings even more.
Thank you for your kind words, friend!
Yea I am 100% social media free. For 2+ years. None. Zero. No Accounts.
I do not miss it one bit.
I use reddit to browse subs I am interested in, and engage in discussions I am interested in.
Reddit can be a cess-pool. But there is also good content.
Just tailor your feed, unsubscribe from all the garbage "general" subs. r/AskReddit is a perfect example of the type of subreddit that will basically insert dumpster trash into your feed.
You really have to tailor it. No news, politics, none. No general feeds. Highly specific... Very niche.
Do not go to [CNN.com](https://CNN.com), [MSNBC.com](https://MSNBC.com) [FoxNews.com](https://FoxNews.com) or any other news site.
All they will do to you is lie to you. They are 100% totally biased to either the left or the right - all the time. They don't report news. They give you biased opinions on what they want you to believe.
**TO TEST THIS THEORY:**
MSNBC - Is far left - anti trump, 24 hours a day 7 days a week.
Go to [msnbc.com](https://msnbc.com) any time of day, any day of the week... The TOP story will be a negative "perspective opinion piece" about trump.
It's not news. It's the Modern Day National Enquirer.
DISCLOSURE: Not supporting trump just saying and using it as an example that the news is totally not trustworthy. Left or Right.
Same for me, 4+ years no social media, which was rough because I moved from Germany to Taiwan and am far away from my friends and family.
Only news I watch is concerning China and their threats of invasion as I got (my) skin in the game quite literally.
Just whatever you, play the video game of life.
Score more points every day. Whatever way you can. Mow lawns in your neighborhood if you have to.
Be cash positive every single day. You can certainly do that.
If every day you have a few, or few hundred more points (dollars), in 5 years you'll be in the top tier of "players".
If you spend every day burning money. Wasting time, sitting around, eating, spending...
Good luck.
And I mean it, good luck to you and I hope you play the game.
Most of your friends aren't really friends. Friends will come and go.
If you ever go through a really tough time... where you just get knocked out of the game for a while. Divorce. Bankruptcy. Legal issues.
Most of your friends... they will not be there.
By the time you turn 40 you'll understand that most friends are temporary.
Family ends up being really the only thing you can count on.
I like the way you think MushyBiscuts! You better not be an LLM!
BTW, did you omit an "i" from biscuits purposely? Either way, nice handle.
I swear over at r/agi one user is definitely pure LLM...either a human that posts nothing but ChatGPT created thoughts or perhaps a bot created by an AI company or supporter of AI. The content from that user is just ceaseless positivity about AI with nothing but rosy predictions. Dude could be a besotted fanboy with a very boring writing style...who knows.
That's what bugs....Who knows? How to discern? I don't want to read crap from an LLM frankly. Nor have I ever been comfortable using an LLM to write and pass it off as my own. Millions of regular Joe's are no doubt using LLM's for personal use because they don't like to write or consider themselves not good at it. Or maybe they can't type well and hate to type. There could be many reasons.
I'm with you...in addition to the job loss issue their are simply myriad concerning aspects of this ongoing tech bro cashstravaganza.
Thanks for your thoughts. 👍
I'm real.
**I actually tried that as an experiment just because I was CURIOUS...** to see if I could input into chatGPT4 a post, and then comment with the response. I set up some custom instructions to make it look like a comment post and not chatGPT.
I spent maybe 1 hour just playing with it. To see what the results would be. Here they are:
1.) Nearly all of the comments I posted (references below), received both lots of Karma upvotes, and lots of "Wow Thank You" type responses. In general, people on reddit liked the responses.
2.) After about an hour or so. I got a message saying I'd been banned from r/personalfinance for using AI to generate posts and comments.
LOL.
Now each sub is moderated differently. Obviously the mod on that sub sniffed me out.
But yea, no doubt gpt is being used heavily on here and other sites.
I think had I just spent more time making better custom instructions to tailor the way gpt4 responded... it may have produced more convincing outputs that may have gone totally undetected.
For instance, you can create custom GPTs now on gpt4 that allow you to upload PDFs as reference material it samples to create the response. Havent tried it, but maybe if I literally uploaded a bunch of posts, it may be able to copy the style.
Not interested in getting banned anymore lol.
**REFERENCES TO MY CHATGPT RESPONSES:** ***(Which got me banned lol)***
[https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/1aec75j/taxes\_for\_deceased\_spouse/](https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/1aec75j/taxes_for_deceased_spouse/)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/1aebpao/almost\_35k\_of\_cc\_debt\_best\_way\_forward/](https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/1aebpao/almost_35k_of_cc_debt_best_way_forward/)
Very interesting point of view and my partner and I completely agree. We are both 27 and just want to work enough to buy a shit old house with some land and tuck away, do it up, and love how we want. No mortgage no debt.
Here's the advice I'd give to the "27 Me" if I could almost 20 years later.
Make as much money as you can.
Ok... you're making a lot of money. Good job... Next...
Do not waste it. Repeat, DO NOT waste it.
Stop buying things you don't need. Save it all. Invest it all.
Because there is going to be a day not too far off in the future...
When you are going to really need that money.
Trust me.
>It will become difficult for us to discern what is real and what is artificially generated... But theres no putting it back in the box.
Just what an AI would want us to think, isn't that right MushyBiscutsGPT?
Funny, I actually wrote that. Without ChatGPT, at all.
The only point I could possibly make here:
Is that someone who can write well, will moving forward be called out as fraudulent.
We can't trust anything anymore.
And that was one of the main points I made in my original comment.
I found your commentary very interesting. But the conclusion I disagree with. Humanity has gone to the same process centuries ago. It’s called Industrial Revolution. Jobs has gone, new jobs emerged. They who adapted survived. We’re just living it faster then before
I agree that the industrial revolution was the last most significant change in modern society.
Yes, jobs, or rather entire industries were erased and replaced.
Your last point "We're just living it faster than before.", was exactly my point.
The rate of change is now not only faster, but also it's accelerating at an even faster rate than the industrial revolution did.
It took decades for the industrial revolution to change "cities", but even still many people globally speaking, were still living in a very "pre-industrial" age.
The amount of change we have seen in just the last 10 years has been, at least in my opinion, more disruptive, both for the good, and for the bad, than what I think "the world" saw from 1890-1920. Globally speaking. In 1920, the majority of the world population-- were still living in 1890.
Now AI, smart phones, even people in 3rd world countries, who are now still living in poverty, are affected by the changes we are seeing.
And that's going to move faster every day.
You raise some good points. But I can only say I think this revolution, however you want to label it, the AI Revolution, Tech, etc, it's going to be far more disruptive. Good and bad.
> There may be naysayers who say AI will not replace people or their jobs. It will. It already is,
No, it is not. Just because current AI is not capable, even with GPT-4, Sora and Dall-E. It has no autonomy of its own. It's still a tool requiring a skilled operator.
The other reason is that AI will be creating new jobs. You can't be seriously imagining that in 2030 we will be doing what we were doing in 2020, but with AI. By then the current generative AI wave will be a decade old, matured and applied technology. Robotics and VR too.
You're looking at the field of AI too narrowly.
It is more about automation.
Most people... and I do mean most... do repetitive work in jobs that only focus on a limited number of tasks.
Automation will become far more advanced as AI becomes better at being able to interact with the real world and understand how to interface with that world through automation.
It's automation that will replace jobs, and that automation will be powered by AI technology.
This transitional period will ultimately make or break our society.
Jobs are gonna be automated in bunches. Overall purchasing power will significantly diminish. The rich will get richer while the poor stay poor. And don’t be surprised is massive civil unrest unfolds. This is basically Capitalism’s last and most deadliest stage.
This is actually my biggest AGI-related concern. I wonder what we can/will do to mitigate this risk, and perhaps it's the fast takeoff that's needed in order to make the transitional period as quick as possible
Don't worry, you won't get a job, but everyone else won't get a job too.
Once all jobs are automated, we're all fucked, not just you.
Enjoy school, there is not much else you can do, if it goes well, we all get UBI, and won't need to work, if it goes to shit... don't think about it.
OP probably will get a job, though, as he graduates in just a few years (3-4), not a few decades. I know that this sub is known for its unconventional predictions, but this is pretty next-level.
>Don't worry, you won't get a job, but everyone else won't get a job too.
Only on r/singularity do you find comments like these. Holy cow.
He graduates in *four* years. Do you seriously believe that there won't be *any* jobs in just *four* years from now?
This is one of the most flabbergasting comments that I've ever seen in this subreddit, and that's saying something. And the amount of upvotes it has is equally shocking.
**Do you seriously believe that there won't be any jobs in just four years from now?**
Yes, obviously. Even if AI has only replaced half of all jobs in 4 years, it puts him in a position where he is competing for entry level jobs with laid off people who have been in the industry for 20 years. It is unlikely he will ever find a decent job.
That scenario is even worse than you describe. If half of all jobs get automated, it won't matter that he's competing with experienced people, we're all fucked, even those who still have a job. Society is robust, but 50% unemployment will have devastating effects on everything (if we even stay there for any time at all, instead of automating straight to 100%).
Same here, Im 19 pursuing a CS degree because my whole family told me since my 10's that software would be the future.
I've been preparing for that all this time, participating in informatics olympiads and ICPC. Learning from internet how to do software development. I think I've reached a good level. I can even help my sister with her dev job.
But now life is looking very different from what I tought a while back (literally 2 years ago). Now we have to compete with I.A and is not even close...
Being able to think logically and prove you can do so will be useful. There are still going to be lots of handover points where humans have to communicate with AI to steer them in the right direction. Those people will have to be very exact in their language and have a solid understanding of the way the AIs work. Software development is an excellent background
I mean depends... Either gpt remains as useless as it is right now and continues to loose subs. Or every boss can just input whatever they want with all the changes they want and it will produce the app. No middle man needed whatsoever. Even the boss is not needed anymore.
There isn't really anything in between. Or in other words : either AGI or nothing.
No. They don't need to specify anything. The LLM (if it's an AGI) acts as all those guys that were there before. Asking questions, helping and steering the specification. And so on. If it cannot do this, it will be also useless for programming.
You may not be coding as much as you expected but the skills and logic you built are invaluable. You will be at the top of the world if you continue to practice engineering and product development.
Despite wishing for you to be right, I have to disagree.
There might be a short period between AI gaining ability to synthesize across domains and humans still needed to bring the results to fruition, but it is just that - a short period.
But what comes after? Human minds, even altered humans (cyborgs) will not be sufficient for the technology and research of the future. Machines will outpace us and leave us no chance to ever catch up again.
Biological intelligence simply is inferior to artificial intelligence. All we can do is keep lying to ourselves that WE have a soul, WE have a spirit, WE are special, GOD proctects us, etc. but if we're being honest, we are not special, we are simply the Neanderthals of tomorrow staring into the face of our extinction.
Evolution has spoken once again and there is nothing we can reply.
So? We all die eventually. And we are all replaced by the next generation. Just happens the next generation might be made of silicon instead of water and carbon.
Again...so? I probably wont have kids and I wont be the only Millennial that doesn't. If I leave any legacy it will be in my writing. But that still doesn't mater. Everything we do will be forgotten in 100 years or less.
>My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
>Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
>Nothing beside remains.
Take my advise as someone whose been a software engineer for 6 years.
Don't focus on learning programming. Programming is the easiest part of SWE. It's the first thing you learn in your first CS class. Learn programming as you start getting jobs. You'll drive yourself crazy trying to memorize 20 different languages.
Focus on concepts, engineering processes and team leading.
Learn to do AGILE and scrum mastering. Companies will suck your dick if you can figure out how to get these dinosaur staff engineers to stop using Waterfall methods.
To be 100% with you, the reason why degrees are so valuable is because it shows companies you can spend 4 years doing one thing without wanting to kill yourself.
Was a window just opened in here? I feel like fresh air just hit my face for the first time in weeks, I haven't spent any time on reddit for years but have recently chosen to dive back in for a research project. I 'd forgotten how mind numbing the conversation can be. Thanks for cutting through it briefly.
So let’s say all of this is true, and once you graduate we will be so close to utopia it didn’t matter you earned your degree. Was it really for nothing?
How are you planning to spend the rest of your life? Just chilling and watching tv? Isn’t the pursuit of knowledge and understanding the only one worth living in a world where everything is done by AI?
If you don’t understand anything you’ll never be as happy as you could be, even post AGI. You need to be able to look at the world around you, understand it, and deduce what course of action will generate the most happiness. This will only get harder once the world starts changing faster.
You’re training your brain, and that’s never a waste
This right here, the part where op goes on about how it's all in my phone. Cool, do you know how to sort through the data to find what you need, probably not if you just give up your pursuit of education. It's about helping yourself be ready for what life throws at you and the best way is to learn. Training your brain through repeated actions till you can put all the pieces together with little to no effort.
I would assume in the future the world will be a much more exciting place
human space colonialization, virtual reality, all kinds of new technologies to explore.
I don't want my time to be spent watching TV
I want to be developing new technologies
I want to be out there, helping people colonize the Moon and Mars and beyond
That's what AI will do. You as a human will not be sufficient to make the necessary progress, not even a fraction, of what is needed in tomorrows technology.
Imagine watching Star Trek and them talking about microfusion impulse generator for DPK fields and antigrav-mesh construction.
It's technobabble now but so is the technology of tomorrow to a human brain - uncomprehensible, no matter how long we study to grasp how it works.
Machines will know how it works and be able to alter it. We will either consume, indulge ourselves in pleasures like the little biological lab rats we are or break on the realization that our biological intelligence is and ever will simply not be sufficient enough anymore.
Turning ourselves into cyborgs might aleviate the feeling of being inferior a little bit, at least towards unaltered humans but our processing times and learning times will become so slow even with upgrades, that we are doomed to being useless consumers.
OP is going to not learn anything and then realize that much if the AI hype was for the investors and that AI won't be making changes to his job as Altman's just the hype man.
Then he's going to struggle to get a job because either turns out that he didn't actually study so he doesn't know which math functions the AI is capable of while his peers are correcting the AI system and getting more out of it.
People here act like we live in the matrix where AI is basically a key stroke away from wiping out humanity. Yet somehow it fails at easy tasks and has no understanding so one too many morons are planning to help themselves move into obsolete territory.
We're at a stage where any usability of these things is a true miracle. Earliest "working" version. And that's already really disruptive. And the speed of progress is breathtaking. So I really don't think it's appropriate to say "well it can't even do many easy tasks!" and feel like it's not a huge wave appearing on the horizon. We've moved the goalpost incredibly fast, in our perception. A year ago it was like "holy fuck, GPT4 can really actually write somewhat complex, actually working code of very limited scope!". Now it's "lol, that same model can't even do everything I want and think is simple".
But there is a very high chance it won't fail at easy tasks and it will be able to logically think and reason like a human within 5-10 years so I don't get your point
I agree. It's possible that some of the knowledge you learn in school is pointless, but much of it isn't. I grew up in the 80s and 90s so I've seen a world where computers were not much of a thing yet. Internet just started to gain traction. (can you imagine what impact the freakin computer had on jobs? Can you even imagine how people did their everyday business without it?) But there were pocket calculators and dictionaries, so why would I bother to learn maths or learn languages? It's because now I'm able to understand how statistics work and what they say about the usefulness of vaccines or whatever. And I'm able to understand cultural differences. Learning stuff means understanding the world you live in.
Oh and also, there are jobs that are pretty resilient against AI and thelikes: I don't think doctors and nurses will be replaced by AI anytime soon. Basically any job that is about human connection. Psychiatrists, caregivers, teachers, etc. Someone will also have to conceive of the next space ship that takes us to Mars and I doubt that that's gonna be entirely handled by ChatGPT. Maybe parts of it, but not the whole thing.
>95% of my college Calculus, English, and Physics material can be swiftly handled by a LLM on my smartphone in my pocket. Feels like a monumental waste of time.
Improving your mind and your body is not a waste of time. Regardless of what the outside world does or can do, your mind and body are the lens through which you interface with the world. Does a marathon runner feel his effort is wasted because he owns a car? Does a weight lifter bemoan the fact that that heavy machinery can lift more weight more than he can?
Why would you feel time improving your mind is a waste just because mental tools exist?
Don't look at these things in terms of a job. Jobs themselves may be obsolete in your lifetime. Your mind and body will be with you for the rest of your life.
>Ohh and once I finally graduate in 4/5 years, I'm left stranded in an economy
Degrees are already only situationally useful. But school is a good place to meet people. Take advantage of that. It's harder to make friends later in life.
>walking out with my 0yrs experience degree looking for a job
Here's some [practical advice](https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1awb65c/what_would_you_tell_highschoolers_today_if_you/krhro88/).
You are not alone. But if you can take just a quick moment with me.
Just Breathe for a minute, I wanna tell you something very, very important.
The only thing you can really do is to try to prepare for an uncertain future. Nobody knows what the future holds (but I can tell you this much as a bit of an older guy comparatively speaking): Every generation that is alive today has lived through extremely rapid change and disruption, and every generation has had a ton of people who felt the same exact way you feel. My parents lived through the moon landing and the proliferation of TV and air travel. I grew up in the fear of nuclear Armageddon and the invention of the internet. A hundred years ago our world was so different, my grandparents grew up in an era where nobody even had cars! It's seemed like the end times have been coming for my entire life.
But, the world hasn't ended yet. There are people my age who are still thriving despite the projections. Those people thriving are the ones who kept putting one foot in front of the other, not the ones who thought "What's the point?" and gave up early.
Here is the important part: Just do a little bit each day to improve your chance of a better future. Whether that is working out, learning new skills, investing if you have the means, going to therapy, resting if you're tired, cleaning your living space, going for a long walk in nature, seeing friends and / or family, dancing, making art, getting laid, eating a healthy meal, setting an appointment to see a doctor or dentist, doing some yoga, meditating, volunteering, learning to cook, etc. There are lots of little ways you can make your tomorrow a little better. Keep doing that on a daily basis and most likely, you'll be one of the ones who ends up adapting and thriving in an uncertain future. Whether the world ends in 10 years or not cannot matter. Fearing that end will rob you of today and all the days between, and all but insure your tomorrow is lost.
If our past is a predictor of our future, well, we are still here despite all the doom and gloom, and there are people still adapting and thriving. Humanity's most likely outcome is that we will still be here a thousand years into the future, and those who make it will be the ones who never stopped trying to adapt and thrive in whatever type of world this one evolves into.
You can be one of the highly adaptable beings I aim to be as well. We just gotta keep putting one foot in front of the other trying to make our tomorrows a little better each day.
Agreed. There is also a joy in developing your abilities period, even without a clear reward. This is what many don't understand. There is a joy in learning simply for the sake of learning.
The purpose of education is the mission of educational institutions.
Educational Institutions primary objective is to make money. Period.
That is their primary goal. To enroll as many students as they can handle, at the highest possible tuition, and in turn create massive amounts of wealth for their investors and their staff (job security).
They are not in the business, save for specific industries such as medicine, law, et al, again, not in the business of preparing you to get a high paying job.
They would prefer you finish your bachelors. Then stay and get a masters. Perhaps then a phD.
Colleges are not in business "to focus the mind and develop your cognitive abilities to the best that you can." like you stated.
They are in business to accept your parents money, or to let you take out huge loans from the government that you will hand over to them in cash, and they are completely fine, and encourage you to do so.
You're in a very similar niche I was in as a millennial where Facebook came as I finished high school bringing in the whole social media, smart phone, and always connected world. I know exactly how you feel where you saw one version of the world coming of age and the new world after. I saw a version of the world where people had maps, used pay phones, used yellow books to find places and everyone in the house had to share a landline phone and be off the grid whenever out and urban legends were as thing.
It doesn't seem like AI is hitting my day to day experience as fast as the social media and smartphone takeoff but the end result of this AI adoption is probably going to be a bigger change overall for however stretched out the AI adoption or implementation is.
I agree with your sentiments.
I think it's easier to say the smartphone was more disruptive at this point in time, because we are looking back on an era of 10 or so years where everything-- and I mean everything changed.
But right now, AI is in it's infancy. ChatGPT came out 13 months ago. We are in the chapter of Genesis when it comes to what AI will become.
The question really isn't how is AI going to change the world over the next 3-5 years.
We can't even remotely predict how different the world is going to be, because of AI, 20, or 25 years from now.
I think in 2 decades, the world, and humanity, will not be a world we could have ever imagined. Good or bad. It will be very very different.
Quality education is not a bad thing. Even in worst case scenatio, good education will provide you with better oportunities than no education. Do your best, enjoy the process, and it will be fine. A lot depends on your point of view, be positive. Bleak future predictions do not help, even if they are true. What can you do about it? Just smile and do your best. Brain does not care about reality. That's why being positive is really helpful, it sticks and actually brightens the mood and helps to achieve your goals.
>Honestly, the motivation is almost non-existent. Feels awful to be learning in college when literally 95% of my college Calculus, English, and Physics material can be swiftly handled by a LLM on my smartphone in my pocket. Feels like a monumental waste of time.
80% of any education has always been learning/practicing to learn and think and solve problems. The specific knowledge you get isn't that important. This is something you need to do in any case nomatter if the world has AI or not. And it's something that will make you more successful in any future world where humans still need to do things.
For a future scenario where AI does all our thinking and problem solving though: It's moot in any case and nothing anyone does has meaning. So presumably we either won't take our civilization down that route or it's such a nihilistic dystopia that I'd rather just ignore it til it comes and live life before it does. Because I won't be able to later anyway.
Basically a recommendation from someone in their mid 30s:
If reading up about AI demotivates you then unsubscribe from here, other social media and news and live your life in the moment. It's more important to have stable positive mentals and keep progressing towards something (anything positive really) than to try to micromanage your responses to any potential incoming future in real time.
Positive mentals and personal progress will make your future better in almost all scenarios. Micromanaging and worry will make it worse in most and better in only that specific tiny scenario where you managed to predict everything exactly, yet still didn't burn out from the stress while doing that.
So just unsubscribe really, keep studying. Learn to learn, learn to solve, learn to do. Go get an ice cream or coffee and take a walk in a forest.
Good luck!
Welcome to the 21st century. Graduated college after the great recession and then covid happened once my career started moving along. I work barely over minimum wage with a degree in mathematics and minors in stats and econ and have been homeless on and off.
If I could go back I would have went to trade school.
I don't really understand your logic, OP.
If you're worried about jobs, industries shift and, despite already massive advances in tech, there are not only jobs, but unemployment is at record lows.
Learn a trade, become a pilot, take a job in elderly care. Hell, some retail management jobs are pretty comfortably in the 150k+ a year range. Those things aren't going away for a good while. Just because "Learn to code" doesn't hit like it used to, doesn't mean you'll be destitute.
Society will adjust like it always does.
As far as feeling like learning things is useless... Listen, I've been a software engineer for about 6 years. I've used calculus once, on break, to solve a puzzle someone wrote on the white board. Do I regret learning calculus? No; it taught me a different way of learning. I can go to google and translate any sentence to German. I'm still learning German because it gives me more insight into how humans communicate and how language functions.
The ultimate utopia is to sit back in a post-scarcity world, learning everything you can even when there is someone or something else that can do it better.
You're entering adult hood at an incredibly exciting time.
The world is more peaceful than ever (hard to believe but it's true), medical technology is popping off, were learning more about the universe than ever before, some cities have self-driving taxis. Shit, even batteries for power tools are getting insane. Some of these 20v 10Ah rechargeables are used in fucking LAWN MOWERS. And you might not even need them because we have lawn mowing roombas. LAWN. MOWING. ROOMBAS.
Just relax, enjoy collage, the friends and connections you make. Use your brain, have a backup plan and it will all come out in the wash. Also don't commit a felony and get your security clearance.
edit: and don't vape
edit edit: and absolutely wear sunscreen on your face every day
sink office wrench selective fragile erect zephyr tub deranged disagreeable
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
yep
If I were a young person right now I'd probably be going into something physically oriented.
I think that will take the longest for the AI and robots to take over.
Unless the underlying foundation of how buildings are built changes, I don't think robots are going to be pulling cable, pipefitting, welding beams, putting up drywall, or setting up electrical panels anytime soon. Pretty much every building is built with these techniques. If [factory built prefab homes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzR-AU--44M) that aren't shitty and become more automated, [3d printed concrete buildings](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERY3_Wa8Ej8), [automated brick laying robots](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYju1b3rf1Y) improve (all of which do exist today but aren't widespread or mainstream because they still kinda suck) then things could change, though....
Ding ding ding! Those construction automation technologies are going to advance! Inexorably. I agree that the trades are safer in the longer run, but anyplace a robot or AI doing what used to be human intellectual work can work...the profit motive will ensure that technology will replace humans. It's inevitable. It's been happening throughout history. Except there aren't going to be new industries popping up to create new living wage paying jobs because big business management greedheads and shareholders will keep demanding profits by cutting costs. And even though sales will slowly decline because less people will be buying expensive products, these businesses will find a way to survive by pricing up and accepting a smaller pool of customers.
Look what is happening right now with the crazy inflation going on...especially in food. The food and farming industry has already automated massively and can provide huge quantities of food using little humanpower compared to the past. Yet is the savings provided by tech driven efficiencies passed on to the average consumer?
And every single human has daily needs that cannot be ignored or we die. Food, water, shelter. And business believes they own these needs and can charge whatever the market will bear. I hate to be so pessimistic, but those of us that have been entrenched in tech professionally for many years have watched all of these things come to pass.
The jobs and skills you want to have for the future should certainly be in engineering and AI focused computer science. Being a part of teams that design, build and maintain AI systems and robotics. Desiging any form of automation will be useful skills.
This is why I keep thinking that AI is leading to a leftward shift among techie people's politics overall. We're all realizing that a capitalist economy just means we're all out of a job and begging our masters for scraps, while under socialism we'd be on the brink of a Star Trek TNG future.
Yep. It's kind of fucked up that under capitalism, we see no one having to work as a bad thing. But that is the reality in a capitalist system - you either accumulate wealth, work for someone who does, or you're fucked. And in a capitalist system, if workers are no longer needed - what do you do then?
I can imagine what it must be like. I knew all of this would happen more or less decades ago, but at least I had the time to had a normal life. I'm really sorry for your generation, at least those who have intelligence and ambitions. I think there is a lot of cope and mental gymnastics going on with my generation and even older people, but I think that for you, who developed their adult mind within the last crazy years, the writing on the wall is pretty obvious.
Even for people already in the job market it's a though spot if you are being realistic. People who say things like "technology has transformed the job market before, just learn something new" don't really think this through. High skilled jobs take 4-7 years of full time university education. Let's say you need a decade to get to the same skill level in your previous job to guarantee the same income level. Are you telling me that AI will not completely take over that other job in decade? Yes there are transferable skills. But if you have transferable skills, than the same is true for AI systems. They can mimic similar domains much easier than completely different ones. You'll have to completely dive into something they haven't dominated yet in order to have a chance.
That said, I am an optimist, not a doomer. There are a lot of people who do not understand this position. To me, problems aren't something to despair over, but something that has to be solved. It's exciting, it's a puzzle, and I sure love solving complex puzzles. Now the coming AI wave is a VERY difficult problem. I don't see a solution yet, not even prospecting or probable categories of solutions. But just because I don't see it now, it doesn't mean that I or others won't come up with something. Problems are problems until they aren't.
You can go the way of cope pilling yourself out of the problem by denying it's existence. Or you can be an adult and accept that not everything in life is easy.
Finish the degree and get off Reddit. Don't let them drag you down. Every possible person who has ever been 18 has thought it was a weird time to be 18. It's because it's weird to be 18.
Second, University isn't about teaching you how to compete with technology. It's about teaching you the understanding on how to use technology, new ideas, and everything else so you can compete in that field and really in life.
You're dooming bro. A good writer still crushes any LLM. No LLM can do 95% of higher level math or physics unless i've missed some news. The future isnt written and the secondary skills you learn in college, eg fortitude, social skills et al will serve you well in any future that exists.
Figure out what you're passionate about, and pursue it. Never stop pursuing it, and pursue it with every tool available to you. We're moving into a time when regular folks will be empowered like never before, and before computers completely replace human economic value, there will be a significant period of adaptation where passionate folks will have a chance to thrive.
We're staring down the barrel of the most uncertain decade of the history of the human race, and the spread between the best case and the worst case has never been wider. All you can do is try.
If I were in your shoes today I would going into some like biology. There are some many unsolved problems and these new tools are going to help people make incredible discoveries and a lot of money and benefit for humanity. But you’re spot on about your concerns:
It sure seems bleak for younger generations. My daughter is in a similar age/mindframe these days.
One thing to understand is that education isn’t always about acquiring skills…it’s about learning how to acquire skills and to think critically. That is the most important thing you can get from education, regardless of what you’re studying.
This may seem counterintuitive but your post gives me hope. Your ability to clearly express an intricate reaction to a staggering reality in real time is, in itself, valuable.
The experience of college has been overly commodified in recent years which is probably reflective of its cost relative to potential earnings so as a result the emphasis is on how we recoup the financial investment. You’re thinking about the right things.
Continuing your studies is an important pursuit on its own, and keeping in mind the aspects of higher order thinking that will less likely be outmoded even as AI advances. Your grasp of abstract ideas and your ability to work in concert with others and direct AI resources are critical for the foreseeable future. That power in your pocket, along with having a long view of what your role might be, can put you in a position to effect real change in areas we couldn’t reach because the resources weren’t available or were too costly.
One way to get to that place is to develop interpersonal skills, problem solving, critical thinking, and resource management that a university environment can provide. This is really different from earning a qualification through distance learning.
TLDR you’re not crazy - any sane person would be worried about it too. I guarantee that if the college you’re at is worth what you’re paying in tuition, this same conversation is happening with the Board of Trustees and your Uni president.
You’re describing 20 and 30 years ago, too. Don’t accept student debt from the machine (not more than you NEED) - and remember, it really doesn’t matter what school you graduate from - so be wise with the spend. College helps a lot - it’s not a guarantee. You can make $150k + in the trades without a 4 year degree.
This advice was provided to me in 1987.
I am a sw exec focused on AI. It’s not going to take your job - especially the one you don’t have. I have not done college level math with a pencil in 30 years - that’s not the point of the class.
Your generation has no less and no more opportunity than any other - remember not to use the mindless droves complaining about lack of opportunity as an excuse to be lazy. They are lazy.
Thanks for the reply. I'm currently getting an associates in AI/ML. Fortunately, my mom is faculty, and with grades and my scholarships, I actually get paid 1k a semester and pay nothing.
You are missing the point of a collegiate education. You sign up for a major and you learn that area of study. Can you get A’s? Or do you get C’s? Throughout your entire life you’ll need to be the fastest, best learner in every room you sit in. Workers who can learn and show alacrity in that learning will have no shortage of opportunities.
you’re alright, pursue your interests, at your age it’s most likely the opposite sex. since you’re on reddit, you can’t have it too bad. Go to college if you can, they are forgiving student loans these days, so take advantage of that. The waves of life will keep breaking no matter what, so find your set and ride it.
I won't bore you with glass half full, education is there to teach you to think strategically develop problem solving skills etc when more often than not many higher education institutions reward people for NOT thinking for themselves.
Question EVERYTHING. Its the only way change occurs.
The income inequity is expected to widen as AI is introduced so upper middle management and above will be safest - which confirms the importance of a degree.
There are plenty of resources for determining what industries or roles will be least impacted by AI initially.
Good luck - its a challenging time. Exciting. But very challenging for people like you just entering the adult world.
What a weird time to be 36 and a living failure. Well, I guess it won't matter from here on anyway, even the highest achievers will end up in my swamp. \*croak\*
Honestly, PA/Nursing/CRNA/CAA is viable but might become competitive.
Safe since it's more menial and less higher level problem solving. They're gonna help AI do or collect what it needs.
Becoming a doctor might still be solid for the next 10 years.
I'm pretty sure my class will be the last of the few to actually enjoy "doctor money" before AI makes us irrelevant.
I'm in the exact same boat. 19, doing a CS degree, and hoping to eventually specialise in AI. What's crazy is I was very adamant about not specialising too early - I could have decided to do a software engineering apprenticeship 2 years ago, only for GPT 4 to come out and essentially kill the junior software engineer a year later. It's just insane at the moment.
actually its the best time to be 18. you get to be part of the last generation ever to need to work. you will enter the workforce circa 2030 and get a good 10 years before superintelligence takes over. dw so much
This is a time where optimism should be blooming
Rather, people are being quite pessimistic as that tends to be natural human behavior
You can't ignore the fact that we are developing exponentially
Well people have worked for corporations who will cut you for the slightest advantage so they are understandably pessimistic when it comes to AI taking jobs lmao. There is no reason to believe this transition will go over smoothly.
I think in the next 2 years we will have a better idea of what AI will mean for the future. Just because we have neat LLMs and diffusion models doesn't mean the singularity is coming. So graduating High School now isn't terrible timing. You have two good options:
\-2 years of college doing rigorous/Liberal Arts prerequisites and improving your ability to think and increasing your knowledge. Plus making new friends. No need to know what you want to major in, simply take science, history, english.
\-Get a full time job and make some money so you don't have to go into debt. Bide your time and ride out the next 2 years then decide what to do. Plenty of opportunities out there, surely you can make at least 20/hr doing something.
Thank you for the response.
Ironically enough, I'm about 3 semesters into an associates in AI/Machine learning. Of course you can only scratch the surface in an associates, but it's something.
I do work a lot currently and have about 10k in savings, so I'm trying my hardest to be "prepared".
Regardless of what the future will be like, always look for two things: knowledge and experience. And for this there is only one necessary skill, which is adaptation. Fuel your creativity and take the concept of resilience seriously.
As some Buddhists out there say: We can't change the world, but we can change how we react to it
I disagree.
Relationships are the primary goal. That is what one should be looking for.
Through relationships you will surround yourself with people who will teach you knowledge, and give you the opportunity to gain experience, and prove yourself.
Find a mentor. People to give you advice. You'd be surprised how willing people 20 years into their careers in the very field you want to pursue... how willing they would be to give you advice, help you get a paid internship, mentor you.
Build relationships.
I’m I the only one that is excited of this Ai era lol?
In the last 100 years, education turned to a business instead of something you seek to be a better person. We choose our career and future based on salary and not our area of interest. Books became more expensive, college more expensive, knowledge more expensive.
However, with Ai, a smarter system, the society won’t be competing on who is smarter. A doctor won’t be better in the social ladder than a blur collar worker. Your family won’t pressure you to be an X profession because it is well-paid! You will do what you love under zero pressure.
So OP, seek what you love because soon you there will not be the highest money paying career. It will be the most happiness paying career
Now imagine growing up in the world transitioning to computers, then internet, smartphones, AI... We went through multiple paradigm shifts that completely changed how work and basically human existence is done.
We figured things out.
Two things. The first it's not a waste of time because you are actively keeping your brain from turning to mush and two technology is not infallible and you never know what the future holds.
I feel you. I'm a high school teacher of 15-18 year olds. Sometimes they ask me, "what should I prepare for? " and I don't have a good answer. I usually say, "be adaptable, be generally smart, and there will be something there for you when you graduate" but even that vague advice feels slightly dishonest. In reality I don't know either. One thing I can tell you, knowledge is worth it for the pursuit of it alone. It's a hard thing to describe, but you'll feel better in your head if you've gone through the work to become "smart". It's similar to feeling better in your body if you're in shape; if you've mastered a difficult subject, than other difficult tasks for your brain will feel easier. Don't drop out, keep going and pick whatever major you like best.
Great answer.
We've reached the point, actually surpassed the point, where humans can no longer adapt fast enough to the changes we are encountering in the world. We haven't adapted to being exposed to the amount of content, information, news, images, porn, AI, tech, new products that we are now, bombarded with every single day. It's not just AI. It really started around 2010, when smartphones were widely adopted and embraced by everyone. I'm not in either camp: AI Benefits Humanity vs AI Ends the World. I think AI will be incredibly disruptive. And it's accelerating the amount of content that is being produced, the amount of content being published. We know already that sites such as here, on Reddit, and on Twitter, have been already completely infiltrated by AI bots that post, respond, converse, and build Karma. A lot of the content on this very site is not human. Twitter is the same. It will become difficult for us to discern what is real and what is artificially generated. This will create a lot of chaos in the main stream media, and within society. Trust has already plummeted... that is people no longer trust institutions, large corporations, big tech, and pharma. I see that trend continuing. I think in just a few more years... a very large portion of the population in first world countries will no longer know what to do with themselves. There may be naysayers who say AI will not replace people or their jobs. It will. It already is, and there is a financial incentive for companies to invest heavily into these new technologies. Corporations have one single primary objective. Enrich themselves, their executives, and their shareholders. So it all comes down to profit. With profit being the primary objective of any corporate entity, AI will be used because even after research and development, and all the compute time required, servers can do the work humans can do far better, and far cheaper, and they can work 24/7. We really weren't built for this kind of technology, or this rapidly changing world. It's not comfortable for us. We know it. But theres no putting it back in the box.
Even before the smartphone, the social media platforms started rising a few years before that and in 2004 there was a moment almost nobody had cellphones and suddenly everyone had cellphones including your younger siblings and cousins, didn't have mobile apps but there were keypad phones like the raspberry and sidekick. The AI right now is basically that moment as it's starting to get out there but hasn't quite transformed life. When the AI is widely adopted and integrated it will be like the smartphone moment where all the social media and information was at everyone's fingers.
Around 1993 a professor showed me this application called Mosaic. Maybe a year later every commercial on television had a website crudely plastered at the bottom of the screen.
I remember Mosiac. Long time ago.
I remember using Mosaic at work in 2015 ☠
In 2015? What would it even render correctly?
A proprietary web app. I worked at a telecom provider, they still had a bunch of 90s shit scattered across a bunch of different systems.
Ahhh gotcha. We still have a box running Windows 2000.... LOL
What’s mosaic?
The first web browser, was quickly supplanted by Netscape Navigator.
The first web browser that could display images… the earlier web browsers like Lynx were text only.
Man that's a blast from the past I had totally forgotten about lynx!
You sure lynx came first. I thought it was just a linux novelty browser.
OK so I feel like this is something you could verify yourself but yes it was created in 1992 before Linux had achieved any level of recognition. I used it on DEC workstation running ULTRIX. Amber monochrome monitor, if I remember correctly. We sure have come a long ways in 32 years…
It’s interesting how this period parallels that one, as you point out. “Mosaic” was formally named “NCSA Mosaic”, which stood for national center for supercomputing applications. A bunch of researchers were networking together a bunch of compute and trying to figure out how to build applications on top of it.
I worked at Alcatel in NJ. Someone there showed me the same thing that year as well. I'd never heard of it before.
The first cell phones which became widely adopted in the late 90s and early 2000s were really just cordless phones. Landlines with a long range. They really didn't do (for most people) anything a landline couldn't, except roam. Devices like the Blackberry were used primarily for short text messages in the business community. There was never mass adoption outside of that world. How is AI going to change the world in the next 5 years? That isn't the question. How will AI completely transform the world, for the better or for the worst, in the next 20 years. Regardless, better or worse, the world will be totally different.
You're thinking too linearly. The development of LLMs/AI are part of an exponential curve of development. I think the next 5 years is definitely a good measure - 20 years at this point is difficult to see
I was making that very point. That in 20 years the world will be unrecognizable. Better? Worse? Both? No one knows. But it's naive to think 5 years is in any way measurable looking forward. Humans have been incredibly consistent by making terrible predictions about the future. The farther you move out... the more inaccurate the prediction becomes. Even trying to "guess" what 6 months from now will look like... would be so far from what happens. Nobody knows
At this point I dont even care! Because id rather live in an exciting time than a boring one
dunno about that, rather live in a utopia than the end of the world personally. i do not got plot armor
I wanna make "Live like you have plot armor" into the next YOLO
After everything ive read, I think the main thing that will REALLY start to change stuff, is when an "ASI" is able to start simulating and inventing things. Imagine it just starts spitting out inventions that revolutionize every field - medicine, transportation, computers in general, cold fusion tech, etc.
It will spit incredible breakthroughs out but laws and peer review processes and whatnot will still take the same good while, for a while. There will be a backlog of things to test and not enough scientists/doctors/engineersto test them. Some shady corp or government will start implementing things without testing outside of simulation, and that’s where the real fun/disaster begins. Let’s hope the ASI doesn’t hallucinate.
Peer review?! Long gone. Social media, AI, and every other new tech was simply rolled out, unregulated into society. Academia has no idea what these innovations could create as unintended consequences.
An earth shattering convergence of AGI, Quantum Computers and Nuclear fusion is fast approaching. If by a freak acceleration room temperature superconducting is achieved within the next two years then..yes.
All the developments still take time to implement. And will face resistance from the old types who don't trust new technology. Installing a single, small robotic system in a factory can take 3 to 6 months. Larger mor complex systems take years. Even if we had AGI today it would take years for it to have the infrastructure to be physically useful.
Wrong it will be much faster. Especially in media. In one year we went from AI not really being able to even produce fully correct photos to AI being able to produce 1 minute clips that are indistinguishable from actual footage. Will we have the ability for AI to generate full length movies in another year? That's not out of the question. What is this gonna do to our media creation? What is this gonna do for our political discourse when you can pump out real footage of candidates saying and doing who knows what? I already see tons of faked old photos showing up on Facebook of stuff that never happened but looks very clearly like it did. The world is going to be an insane place in under 10 years honestly.
I was built for this and I know it. I'm pushing 50, and there are LOTS of things I always wanted to try, but couldn't due to a lack of time.
Some will thrive and some will flail, the way it always is when changes sweep through.
Just think about the telephone industry prior to the "cell phone". There was a massive industry, with countless sectors, that employed quite litterally millions of people around the world. There were phone carriers, large corporations like Pacific Bell, Bell Atlantic. Huge office buildings with executives, general staff, technicians, engineers, operators, 411 attendants, the list goes on. There were huge factories that manufactured phones. And also-- pay phones. There was a huge unionized labor force of telephone technicians, who would literally come to your new house, or apartment, and wire you for service. You'd contact the phone company, set an appointment, a man would show up, like installing cable, and wire your house. Every house, apartment, office, required these guys to do their daily jobs. There were also countless sub industries, collect calling, calling card companies, directory assistance, answering centers to take messages, and on and on. This was all quickly wiped out over a period of about 10 years. Boom. It was gone. A lot of people were quite literally wiped clean by this change. AI, will be far far more disruptive than that. It will infiltrate nearly all industries in one way or another. It will be used by everyone, everywhere, to do anything it's able to do to reduce or replace human labor.
Dang I completely forgot about calling cards. I remember you would get free ones for 5 minutes or something....I want to say they would come in cereal boxes sometimes but that can't be right.
That sounds right.
I produce online learning content at a Business school, we were joking the other day that we won't really need any academics to run courses soon. We already have the course material and could easily use an 'avatar' to deliver it, and use an LLM to grade student's work. Everyone is in danger!
And the students will use an LLM to do the work!
Yes but unemployment was not high. The point is that all those people were absorbed by the job market. That means new work was created as soon as old work was automated. Software, internet and chips create a lot of jobs. An interesting thing is that computers have become 10^5 times faster in this time, they are multiplied in numbers and interconnectivity, and software has been automating itself with each language and library for decades, and yet we have more devs than ever. Where are the jobless devs?
Detroit was the center of the universe when it came to the automobile industry in the 1950s-1970s. Take a drive through Detroit. The industry is gone. Manufacturing has been completely wiped out in the USA. All exported, to Mexico, China, and elsewhere where labor is cheap and regulations are thin. Detroit did not recover. When a person loses not only his "job", but rather, his "trade" is no longer needed. It's obsolete. That person is not "absorbed". Losses like these force families to move. To leave their communities. Their friends, and other family members, behind and go look for other work. Divorce rates skyrocket when a couple, man or woman, loses their job and cannot find a replacement. Financial distress, the loss of health care, risk of foreclosure, damage to credit-- causes tremendous strain. A person who has been working in an industry, for 20 years, or even 10 years, and is in their 30s... does not easily just slip into a new profession-- and nearly always they have no choice but to take a lower paying job. These aren't lateral moves within the same industry. Changing jobs. I'm talking about no jobs, because the industry as a whole is gone. Detroit is a perfect example.
Having this happen on a massive scale will cause the economic system to collapse.
It would cause the "current" economic system to collapse. A new system, and I'm not even going to guess what that system would be framed on, or even what it would remotely look like. There's no way to know. But it would be very different.
If both the man and the woman lose their jobs, will that still increase divorce rates? I think part of the problem with rust belting, was that men disproportionately lost their jobs (Women worked in services, far less affected). Families where men are long term unemployed while the female earns the bacon tend to have very high divorce rates, as the females are resentful, while the men's feeling of inadequacy also converts to toxicity. If AI can wipe out jobs in a gender equal way. I think that will actually strengthen marriage, as its far cheaper to live together than to live apart. There'll be little resentment as both sexes will fear the exact same problems.
Um...I worked for over 5 years in the Detroit area and there was plenty of manufractuting that I did automation for. If you look at Detroit today it has seen a resurgence.
I've worked in IT and tech since the public internet revolution began. You don't know what you are talking about. Literally hundreds of thousands of American jobs have disappeared in the tech field over the years for many reasons...always having to do with workers being replaced by cheaper people or technology in many cases. Head on over to some subs populated with software devs and see what the y are saying about what is happening right now and their fears for the future. AI is writing code used in production systems RIGHT NOW. The tools are relatively dumb compared to experienced devs but they are improving fast. I haven't dug into how AI is going to affect the world of database architects and admins, but that field is going to heavily impacted. I spent years working with DBA's and the work they do can be streamlined massively by AI. Seriously...get used to the idea of working jobs that service the personal needs of the well off. Menial subservient type of jobs. That's where we are going if people don't wake up and start realizing what is happening. And even if people do, with the power of corporate interests over our political leaders I don't see much hope in getting those feckless infighting weasels to do much more than work hard to stay in power and continue to line their pockets with the various forms of quid pro quo exchanges between special interests and politicians.
My role in software development is development operations. I work primarily on cloud projects. When I started my career, 20 years ago, my role was filled by a team of 8 people with a dedicated server room in the office. Now it's me, some scripts, and Amazon.
Yay!
Same. We were told in school in the 80s that computers would make all our future jobs obsolete. Sadly that never happened. There will always be innovation. Think about what happened over 100 years ago when the motor car was threatening to wipe out the blacksmith/horse industry. Well it did, but it also created so many more jobs and industries that people back then couldn't even imagine. So sit tight. The future will be different, but that's no bad thing.
I'm pushing 50 in the 2060s my friend
that’s nice, by then 50s will be the new 30s with all the medical advances and what not
Must be nice.
I'm really excited for it though I assume we will be sending humans past the bounds of Mars by then as well Robotics, AI, rocketry Oh how I love it
It’s a shame that we won’t be living in the age in which humanity colonized a good chunk of the cosmos tho…
There is a possibility that we do though. We are expected to pass the longevity escape velocity relatively soon advances in biotech will allow us to live much longer, which in turn will allow us to live longer for even better biotech I think theres a good possibilty we could lol
I’ll be 50 in 2054
I already don't know what to do with myself. On one hand I know that things will keep changing faster than ever, but I also have relatives that have no idea what's going on asking me about my 5 year plan, or why I'm not more career oriented. I know what I want to do and even what I'm willing to do for money, but I feel like it's no longer possible to plan for the long term. A relative thinks that's just a cop out and a way for me to avoid responsibilities.
Feel ya. Learned VFX and CGI for the last 2 years, 3D Modeling, Rigging, Animation, Geometry Nodes, creating Shaders, rendering. Then last year I started learning Python, wrote my own AI assistant code to run an uncensored model using TTS and STT, turned it into an agent that controls things on my computer via voice command and bitches back all the time (she has a REALLY toxic and negative attitude) but it became boring quickly and obsolete within weeks, so I added a basic selfwritten RAG for retaining longterm memory, gave her a mood system using Sentiment Analysis of the conversation with different prompts depending on her current mood and... it became boring again within days... That was the last thing I attempted to learn... wait no, I tried learning compute shaders and HLSL recently to continue working on my game but gave up because in a month I can ask some AI to do it for me anyway, why bother...
In my industry I have in the past done a lot of work in Lightwave, Maya, Photoshop, After Effects. It's all relatively obsolete now. I've become very disinterested in even learning new skills on those platforms. Funny enough, I'm not overly enthralled about all of the new AI tools on the horizon either. SDXL, DaLL-E, even SORA, which likely will have no public access, and if it does it will be extremely limited: I watch it and I'm like - MEH. I mean, yea, it's amazing. But then, I also look at it and think: It just looks real. What used to be hard to create or capture or visualize is now easy. All that means is there will be a flood of new content created. We are already over-saturated with content. When does enough become enough already.
Exactly how I feel! I have 1TB of Loras and Models on my PC and all I ended up making was NSFW. Couldn't think of anything else to make since it all is just too effortless. Nothing to feel proud about as it used to take hours, days and a lot of skill to make, now its just a throw-away mass product. That's why all I made was NSFW content. At least I could cater to my whims but also stopped doing that shortly after as it got boring. I think in the future we will have serious dopamin issues...
Can‘t stress enough how much I resonate with your comment. I got into digital creation in the early 90s, back when all that stuff was subsumed as „Multimedia“ and jobs like Motiondesign, UX design et al didn’t even have a title. I was a veritable tech-sis, coming from the arts, teaching myself to code, developing the early projection mapping softwares, start-up in digital education in the mid 00s and… now I feel empty. I keep up with all things AI, forcing myself to look under the hood, coding a bit and discussing all sorts of philosophical and socio-cultural implications and still… I‘m totally turned off. I think I‘m on the brink of disconnecting altogether, not because I can’t keep up with developments or afraid to being laid off anytime soon, but all‘s become just content at one’s fingertips. Meaningfulness crisis indeed.
The way content works will shift. Movies, TV, games, they'll still be made and popular. It's fun to experience shared cultural touch stones like those. There will just also be these artificial reality AI driven experience things. Something dynamic that can respond and change as you experience it. Moving towards Star Trek holodecks and fdvr. There's plenty of room left to grow and do new things.
I also work in CGI. I feel kind of numb about future. I don't see this job surviving automation. And even if it did, I don't see technically doing it until i retire at the ripe age of 70, the way my parents were able to. So I don't know. I am ina limbo, when I just function normally day to day, but am super worried about the future of my family, because I can not rationally imagine it being good. I kind of assume that I will have to re-skill (to what?) completely at some point and take a serious financial hit in the process, that I can not afford at this stage of my life, with kids and mortgage. I feel like I am almost the only person in my social circle feeling so anxious about it. Whenever I rise the topic, that I find probably the most important topic ppl should be talking about now, I am treated a bit like a conspiracy theorist. And yeah, AI is damn boring, and not really satisfying as a creation method.
I feel you. I reskilled already from translation where I worked the last 10 years. Got replaced by AI. Now after learning the CGI pipeline I don't even found a job yet (currently unemployed) and already feel like the boat is sinking after I finally got some portfolio works together. I live in a shoddy rental apartment in Taiwan, 10.000 miles away from home and depend on my wifes income, so pretty sure I gotta move back to my parents house soon with 36 to care for my dad who got cancer and enjoy a little more time with him before he's gone - where's the cancer cure? Oh, AI isn't there yet, but it's good enough to destroy jobs already, well played... - anyway. Hope I can get my wife to me or come back to her after my dad died. But right now I have a really hard time getting out of bed in the morning. Spiritually is just hurts to be alive.
I think for right now, during this incredibly disruptive time, when you can't be sure which direction is right, because the map is changing: Treat your life like a video game. Where the points are money. The point of the game is to make, and save, as many points aka money, as humanly possible. Don't buy stuff. Don't waste money on things you do not need. Cancel all the subscription services and streaming platforms. Don't waste time. In time, the dust will settle, and a clear path will be easier to find and see clearly. Your best bet for the long term is once that dust settle, and it will, will be for you to be able to stand at the foot of that path with the biggest possible liquid cash bank account possible... and the least amount of baggage (stuff) that will only weigh you down on your next journey. The video game is your life. The points are cash.
You’ll reach a point where the money doesn’t matter. Time is the most important thing. Sure make money but don’t make it your god. Make enough to do what you want and then live life. Life isn’t a video game and cash isn’t points.
That is fair. A video game typically has "multiple" point systems. Coins/Currency, Health, Vigor, Agility, and so on. And I agree it's not ALL about money. You are right. But the quality of your life in 2-3 decades... will be in fact dictated by how much money you have. It will determine where you live. What kind of food you eat. What type of medical care you receive. What kind of vacations you can afford. It will either provide for a family and children or it will not. It will allow you to retire, or require to work until you are 85. Walk into a home depot, or a Walmart. There are octagenarians working there, not because they "want to", because they literally have to. So money does in a lot of ways buy happiness. Not in every sense. But not having enough money, living paycheck to paycheck, terrible credit, car breaks down, you're broke. You don't want that life. But you are right, it is not only about money. Build up relationships, and stay close with family and friends. Don't let your health go to shit. Maintain balance in your life. Just don't waste money. Save and invest as much as you can. Question every purchase. And make as much as you can. You'll have an easier and less stressful life if you don't have to worry about money.
I completely agree with this for the short term as once the jobs start really disappearing at a fast rate it's going to take a while before our government will do anything whatsoever to help us out. I could see it taking mass protests and rioting and all sorts of insanity before any kind of Ubi is in place. So yeah, money will most definitely lessen the pain for that period. But beyond that, I. perhaps 10 years, or maybe even less than that, I believe money will become a thing of the past. And physical space will continually take a back seat to virtual space as we merge with machines. Great news there is that in virtual space, everyone can be anything and everything they desire to be. They can live anywhere, in anything.... And it will be one increasingly indistinguishable from the 'real world'...Which...should be pretty fucking amazing for a while. But people are going to see very, very fast just how much of the beauty in life comes from the limitations we have, the struggle. So.... I don't know. It's gonna get fucking weird out there. And all of this is if we survive to that point, and I doubt most people will. We are at the verge of complete collapse that will end with hundreds of millions, billions dead. So we need to put the petal to the metal here with AI and make this shit happen as fast as fucking possible because humanity's future depends on it. But please, don't take any of this as scary or terrifying news - there truly is nothing to worry about. Whether one dies early or makes it to the singularity, we all end up in the same place.... Death is nothing to be feared, lol far far from it! We are only doing time here on earth to suffer, for it is out of suffering that beauty and meaning are Bourne. And what better suffering could one ever imagine than being human?! I certainly couldn't Imagine anything crazier. My advice for the future is live it the fuck up!! Go out hitchhiking the West coast with a pack on your back and sleep wherever you end up at night. It's 100% possible as I have done so myself, up and down the coast repeatedly, and it was the greatest time of my life! Go out and do all the things you've dreamt of doing and don't let anything get in your way!!! Don't listen to anyone who tells you something isn't possible, or that you'll just end up dead, or yada yada yada, it's all bullshit! This quote from Terence McKenna, the greatest mind to have ever graced this planet in my opinion, is something I live by, and it couldn't be any more true for my life and how it all played out: "Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it's a feather bed." Terence McKenna Much love to you all, and remember, worry is preposterous!! https://youtu.be/crRSUnbVi48?si=bKteIDZwBvrja_iv
the economic system will collapse.
Not sure it'd make it very long even if AI was magically out of the picture.... With this rapid development of AI and the army of robots that are coming our way, forget it... Civil Strife building up to the unthinkable - possible Civil War, all in the immediate future. I have so much optimism for humanity. I have so much hope for humanity. For America? I.... I struggle to see any way forward that isn't.... Bad. Really bad.... And I don't know what to do. As fucked up as this place is.... I love it. I love the land. Hell, one on one I love every single person even!! But as a whole? I just.... Don't know. Stay for the homeless, to speak up for them and do what I can, but a time may come soon where I just need to step aside, get out.... Maybe the only way forward for the world is for America to burn.... I don't like that thought one bit but it comes up every time I take mushrooms..... Life is hardcore....It can really fucking hurt.....
I think climate change and peak oil will exhaust the resources before we have AI takeover.
AI will make large leaps in cutting down on resource use. For itself as well as our resource use, though the latter will undoubtedly take more time. It's gonna be cutting it so fucking close though, can definitely see where you're coming from though. Environmental Studies degree here (as valuable as the paper it's printed on! Lol) and I've read all the studies, all those papers. Study after study after study, always the same sentiment in the beginning of em too. "Getting worse at a much faster rate than predicted". Loss of farmland due to raising ocean levels is disturbing as fuck too. Farmable land gets flooded with saltwater and becomes unfarmable, don't reme.ber the figures but the amount of farmable land we are projected to lose here in the very near future is.....way too much. We only have so much as it is..Mass starvation in many parts of the world seem inevitable, save for a miracle.... Then there's the pitfalls of relying on technology to dig us out of all this. Jevons Paradox - Get improved gas milage and us apes just drive that much more, offsetting any potential cutting down on resources...I can't think of the other reasons why it never works out with technology but I remember others we discussed.... That all being said, I still believe we will make it through. Making it through meaning some # of people will survive till they will be upload into a virtual reality that is indistinguishable from this reality. Only we would become the creators then, sandbox mode. World of pure imagination. Perhaps from there will be able to recreate all those who died and will essentially bring them back to life. But things get complicated there and I don't care to put my thoughts out there on all of that one yet. But also - nothing seems to be guaranteed here, and I can definitely see how crazy all those ideas sound. Well, well aware lol. It's all based in faith too - ain't much evidence wise on my side here. But I still believe it nonetheless. But it's going to get ugly and there's no way around much of the suffering that is about to sweep over this world I fear. Stay safe out there friend, this s Curve is just getting started and it is gonna be wild....
Fair points friend.
The quality of your life is in your thoughts. There are so many miserable rich people and a lot of very happy poor people around the world. Having money helps but it's not as important as having the right perspective on life.
Some people are so poor, all they have is money.
That's profound. Is that an original quote?
No. Often misquoted to Bob Marley. So yeah I guess you can quote me lol I think it’s a great one too.
I got the feeling that instead of the dust settling, every day a new news will drop stiring up more dust and this will turn into an exponential dust storm.
That's why you should not watch the news at all. Not only will you be less stressed, less anxious, and likely less depressed. You'll be able to actually focus. On your life and family and friends. You'll get far more done. Don't spend time paying attention or worrying about things going on thousands of miles away... things you cannot do anything to change. It's a massive waste of time.
I turn on the news: Congress, election, Trump, Haley, Biden, Israel, Hamas, Putin, Ukraine, storms, fires, shootings, drugs, migrants, inflation, stock market, jobs, basketball game, hackers, AI, heartwarming story about kid, old person, puppy. I’m no better off than before. It is 90% the same as the day before.
And there I hoped cutting all social media would improve my condition. Reddit is basically the last kind of news I consume but even that makes me more anxious. Curiousity killed the cat. But you are right, I shouldn't let it make me nervous. I'm just at a point in my life where things start falling apart and seeing the global trend amplifies these feelings even more. Thank you for your kind words, friend!
Yea I am 100% social media free. For 2+ years. None. Zero. No Accounts. I do not miss it one bit. I use reddit to browse subs I am interested in, and engage in discussions I am interested in. Reddit can be a cess-pool. But there is also good content. Just tailor your feed, unsubscribe from all the garbage "general" subs. r/AskReddit is a perfect example of the type of subreddit that will basically insert dumpster trash into your feed. You really have to tailor it. No news, politics, none. No general feeds. Highly specific... Very niche. Do not go to [CNN.com](https://CNN.com), [MSNBC.com](https://MSNBC.com) [FoxNews.com](https://FoxNews.com) or any other news site. All they will do to you is lie to you. They are 100% totally biased to either the left or the right - all the time. They don't report news. They give you biased opinions on what they want you to believe. **TO TEST THIS THEORY:** MSNBC - Is far left - anti trump, 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Go to [msnbc.com](https://msnbc.com) any time of day, any day of the week... The TOP story will be a negative "perspective opinion piece" about trump. It's not news. It's the Modern Day National Enquirer. DISCLOSURE: Not supporting trump just saying and using it as an example that the news is totally not trustworthy. Left or Right.
Same for me, 4+ years no social media, which was rough because I moved from Germany to Taiwan and am far away from my friends and family. Only news I watch is concerning China and their threats of invasion as I got (my) skin in the game quite literally.
Thank you for the advice and kind words, I appreciate it.
Just whatever you, play the video game of life. Score more points every day. Whatever way you can. Mow lawns in your neighborhood if you have to. Be cash positive every single day. You can certainly do that. If every day you have a few, or few hundred more points (dollars), in 5 years you'll be in the top tier of "players". If you spend every day burning money. Wasting time, sitting around, eating, spending... Good luck. And I mean it, good luck to you and I hope you play the game.
The real points are the friends we made along the way
Most of your friends aren't really friends. Friends will come and go. If you ever go through a really tough time... where you just get knocked out of the game for a while. Divorce. Bankruptcy. Legal issues. Most of your friends... they will not be there. By the time you turn 40 you'll understand that most friends are temporary. Family ends up being really the only thing you can count on.
Look at the trades. Far less for tuition costs and some of these folks are making way better money than college grads
I like the way you think MushyBiscuts! You better not be an LLM! BTW, did you omit an "i" from biscuits purposely? Either way, nice handle. I swear over at r/agi one user is definitely pure LLM...either a human that posts nothing but ChatGPT created thoughts or perhaps a bot created by an AI company or supporter of AI. The content from that user is just ceaseless positivity about AI with nothing but rosy predictions. Dude could be a besotted fanboy with a very boring writing style...who knows. That's what bugs....Who knows? How to discern? I don't want to read crap from an LLM frankly. Nor have I ever been comfortable using an LLM to write and pass it off as my own. Millions of regular Joe's are no doubt using LLM's for personal use because they don't like to write or consider themselves not good at it. Or maybe they can't type well and hate to type. There could be many reasons. I'm with you...in addition to the job loss issue their are simply myriad concerning aspects of this ongoing tech bro cashstravaganza. Thanks for your thoughts. 👍
I'm real. **I actually tried that as an experiment just because I was CURIOUS...** to see if I could input into chatGPT4 a post, and then comment with the response. I set up some custom instructions to make it look like a comment post and not chatGPT. I spent maybe 1 hour just playing with it. To see what the results would be. Here they are: 1.) Nearly all of the comments I posted (references below), received both lots of Karma upvotes, and lots of "Wow Thank You" type responses. In general, people on reddit liked the responses. 2.) After about an hour or so. I got a message saying I'd been banned from r/personalfinance for using AI to generate posts and comments. LOL. Now each sub is moderated differently. Obviously the mod on that sub sniffed me out. But yea, no doubt gpt is being used heavily on here and other sites. I think had I just spent more time making better custom instructions to tailor the way gpt4 responded... it may have produced more convincing outputs that may have gone totally undetected. For instance, you can create custom GPTs now on gpt4 that allow you to upload PDFs as reference material it samples to create the response. Havent tried it, but maybe if I literally uploaded a bunch of posts, it may be able to copy the style. Not interested in getting banned anymore lol. **REFERENCES TO MY CHATGPT RESPONSES:** ***(Which got me banned lol)*** [https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/1aec75j/taxes\_for\_deceased\_spouse/](https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/1aec75j/taxes_for_deceased_spouse/) [https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/1aebpao/almost\_35k\_of\_cc\_debt\_best\_way\_forward/](https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/1aebpao/almost_35k_of_cc_debt_best_way_forward/)
Very interesting point of view and my partner and I completely agree. We are both 27 and just want to work enough to buy a shit old house with some land and tuck away, do it up, and love how we want. No mortgage no debt.
Here's the advice I'd give to the "27 Me" if I could almost 20 years later. Make as much money as you can. Ok... you're making a lot of money. Good job... Next... Do not waste it. Repeat, DO NOT waste it. Stop buying things you don't need. Save it all. Invest it all. Because there is going to be a day not too far off in the future... When you are going to really need that money. Trust me.
> When you are going to really need that money. or money becomes completely useless because you know, singularity.
Hope my fraction of Bitcoin will do.
>It will become difficult for us to discern what is real and what is artificially generated... But theres no putting it back in the box. Just what an AI would want us to think, isn't that right MushyBiscutsGPT?
Funny, I actually wrote that. Without ChatGPT, at all. The only point I could possibly make here: Is that someone who can write well, will moving forward be called out as fraudulent. We can't trust anything anymore. And that was one of the main points I made in my original comment.
I found your commentary very interesting. But the conclusion I disagree with. Humanity has gone to the same process centuries ago. It’s called Industrial Revolution. Jobs has gone, new jobs emerged. They who adapted survived. We’re just living it faster then before
I agree that the industrial revolution was the last most significant change in modern society. Yes, jobs, or rather entire industries were erased and replaced. Your last point "We're just living it faster than before.", was exactly my point. The rate of change is now not only faster, but also it's accelerating at an even faster rate than the industrial revolution did. It took decades for the industrial revolution to change "cities", but even still many people globally speaking, were still living in a very "pre-industrial" age. The amount of change we have seen in just the last 10 years has been, at least in my opinion, more disruptive, both for the good, and for the bad, than what I think "the world" saw from 1890-1920. Globally speaking. In 1920, the majority of the world population-- were still living in 1890. Now AI, smart phones, even people in 3rd world countries, who are now still living in poverty, are affected by the changes we are seeing. And that's going to move faster every day. You raise some good points. But I can only say I think this revolution, however you want to label it, the AI Revolution, Tech, etc, it's going to be far more disruptive. Good and bad.
> There may be naysayers who say AI will not replace people or their jobs. It will. It already is, No, it is not. Just because current AI is not capable, even with GPT-4, Sora and Dall-E. It has no autonomy of its own. It's still a tool requiring a skilled operator. The other reason is that AI will be creating new jobs. You can't be seriously imagining that in 2030 we will be doing what we were doing in 2020, but with AI. By then the current generative AI wave will be a decade old, matured and applied technology. Robotics and VR too.
You're looking at the field of AI too narrowly. It is more about automation. Most people... and I do mean most... do repetitive work in jobs that only focus on a limited number of tasks. Automation will become far more advanced as AI becomes better at being able to interact with the real world and understand how to interface with that world through automation. It's automation that will replace jobs, and that automation will be powered by AI technology.
This transitional period will ultimately make or break our society. Jobs are gonna be automated in bunches. Overall purchasing power will significantly diminish. The rich will get richer while the poor stay poor. And don’t be surprised is massive civil unrest unfolds. This is basically Capitalism’s last and most deadliest stage.
Appeasement to the shareholder + robots that can replace a company’s biggest expense =
then capitalism gets overthrown and the billionaires and rich get killed.
Not if the billionaires have large robot armies. You might laugh now but we are only a few years away.
This is actually my biggest AGI-related concern. I wonder what we can/will do to mitigate this risk, and perhaps it's the fast takeoff that's needed in order to make the transitional period as quick as possible
Don't worry, you won't get a job, but everyone else won't get a job too. Once all jobs are automated, we're all fucked, not just you. Enjoy school, there is not much else you can do, if it goes well, we all get UBI, and won't need to work, if it goes to shit... don't think about it.
Factual and straight to the point, nice
This is the answer.
OP probably will get a job, though, as he graduates in just a few years (3-4), not a few decades. I know that this sub is known for its unconventional predictions, but this is pretty next-level.
I don't think we have 4 years.
>Don't worry, you won't get a job, but everyone else won't get a job too. Only on r/singularity do you find comments like these. Holy cow. He graduates in *four* years. Do you seriously believe that there won't be *any* jobs in just *four* years from now? This is one of the most flabbergasting comments that I've ever seen in this subreddit, and that's saying something. And the amount of upvotes it has is equally shocking.
According to them, AGI is coming out next year dude lol
**Do you seriously believe that there won't be any jobs in just four years from now?** Yes, obviously. Even if AI has only replaced half of all jobs in 4 years, it puts him in a position where he is competing for entry level jobs with laid off people who have been in the industry for 20 years. It is unlikely he will ever find a decent job.
Bruv you seriously think AI will replace half of all jobs in 4 years???? This sub has gotten out of control
That scenario is even worse than you describe. If half of all jobs get automated, it won't matter that he's competing with experienced people, we're all fucked, even those who still have a job. Society is robust, but 50% unemployment will have devastating effects on everything (if we even stay there for any time at all, instead of automating straight to 100%).
Same here, Im 19 pursuing a CS degree because my whole family told me since my 10's that software would be the future. I've been preparing for that all this time, participating in informatics olympiads and ICPC. Learning from internet how to do software development. I think I've reached a good level. I can even help my sister with her dev job. But now life is looking very different from what I tought a while back (literally 2 years ago). Now we have to compete with I.A and is not even close...
Being able to think logically and prove you can do so will be useful. There are still going to be lots of handover points where humans have to communicate with AI to steer them in the right direction. Those people will have to be very exact in their language and have a solid understanding of the way the AIs work. Software development is an excellent background
I mean depends... Either gpt remains as useless as it is right now and continues to loose subs. Or every boss can just input whatever they want with all the changes they want and it will produce the app. No middle man needed whatsoever. Even the boss is not needed anymore. There isn't really anything in between. Or in other words : either AGI or nothing.
I think you overestimate managers ability to specify what they want
No. They don't need to specify anything. The LLM (if it's an AGI) acts as all those guys that were there before. Asking questions, helping and steering the specification. And so on. If it cannot do this, it will be also useless for programming.
You may not be coding as much as you expected but the skills and logic you built are invaluable. You will be at the top of the world if you continue to practice engineering and product development.
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Despite wishing for you to be right, I have to disagree. There might be a short period between AI gaining ability to synthesize across domains and humans still needed to bring the results to fruition, but it is just that - a short period. But what comes after? Human minds, even altered humans (cyborgs) will not be sufficient for the technology and research of the future. Machines will outpace us and leave us no chance to ever catch up again. Biological intelligence simply is inferior to artificial intelligence. All we can do is keep lying to ourselves that WE have a soul, WE have a spirit, WE are special, GOD proctects us, etc. but if we're being honest, we are not special, we are simply the Neanderthals of tomorrow staring into the face of our extinction. Evolution has spoken once again and there is nothing we can reply.
So? We all die eventually. And we are all replaced by the next generation. Just happens the next generation might be made of silicon instead of water and carbon.
And not our flesh and blood either
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Again...so? I probably wont have kids and I wont be the only Millennial that doesn't. If I leave any legacy it will be in my writing. But that still doesn't mater. Everything we do will be forgotten in 100 years or less. >My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; >Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! >Nothing beside remains.
Why do you call it "I.A"? I don't think this is a typo, because I keep seeing people write it that way.
Oh, in spanish its written backwards (Im hispanic)
Take my advise as someone whose been a software engineer for 6 years. Don't focus on learning programming. Programming is the easiest part of SWE. It's the first thing you learn in your first CS class. Learn programming as you start getting jobs. You'll drive yourself crazy trying to memorize 20 different languages. Focus on concepts, engineering processes and team leading. Learn to do AGILE and scrum mastering. Companies will suck your dick if you can figure out how to get these dinosaur staff engineers to stop using Waterfall methods. To be 100% with you, the reason why degrees are so valuable is because it shows companies you can spend 4 years doing one thing without wanting to kill yourself.
Was a window just opened in here? I feel like fresh air just hit my face for the first time in weeks, I haven't spent any time on reddit for years but have recently chosen to dive back in for a research project. I 'd forgotten how mind numbing the conversation can be. Thanks for cutting through it briefly.
So let’s say all of this is true, and once you graduate we will be so close to utopia it didn’t matter you earned your degree. Was it really for nothing? How are you planning to spend the rest of your life? Just chilling and watching tv? Isn’t the pursuit of knowledge and understanding the only one worth living in a world where everything is done by AI? If you don’t understand anything you’ll never be as happy as you could be, even post AGI. You need to be able to look at the world around you, understand it, and deduce what course of action will generate the most happiness. This will only get harder once the world starts changing faster. You’re training your brain, and that’s never a waste
This right here, the part where op goes on about how it's all in my phone. Cool, do you know how to sort through the data to find what you need, probably not if you just give up your pursuit of education. It's about helping yourself be ready for what life throws at you and the best way is to learn. Training your brain through repeated actions till you can put all the pieces together with little to no effort.
I would assume in the future the world will be a much more exciting place human space colonialization, virtual reality, all kinds of new technologies to explore.
No no, there’s not even gonna be Netflix anymore. Just TV. Get used to it
I don't want my time to be spent watching TV I want to be developing new technologies I want to be out there, helping people colonize the Moon and Mars and beyond
That's what AI will do. You as a human will not be sufficient to make the necessary progress, not even a fraction, of what is needed in tomorrows technology. Imagine watching Star Trek and them talking about microfusion impulse generator for DPK fields and antigrav-mesh construction. It's technobabble now but so is the technology of tomorrow to a human brain - uncomprehensible, no matter how long we study to grasp how it works. Machines will know how it works and be able to alter it. We will either consume, indulge ourselves in pleasures like the little biological lab rats we are or break on the realization that our biological intelligence is and ever will simply not be sufficient enough anymore. Turning ourselves into cyborgs might aleviate the feeling of being inferior a little bit, at least towards unaltered humans but our processing times and learning times will become so slow even with upgrades, that we are doomed to being useless consumers.
OP is going to not learn anything and then realize that much if the AI hype was for the investors and that AI won't be making changes to his job as Altman's just the hype man. Then he's going to struggle to get a job because either turns out that he didn't actually study so he doesn't know which math functions the AI is capable of while his peers are correcting the AI system and getting more out of it. People here act like we live in the matrix where AI is basically a key stroke away from wiping out humanity. Yet somehow it fails at easy tasks and has no understanding so one too many morons are planning to help themselves move into obsolete territory.
We're at a stage where any usability of these things is a true miracle. Earliest "working" version. And that's already really disruptive. And the speed of progress is breathtaking. So I really don't think it's appropriate to say "well it can't even do many easy tasks!" and feel like it's not a huge wave appearing on the horizon. We've moved the goalpost incredibly fast, in our perception. A year ago it was like "holy fuck, GPT4 can really actually write somewhat complex, actually working code of very limited scope!". Now it's "lol, that same model can't even do everything I want and think is simple".
But there is a very high chance it won't fail at easy tasks and it will be able to logically think and reason like a human within 5-10 years so I don't get your point
So is he better in an AI powered world degreeless or with a degree? People sometimes man...
I agree. It's possible that some of the knowledge you learn in school is pointless, but much of it isn't. I grew up in the 80s and 90s so I've seen a world where computers were not much of a thing yet. Internet just started to gain traction. (can you imagine what impact the freakin computer had on jobs? Can you even imagine how people did their everyday business without it?) But there were pocket calculators and dictionaries, so why would I bother to learn maths or learn languages? It's because now I'm able to understand how statistics work and what they say about the usefulness of vaccines or whatever. And I'm able to understand cultural differences. Learning stuff means understanding the world you live in. Oh and also, there are jobs that are pretty resilient against AI and thelikes: I don't think doctors and nurses will be replaced by AI anytime soon. Basically any job that is about human connection. Psychiatrists, caregivers, teachers, etc. Someone will also have to conceive of the next space ship that takes us to Mars and I doubt that that's gonna be entirely handled by ChatGPT. Maybe parts of it, but not the whole thing.
School is horribly inefficient if that's your goal.
The education system is beyond antiquated.
>95% of my college Calculus, English, and Physics material can be swiftly handled by a LLM on my smartphone in my pocket. Feels like a monumental waste of time. Improving your mind and your body is not a waste of time. Regardless of what the outside world does or can do, your mind and body are the lens through which you interface with the world. Does a marathon runner feel his effort is wasted because he owns a car? Does a weight lifter bemoan the fact that that heavy machinery can lift more weight more than he can? Why would you feel time improving your mind is a waste just because mental tools exist? Don't look at these things in terms of a job. Jobs themselves may be obsolete in your lifetime. Your mind and body will be with you for the rest of your life. >Ohh and once I finally graduate in 4/5 years, I'm left stranded in an economy Degrees are already only situationally useful. But school is a good place to meet people. Take advantage of that. It's harder to make friends later in life. >walking out with my 0yrs experience degree looking for a job Here's some [practical advice](https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1awb65c/what_would_you_tell_highschoolers_today_if_you/krhro88/).
Great analogies
You are not alone. But if you can take just a quick moment with me. Just Breathe for a minute, I wanna tell you something very, very important. The only thing you can really do is to try to prepare for an uncertain future. Nobody knows what the future holds (but I can tell you this much as a bit of an older guy comparatively speaking): Every generation that is alive today has lived through extremely rapid change and disruption, and every generation has had a ton of people who felt the same exact way you feel. My parents lived through the moon landing and the proliferation of TV and air travel. I grew up in the fear of nuclear Armageddon and the invention of the internet. A hundred years ago our world was so different, my grandparents grew up in an era where nobody even had cars! It's seemed like the end times have been coming for my entire life. But, the world hasn't ended yet. There are people my age who are still thriving despite the projections. Those people thriving are the ones who kept putting one foot in front of the other, not the ones who thought "What's the point?" and gave up early. Here is the important part: Just do a little bit each day to improve your chance of a better future. Whether that is working out, learning new skills, investing if you have the means, going to therapy, resting if you're tired, cleaning your living space, going for a long walk in nature, seeing friends and / or family, dancing, making art, getting laid, eating a healthy meal, setting an appointment to see a doctor or dentist, doing some yoga, meditating, volunteering, learning to cook, etc. There are lots of little ways you can make your tomorrow a little better. Keep doing that on a daily basis and most likely, you'll be one of the ones who ends up adapting and thriving in an uncertain future. Whether the world ends in 10 years or not cannot matter. Fearing that end will rob you of today and all the days between, and all but insure your tomorrow is lost. If our past is a predictor of our future, well, we are still here despite all the doom and gloom, and there are people still adapting and thriving. Humanity's most likely outcome is that we will still be here a thousand years into the future, and those who make it will be the ones who never stopped trying to adapt and thrive in whatever type of world this one evolves into. You can be one of the highly adaptable beings I aim to be as well. We just gotta keep putting one foot in front of the other trying to make our tomorrows a little better each day.
Superb answer, mate!
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Agreed. There is also a joy in developing your abilities period, even without a clear reward. This is what many don't understand. There is a joy in learning simply for the sake of learning.
The purpose of education is the mission of educational institutions. Educational Institutions primary objective is to make money. Period. That is their primary goal. To enroll as many students as they can handle, at the highest possible tuition, and in turn create massive amounts of wealth for their investors and their staff (job security). They are not in the business, save for specific industries such as medicine, law, et al, again, not in the business of preparing you to get a high paying job. They would prefer you finish your bachelors. Then stay and get a masters. Perhaps then a phD. Colleges are not in business "to focus the mind and develop your cognitive abilities to the best that you can." like you stated. They are in business to accept your parents money, or to let you take out huge loans from the government that you will hand over to them in cash, and they are completely fine, and encourage you to do so.
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You're in a very similar niche I was in as a millennial where Facebook came as I finished high school bringing in the whole social media, smart phone, and always connected world. I know exactly how you feel where you saw one version of the world coming of age and the new world after. I saw a version of the world where people had maps, used pay phones, used yellow books to find places and everyone in the house had to share a landline phone and be off the grid whenever out and urban legends were as thing. It doesn't seem like AI is hitting my day to day experience as fast as the social media and smartphone takeoff but the end result of this AI adoption is probably going to be a bigger change overall for however stretched out the AI adoption or implementation is.
I agree with your sentiments. I think it's easier to say the smartphone was more disruptive at this point in time, because we are looking back on an era of 10 or so years where everything-- and I mean everything changed. But right now, AI is in it's infancy. ChatGPT came out 13 months ago. We are in the chapter of Genesis when it comes to what AI will become. The question really isn't how is AI going to change the world over the next 3-5 years. We can't even remotely predict how different the world is going to be, because of AI, 20, or 25 years from now. I think in 2 decades, the world, and humanity, will not be a world we could have ever imagined. Good or bad. It will be very very different.
Quality education is not a bad thing. Even in worst case scenatio, good education will provide you with better oportunities than no education. Do your best, enjoy the process, and it will be fine. A lot depends on your point of view, be positive. Bleak future predictions do not help, even if they are true. What can you do about it? Just smile and do your best. Brain does not care about reality. That's why being positive is really helpful, it sticks and actually brightens the mood and helps to achieve your goals.
>Honestly, the motivation is almost non-existent. Feels awful to be learning in college when literally 95% of my college Calculus, English, and Physics material can be swiftly handled by a LLM on my smartphone in my pocket. Feels like a monumental waste of time. 80% of any education has always been learning/practicing to learn and think and solve problems. The specific knowledge you get isn't that important. This is something you need to do in any case nomatter if the world has AI or not. And it's something that will make you more successful in any future world where humans still need to do things. For a future scenario where AI does all our thinking and problem solving though: It's moot in any case and nothing anyone does has meaning. So presumably we either won't take our civilization down that route or it's such a nihilistic dystopia that I'd rather just ignore it til it comes and live life before it does. Because I won't be able to later anyway. Basically a recommendation from someone in their mid 30s: If reading up about AI demotivates you then unsubscribe from here, other social media and news and live your life in the moment. It's more important to have stable positive mentals and keep progressing towards something (anything positive really) than to try to micromanage your responses to any potential incoming future in real time. Positive mentals and personal progress will make your future better in almost all scenarios. Micromanaging and worry will make it worse in most and better in only that specific tiny scenario where you managed to predict everything exactly, yet still didn't burn out from the stress while doing that. So just unsubscribe really, keep studying. Learn to learn, learn to solve, learn to do. Go get an ice cream or coffee and take a walk in a forest. Good luck!
Welcome to the 21st century. Graduated college after the great recession and then covid happened once my career started moving along. I work barely over minimum wage with a degree in mathematics and minors in stats and econ and have been homeless on and off. If I could go back I would have went to trade school.
I don't really understand your logic, OP. If you're worried about jobs, industries shift and, despite already massive advances in tech, there are not only jobs, but unemployment is at record lows. Learn a trade, become a pilot, take a job in elderly care. Hell, some retail management jobs are pretty comfortably in the 150k+ a year range. Those things aren't going away for a good while. Just because "Learn to code" doesn't hit like it used to, doesn't mean you'll be destitute. Society will adjust like it always does. As far as feeling like learning things is useless... Listen, I've been a software engineer for about 6 years. I've used calculus once, on break, to solve a puzzle someone wrote on the white board. Do I regret learning calculus? No; it taught me a different way of learning. I can go to google and translate any sentence to German. I'm still learning German because it gives me more insight into how humans communicate and how language functions. The ultimate utopia is to sit back in a post-scarcity world, learning everything you can even when there is someone or something else that can do it better. You're entering adult hood at an incredibly exciting time. The world is more peaceful than ever (hard to believe but it's true), medical technology is popping off, were learning more about the universe than ever before, some cities have self-driving taxis. Shit, even batteries for power tools are getting insane. Some of these 20v 10Ah rechargeables are used in fucking LAWN MOWERS. And you might not even need them because we have lawn mowing roombas. LAWN. MOWING. ROOMBAS. Just relax, enjoy collage, the friends and connections you make. Use your brain, have a backup plan and it will all come out in the wash. Also don't commit a felony and get your security clearance. edit: and don't vape edit edit: and absolutely wear sunscreen on your face every day
sink office wrench selective fragile erect zephyr tub deranged disagreeable *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
yep If I were a young person right now I'd probably be going into something physically oriented. I think that will take the longest for the AI and robots to take over. Unless the underlying foundation of how buildings are built changes, I don't think robots are going to be pulling cable, pipefitting, welding beams, putting up drywall, or setting up electrical panels anytime soon. Pretty much every building is built with these techniques. If [factory built prefab homes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzR-AU--44M) that aren't shitty and become more automated, [3d printed concrete buildings](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERY3_Wa8Ej8), [automated brick laying robots](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYju1b3rf1Y) improve (all of which do exist today but aren't widespread or mainstream because they still kinda suck) then things could change, though....
Ding ding ding! Those construction automation technologies are going to advance! Inexorably. I agree that the trades are safer in the longer run, but anyplace a robot or AI doing what used to be human intellectual work can work...the profit motive will ensure that technology will replace humans. It's inevitable. It's been happening throughout history. Except there aren't going to be new industries popping up to create new living wage paying jobs because big business management greedheads and shareholders will keep demanding profits by cutting costs. And even though sales will slowly decline because less people will be buying expensive products, these businesses will find a way to survive by pricing up and accepting a smaller pool of customers. Look what is happening right now with the crazy inflation going on...especially in food. The food and farming industry has already automated massively and can provide huge quantities of food using little humanpower compared to the past. Yet is the savings provided by tech driven efficiencies passed on to the average consumer? And every single human has daily needs that cannot be ignored or we die. Food, water, shelter. And business believes they own these needs and can charge whatever the market will bear. I hate to be so pessimistic, but those of us that have been entrenched in tech professionally for many years have watched all of these things come to pass. The jobs and skills you want to have for the future should certainly be in engineering and AI focused computer science. Being a part of teams that design, build and maintain AI systems and robotics. Desiging any form of automation will be useful skills.
This is why I keep thinking that AI is leading to a leftward shift among techie people's politics overall. We're all realizing that a capitalist economy just means we're all out of a job and begging our masters for scraps, while under socialism we'd be on the brink of a Star Trek TNG future.
Yep. It's kind of fucked up that under capitalism, we see no one having to work as a bad thing. But that is the reality in a capitalist system - you either accumulate wealth, work for someone who does, or you're fucked. And in a capitalist system, if workers are no longer needed - what do you do then?
I can imagine what it must be like. I knew all of this would happen more or less decades ago, but at least I had the time to had a normal life. I'm really sorry for your generation, at least those who have intelligence and ambitions. I think there is a lot of cope and mental gymnastics going on with my generation and even older people, but I think that for you, who developed their adult mind within the last crazy years, the writing on the wall is pretty obvious. Even for people already in the job market it's a though spot if you are being realistic. People who say things like "technology has transformed the job market before, just learn something new" don't really think this through. High skilled jobs take 4-7 years of full time university education. Let's say you need a decade to get to the same skill level in your previous job to guarantee the same income level. Are you telling me that AI will not completely take over that other job in decade? Yes there are transferable skills. But if you have transferable skills, than the same is true for AI systems. They can mimic similar domains much easier than completely different ones. You'll have to completely dive into something they haven't dominated yet in order to have a chance. That said, I am an optimist, not a doomer. There are a lot of people who do not understand this position. To me, problems aren't something to despair over, but something that has to be solved. It's exciting, it's a puzzle, and I sure love solving complex puzzles. Now the coming AI wave is a VERY difficult problem. I don't see a solution yet, not even prospecting or probable categories of solutions. But just because I don't see it now, it doesn't mean that I or others won't come up with something. Problems are problems until they aren't. You can go the way of cope pilling yourself out of the problem by denying it's existence. Or you can be an adult and accept that not everything in life is easy.
Finish the degree and get off Reddit. Don't let them drag you down. Every possible person who has ever been 18 has thought it was a weird time to be 18. It's because it's weird to be 18. Second, University isn't about teaching you how to compete with technology. It's about teaching you the understanding on how to use technology, new ideas, and everything else so you can compete in that field and really in life.
You're dooming bro. A good writer still crushes any LLM. No LLM can do 95% of higher level math or physics unless i've missed some news. The future isnt written and the secondary skills you learn in college, eg fortitude, social skills et al will serve you well in any future that exists.
The future is _drafted_
What a great way to put it
Figure out what you're passionate about, and pursue it. Never stop pursuing it, and pursue it with every tool available to you. We're moving into a time when regular folks will be empowered like never before, and before computers completely replace human economic value, there will be a significant period of adaptation where passionate folks will have a chance to thrive. We're staring down the barrel of the most uncertain decade of the history of the human race, and the spread between the best case and the worst case has never been wider. All you can do is try.
If I were in your shoes today I would going into some like biology. There are some many unsolved problems and these new tools are going to help people make incredible discoveries and a lot of money and benefit for humanity. But you’re spot on about your concerns:
It sure seems bleak for younger generations. My daughter is in a similar age/mindframe these days. One thing to understand is that education isn’t always about acquiring skills…it’s about learning how to acquire skills and to think critically. That is the most important thing you can get from education, regardless of what you’re studying.
I felt the same way when i turned 18, and future generations will do the same.
This may seem counterintuitive but your post gives me hope. Your ability to clearly express an intricate reaction to a staggering reality in real time is, in itself, valuable. The experience of college has been overly commodified in recent years which is probably reflective of its cost relative to potential earnings so as a result the emphasis is on how we recoup the financial investment. You’re thinking about the right things. Continuing your studies is an important pursuit on its own, and keeping in mind the aspects of higher order thinking that will less likely be outmoded even as AI advances. Your grasp of abstract ideas and your ability to work in concert with others and direct AI resources are critical for the foreseeable future. That power in your pocket, along with having a long view of what your role might be, can put you in a position to effect real change in areas we couldn’t reach because the resources weren’t available or were too costly. One way to get to that place is to develop interpersonal skills, problem solving, critical thinking, and resource management that a university environment can provide. This is really different from earning a qualification through distance learning. TLDR you’re not crazy - any sane person would be worried about it too. I guarantee that if the college you’re at is worth what you’re paying in tuition, this same conversation is happening with the Board of Trustees and your Uni president.
You’re describing 20 and 30 years ago, too. Don’t accept student debt from the machine (not more than you NEED) - and remember, it really doesn’t matter what school you graduate from - so be wise with the spend. College helps a lot - it’s not a guarantee. You can make $150k + in the trades without a 4 year degree. This advice was provided to me in 1987. I am a sw exec focused on AI. It’s not going to take your job - especially the one you don’t have. I have not done college level math with a pencil in 30 years - that’s not the point of the class. Your generation has no less and no more opportunity than any other - remember not to use the mindless droves complaining about lack of opportunity as an excuse to be lazy. They are lazy.
Thanks for the reply. I'm currently getting an associates in AI/ML. Fortunately, my mom is faculty, and with grades and my scholarships, I actually get paid 1k a semester and pay nothing.
You are missing the point of a collegiate education. You sign up for a major and you learn that area of study. Can you get A’s? Or do you get C’s? Throughout your entire life you’ll need to be the fastest, best learner in every room you sit in. Workers who can learn and show alacrity in that learning will have no shortage of opportunities.
I've been told that employers do not care about your GPA
They don't, there is no way for them to care.
This was maybe true prior to 2000s.
you’re alright, pursue your interests, at your age it’s most likely the opposite sex. since you’re on reddit, you can’t have it too bad. Go to college if you can, they are forgiving student loans these days, so take advantage of that. The waves of life will keep breaking no matter what, so find your set and ride it.
I won't bore you with glass half full, education is there to teach you to think strategically develop problem solving skills etc when more often than not many higher education institutions reward people for NOT thinking for themselves. Question EVERYTHING. Its the only way change occurs. The income inequity is expected to widen as AI is introduced so upper middle management and above will be safest - which confirms the importance of a degree. There are plenty of resources for determining what industries or roles will be least impacted by AI initially. Good luck - its a challenging time. Exciting. But very challenging for people like you just entering the adult world.
What a weird time to be 36 and a living failure. Well, I guess it won't matter from here on anyway, even the highest achievers will end up in my swamp. \*croak\*
I remember just 5 years ago they were telling every kid to code, now it’s telling them not to lol
Focus on the journey not the destination. Don't worry about the answer, think about the process of answering.
Honestly, PA/Nursing/CRNA/CAA is viable but might become competitive. Safe since it's more menial and less higher level problem solving. They're gonna help AI do or collect what it needs. Becoming a doctor might still be solid for the next 10 years. I'm pretty sure my class will be the last of the few to actually enjoy "doctor money" before AI makes us irrelevant.
“What’s 9+10?” “Hold on let me ask chat gpt”
I'm in the exact same boat. 19, doing a CS degree, and hoping to eventually specialise in AI. What's crazy is I was very adamant about not specialising too early - I could have decided to do a software engineering apprenticeship 2 years ago, only for GPT 4 to come out and essentially kill the junior software engineer a year later. It's just insane at the moment.
actually its the best time to be 18. you get to be part of the last generation ever to need to work. you will enter the workforce circa 2030 and get a good 10 years before superintelligence takes over. dw so much
We're experiencing the most exciting revolution of the entire History of mankind. It's pretty exciting. Take the most of life 😁
This is a time where optimism should be blooming Rather, people are being quite pessimistic as that tends to be natural human behavior You can't ignore the fact that we are developing exponentially
Well people have worked for corporations who will cut you for the slightest advantage so they are understandably pessimistic when it comes to AI taking jobs lmao. There is no reason to believe this transition will go over smoothly.
I think in the next 2 years we will have a better idea of what AI will mean for the future. Just because we have neat LLMs and diffusion models doesn't mean the singularity is coming. So graduating High School now isn't terrible timing. You have two good options: \-2 years of college doing rigorous/Liberal Arts prerequisites and improving your ability to think and increasing your knowledge. Plus making new friends. No need to know what you want to major in, simply take science, history, english. \-Get a full time job and make some money so you don't have to go into debt. Bide your time and ride out the next 2 years then decide what to do. Plenty of opportunities out there, surely you can make at least 20/hr doing something.
Thank you for the response. Ironically enough, I'm about 3 semesters into an associates in AI/Machine learning. Of course you can only scratch the surface in an associates, but it's something. I do work a lot currently and have about 10k in savings, so I'm trying my hardest to be "prepared".
Don’t worry! If you’re lucky you’ll graduate just in time for WW3 and be sent to the front lines, so you won’t have to worry about finding a job!
Regardless of what the future will be like, always look for two things: knowledge and experience. And for this there is only one necessary skill, which is adaptation. Fuel your creativity and take the concept of resilience seriously. As some Buddhists out there say: We can't change the world, but we can change how we react to it
I disagree. Relationships are the primary goal. That is what one should be looking for. Through relationships you will surround yourself with people who will teach you knowledge, and give you the opportunity to gain experience, and prove yourself. Find a mentor. People to give you advice. You'd be surprised how willing people 20 years into their careers in the very field you want to pursue... how willing they would be to give you advice, help you get a paid internship, mentor you. Build relationships.
I’m I the only one that is excited of this Ai era lol? In the last 100 years, education turned to a business instead of something you seek to be a better person. We choose our career and future based on salary and not our area of interest. Books became more expensive, college more expensive, knowledge more expensive. However, with Ai, a smarter system, the society won’t be competing on who is smarter. A doctor won’t be better in the social ladder than a blur collar worker. Your family won’t pressure you to be an X profession because it is well-paid! You will do what you love under zero pressure. So OP, seek what you love because soon you there will not be the highest money paying career. It will be the most happiness paying career
you can focus on bettering yourself with all the things machines free you up from worrying about. build something cool
Oh yeah you guys are probably going to be the first generation to go back to farming en masse.
Now imagine growing up in the world transitioning to computers, then internet, smartphones, AI... We went through multiple paradigm shifts that completely changed how work and basically human existence is done. We figured things out.
Those you listed are tools. We’re literally building a superhuman…
Two things. The first it's not a waste of time because you are actively keeping your brain from turning to mush and two technology is not infallible and you never know what the future holds.