The Disappearing White-Collar Job (wsj.com) 154
An anonymous reader writes: A once-in-a-generation convergence of technology and pressure to operate more efficiently has corporations saying many lost jobs may never return. The jobs lost in a monthslong cascade of white-collar layoffs triggered by overhiring and rising interest rates might never return, corporate executives and economists say. Companies are rethinking the value of many white-collar roles, in what some experts anticipate will be a permanent shift in labor demand that will disrupt the work life of millions of Americans whose jobs will be lost, diminished or revamped through the use of artificial intelligence.
"We may be at the peak of the need for knowledge workers," said Atif Rafiq, a former chief digital officer at McDonald's and Volvo. "We just need fewer people to do the same thing." Long after robots began taking manufacturing jobs, artificial intelligence is now coming for the higher-ups -- accountants, software programmers, human-resources specialist and lawyers -- and converging with unyielding pressure on companies to operate more efficiently. [...] The Labor Department projects that of the 20 occupations that will create the most jobs through 2031, about two-thirds will be blue-collar jobs that pay around $32,000 a year, including home-health and personal-care aides, restaurant cooks, fast-food workers, wait staff and freight movers. The professions with the best prospects for growth that require a college degree include software developers, operations managers and registered nurses. Those jobs pay around $100,000 a year and are forecast to be better protected than other white-collar work from AI displacement.
"We may be at the peak of the need for knowledge workers," said Atif Rafiq, a former chief digital officer at McDonald's and Volvo. "We just need fewer people to do the same thing." Long after robots began taking manufacturing jobs, artificial intelligence is now coming for the higher-ups -- accountants, software programmers, human-resources specialist and lawyers -- and converging with unyielding pressure on companies to operate more efficiently. [...] The Labor Department projects that of the 20 occupations that will create the most jobs through 2031, about two-thirds will be blue-collar jobs that pay around $32,000 a year, including home-health and personal-care aides, restaurant cooks, fast-food workers, wait staff and freight movers. The professions with the best prospects for growth that require a college degree include software developers, operations managers and registered nurses. Those jobs pay around $100,000 a year and are forecast to be better protected than other white-collar work from AI displacement.
4 day weeks will help reduce the problems. (Score:2)
In general, we need work to be automated, and we need to find ways to make social adjustments that make our lives healthier. Less work for everyone!
Less work. One example: Robotic Apple Harvesters (Score:2)
Advanced Farm [advanced.farm] makes robotic Apple Harvesters, for example.
Re: (Score:2)
Eventually there will be less need for unpleasant jobs.
Eventually there will be less need for workers for unpleasant jobs. Honestly, I don't even think it'll just be the unpleasant ones. I mean, on the one hand, I'd love for the AI to take over coding. This was a shit-sandwich decision to take as a career path any way you slice it, it'll be nice once it's relegated to a few big brains orchestrating the machines. The downside is, I've spent enough time doing this I'm gonna be a hurtin' unit when the axe falls. My other potential career choice? Farmer. BWAHAHAHAH
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
the baby boomers who got theirs (fuck you)
Fuck you right back, buddy. I worked for many years, and didn't spend a lot of time whining like a broken little baby.
Re:Who's going to pay for it? (Score:5, Informative)
I am a Boomer, and I have worked all my life in an environment that did have "at will" employment, had weakening unions throughout those 40 years, had double digit inflation and double digit unemployment right around the time I got my first career job, and had a 12.125% interest rate on my first mortgage, so settling on a house smaller than the median of the time, and much smaller than the median size now. So, it doesn't seem all that impossible to make do now.
interrest rate is not the issue (Score:3)
Re:Who's going to pay for it? (Score:4, Insightful)
Now go and do the maths on that 12.125% on the cost of the house relative to fraction of income and then repeat with current prices and current wages. You're likely in for a shock.
You've also got an observer effect mixed in there. You're saying 'I survived then so I don't see why other people can't now'. Did everyone survive the interest rates in the late 80s ok? No. Would you be on here commenting 'I lost my house in the 80s, but I know of one person who didn't so I don't see why other people can't survive now'?
Re: (Score:2)
Get a look at how things are now. Most anyone under 40 will never own a house
Who's fault is this ? Young people do *not* vote in numbers. If young people voted in high numbers, the politicians would listen to you. Instead the boomers are voting in high numbers and get what they want and are listened to.
Young never voted in numbers, so the old people gets to chose policies. Want change, get off your phone and vote for what you want.
Re: (Score:2)
Waaah, poor baby, do you need a safe space? // Gen Y here
All the big wigs are thinking (Score:3)
We get to then keep all the money to ourselves.
GENIUS!
Re: (Score:2)
And after a while you'd get stagnation because an AI is just using randomness and lacks the ability to do proper predictions and evolution.
A creative human can do things that no AI would even consider and come out ahead. Of course there are humans that the AI can beat too.
We do have security holes in applications of today, but imagine the strange faults you could get when an AI is involved.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Robots with bullets and excellent aim and infrared imaging and no fear of death will be cheap soon, and the rich people will own all of them.
Re: (Score:2)
And we will know how to hack them.
Hey, I always wanted my personal army and kill people will impunity, don't take that from me.
Yes, this time it's different (Score:5, Interesting)
The standard refrain against the argument of disappearing jobs has always been "But new technology always creates more jobs than it destroys". Those that argue this use the past as a guide. For instance, automobiles/trucks replacing horse-drawn carts created more jobs. Fair enough.
The difference this time, though, is that past advances were used to increase productivity of workers. The farmer could work more land (and make more money) with his tractor than with a horse. The delivery man could carry more goods, and faster, in his Ford Model TT pickup than with a horse and cart. The construction worker with a jackhammer, vs. a sledgehammer, etc etc. But these advances aren't about making workers more productive. It's about replacing them completely. And that's why you wont see nearly as many jobs created as in the past. The whole point is to automate work without human involvement as much as possible.
THIS tech really is a mass job killer.
Re:Yes, this time it's different (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed. This time it is different and that has been clear for a while. Sure, the more demanding white-collar jobs will not go away, but a lot of white-collar jobs are not demanding or only have small somewhat demanding parts. And many/most of those will go away and not come back.
Re: (Score:2)
If you really have been living under a rock and are not just trolling: Anything that requires actual insight and understanding (even only in small quantities) is "more demanding" and something AI generally cannot do. You can fake tiny and sometimes even really small amounts of it by using vast amounts of training data, but the combinatorial explosion explosion that always happens when insight is required makes this strongly subject to diminishing returns and rather strongly limits what can be done with this
Re: (Score:2)
Also, cue the backlash of disgruntled workers and vociferous boycotts.
Re:Yes, this time it's different (Score:5, Insightful)
Another consideration: the rush to adopt AI and decrease labor costs will no-doubt shrink the pool of customers with the ability to buy whatever tchotchke is now being produced more cheaply.
How long before the corporate masters realize that? Or, more importantly, how many years of their whining like children will we have to listen to about how nobody buys their product anymore like we hear during every economic shrinkage period? I swear there's always some exec parading around on TV babbling about how the consumers are evil and tanking the entire economy. Gonna be real funny when we have nobody making any money to spend.
Also, cue the backlash of disgruntled workers and vociferous boycotts.
Backlash? What are we gonna do? Get off the couch? Have you lost your mind?
Re: (Score:3)
It's kinda frightening that they don't get it. I mean, this is economy 101: You need to sell your crap to make any profit. If you cannot sell your goods, no matter how cheaply you produce them, their cost will sink you. Producing makes you poor, only selling makes you rich.
And to sell, you need a customer. You need someone on the demand side with the want and the means to demand your goods.
Re: (Score:2)
> Gonna be real funny when we have nobody making any money to spend.
They will soon see people, correctly, as nothing but drains on resources and their wealth. Let's suppose now 5% of working age people are incapable of any useful work from profound disability. What happens when it's 80%, which will be the case once physical robots are embodied with good enough AI?
Like 85% of humans are as useful as the deranged hobo swearing under the bridge, and will never ever be able to offer any labor competitive
remove healthcare from jobs (Score:2)
remove healthcare from jobs
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
remove healthcare from jobs
In America? What healthcare?
Re: (Score:2)
remove healthcare from jobs
In America? What healthcare?
The kind everyone gets from their job, I assume.
Re:Yes, this time it's different (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
> I have to take the "professionals", who get paid to do the job, by the hand, show them their mistakes and how to fix them... [a] small script which could replace them doesn't materialize.
Indeed! I've worked at bureaucracies both public and private, and the amount of waste due to systems that don't communicate with each other is utterly amazing. Gov't agencies need more IT-knowledgeable auditors/inspectors to point out questionable practices. The usual chain-of-command doesn't fix most cruft, because
Re:Yes, this time it's different (Score:5, Insightful)
It's about replacing them completely
don't think so. this kind of automation is still the same paradigm: you can get an ai to write a program but not develop a software product. you can get it to mash together a 1000 page court case in record time but likely not to win it alone. even in the arts, you still need someone devising the prompts. it's a radical change that will shift many perspectives, but it is still strictly about human-machine collaboration: this "ai" is just a tool.
these grim forecasts are baseless. it probably helps that there's a bit of perfect storm going on right now, and these generators just appear out of the blue the moment the labor market is downsizing because of a host of other serious reasons (layoffs driven by vanishing inflated expectations plus rampant inflation and high interest rates kicking in). now chatgpt is going to make quite a few workers redundant, and this will indeed be a painful adjustment, but it's business as usual. actually, we probably have worse things to worry about right now than robots taking away our jobs.
Re: (Score:2)
Anecdotal evidence: I spent a few hours trying to get ChatGPT to write a somewhat simple PowerShell script to automate a certain task. I eventually gave up and started learning the bloody thing myself.
Some time ago, I (unfortunately) thought it would be smart to have ChatGPT write me a bash script which automated another task (crawl through a directory structure and remove all empty directories). The code it spat out somehow managed to treat directories with spaces in them as separate directories (e.g. inst
Re: (Score:2)
It's right in the summary. They expect programmer jobs to be lost and not return, but software developer jobs to grow.
Re: (Score:3)
But these advances aren't about making workers more productive. It's about replacing them completely.
Even that isn't new, though. Met many telephone operators lately? Secretaries/typists? Elevator attendants? Milkmen? Similarly, only Oregon and New Jersey don't allow you to pump your own gas. I'm sure there are plenty of other examples.
Globally, however, there are societal differences. In many poorer countries, even people with fairly modest middle-class incomes often retain house servants. This is not because they want to lord it over the filthy poors, but because it's just what you do. You give people j
Re: (Score:2)
This is not because they want to lord it over the filthy poors, but because it's just what you do. You give people jobs, where you can. Americans don't seem to share this attitude (but they sure do seem to get mad at people who have the gall to sleep on the streets).
No that's not why. It's because they afford to. In many low to medium income countries the average wage can be around $500/month let's say. But the upper middle classes, working at a global corporation for example, could be $2k/m. Food and housing is cheap. So it's pretty easy to pay $200 for some student to clean for your or a retired grandma to come cook every meal.
You'll have a hard time doing this in the US or Europe on anything but let's say 5% income or so. I'd be happy to pay someone to wipe my ass f
Re: (Score:2)
People forget that each technological revolution like this is not (just) an increment, it's a decrement, namely in the number of things humans can still do better than everything else. Loudly exclaiming that 9-1, 8-1, 7-1 and 6-1 all left a positive remainder means fuck all when you get to 1-1.
Re: (Score:2)
Not only that, but the entry threshold is climbing to a point where we see a job loss for too many people in a too short span of time, and those people have nowhere to go.
Every time technology "killed" jobs, some people had to move. But so far, most of them could. Yes, the "IQ-threshold" of work raised a lot from the time when there was no-skill labor like carrying heavy stuff, but at least most people could muster the training ability to move on to other jobs. When farmhands were replaced by machines, they
Re: Yes, this time it's different (Score:3)
Entry threshold has been climbing well before AI anyway.
You ever check some of the entry positions for white-collar jobs like a technical writer or programmer? Pretty much asking for 2-3 years of work experience in those fields from the get-go. The average college student meanwhile (putting aside their part-time jobs), might have a 6-9 month internship at best.
It is also not exactly rare to see newly graduates apply for dozens if not hundreds of jobs, and only receive a response (even a letter of rejection)
creative destruction (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The tractor replaced a bunch of farm hands. The jackhammer replaces a bunch of guys with picks. The AI accountant replaces a bunch of accountants (oh noes), but you still have to have some accountant supervisors to keep an eye on things, or the CFO, or the CEO, or somebody, until we get to the point where we have a fully automated society and we just ask the magic box to fulfill our every desire.
Meanwhile, we do invent a bunch of new jobs. Accountant, for example. Programmer, lawyer, HR specialist. Company
Re: (Score:2)
Will AI produce new jobs? Consider where AI is now, not some hypothetical general human-intelligence AI. AI as it is now, is very good at some things and terrible at others. It makes mistakes no human would make, fabricates things (Ask ChatGPT to write and essay about and see what happens).
Re: (Score:2)
I think your argument is a false comparison. It was never about increasing worker productivity, it was about increasing total economic productivity. Many / most technical advances of the past increased productivity through ... wait for it ... eliminating work, replacing them completely. What used to take a room full of accountants now takes a single accountant and a computer. What used to take a field full of farmers now takes one hillbilly and his tractor. Buildings used to get built. We didn't have a work
Sabotage (Score:2)
Sabotage means to push back, pull out, or break off the fangs of Capitalism. — W.D. Haywood, Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology (pp.65)
Re: (Score:2)
Sabot means shoe
So what's left? (Score:3, Insightful)
Literally the reason for a shift to a pure-white-collar workforce was because of the complete and utter dismantling of the manufacturing sector aided by the continuous push by the multi-trillion-dollar higher education racket. There are no manufacturing jobs. There are no white collar jobs. Menial service jobs pay so little only those willing to work for less than minimal wage will take them. We're screwed.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
We're screwed.
If nothing is done to rethink wealth distribution and to give meaning in life to people that trouble finding it themselves, yes. Will not happen today or tomorrow, but burning cities are a real possibility.
Re:So what's left? (Score:5, Funny)
Will not happen today or tomorrow, but burning cities are a real possibility.
Think of all the construction jobs that will create.
Re: (Score:2)
Suuure. You also into finding people dying in war or catastrophes funny?
Re: (Score:2)
Well, I agree that Darwin award candidates are often funnily tragic.
Re: (Score:3)
I agree that Darwin award candidates are often funnily tragic.
The species is autodarwinating as we speak. Mass layoffs and continuing pollution, inadequate health care and general unsustainability? We've got an app for that!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe the few billionaires could build ghost cities with no inhabitants for their edification.
Re:So what's left? (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is that a lot of the manufacturing jobs are NOT in the popular places to live. Everyone wants to live in the trendy cities or in the trendy near-suburbs. Meanwhile, real manufacturing simply can't exist in a region where a basic apartment costs $3500/month.
Oh, right, a few "influencers" (retch) want to live in the ACTUAL countryside, but only where everything is green and the views make for good TikTok.
Meanwhile, semi-rural Pennsylvania, Ohio and Illinois still have TONS of manufacturing jobs, and are absolutely HUNGRY for workers. The rust-belt is still doing a LOT of real-life production. The kicker is that you gotta live about 75 miles away from the nearest trendy city. If you give this a shot, you'll find that life is a tad boring but basically pretty good. These companies pay an decent living wage that allows you to own a house. Not a shoebox apartment, an honest-to-god house. If you're young, they'll probably straight-up pay for your degree from a local university, just to keep you in the building.
Re: (Score:2)
:)
Re: So what's left? (Score:2)
A lot of those factory jobs still pay like peanuts, even in the aforementioned areas you talk about.
The average CNC machinist makes under 50k (and in some cases less than 40k) a year, with the top 10% earners earning 50-60k (not including management positions). Cost of living in Pennsylvania meanwhile is around 49k. While the state is overall cheaper to live in compared to say, WA or New York, it is still quite high for those types of jobs.
And on top of that is the cost of housing, of which we are seeing a
Re: (Score:3)
This i
Re:So what's left? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, there are semi-rural areas that have been destroyed by lost industry and the drug problem. But many more areas are thriving. Solid manufacturing companies that have been around for decades. Maybe they change hands every now and then, but the employers try HARD to keep the employees. Good, fully-trained manufacturing f
Re: (Score:3)
yes but the difference between a thriving community and a destroyed one can be as little as a single company deciding to close a factory and thats a bad gamble if want to, say, buy a house where you live or start a business in one of those towns. When the one employer up and leaves you are the one stuck holding the bag. In cities it takes a much bigger change over a larger period of time for the fortunes of the entire area to change, in a small community it can literally happen overnight.
Re: (Score:3)
Literally the reason for a shift to a pure-white-collar workforce was because of the complete and utter dismantling of the manufacturing sector aided by the continuous push by the multi-trillion-dollar higher education racket. There are no manufacturing jobs. There are no white collar jobs. Menial service jobs pay so little only those willing to work for less than minimal wage will take them. We're screwed.
We're moving into an entire economy built on advertising, with all other areas handled by AI. Advertising is the new messiah. With the old god of greed / capitalism, and the new god of shoving ads down people's throats in ever more encroaching ways, the future is super, blindingly, brilliantly bright, for the upper class. The rest of us may suffer, but what's a little suffering among the surfs? Maybe we can be bribed into fighting each other to the death for the entertainment of the ruling classes?
Re: (Score:2)
Literally the reason for a shift to a pure-white-collar workforce
The only countries which run a pure-white-collar workforce are tax havens. I suspect you're talking about America. Manufacturing as a % of total GDP has fallen over the past 6 decades (but that stands to reason, whenever you introduce ${newthing} then ${otherthings} need to drop as a percentage of total by definition), however the Manufacturing output of the USA in absolute terms has never been higher.
Just because you don't have armies of blue collar workers injuring themselves in smelting facilities coming
Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
The internet has become nothing but doombait misinformation about anything to do with "the economy" and it's become tiring.
Re: (Score:2)
Not only Volvo. You can have 10 jobs if you want in almost every field. Will we even notice the lost jobs that will never return?
Re: (Score:2)
> The professions with the best prospects for growth that require a college degree include software developers, operations managers and registered nurses.
Its right in the summary. Between ageism and AI its a wonder any of us still have jobs at all... if you believe the hype.
Re: (Score:2)
So, yeah. I think the grandparent post is about right - it's fear-mongering for clicks.
I mean sure the future might suck, but likely in some way that hasn't even occurred to us yet.
Re: (Score:2)
I find the Chicken Little nature of AI-scariness a bit comical personally. People seem convinced that 'its different this time', it is not different this time. Once again things will change and we will adapt, some people will suffer and some people will 'win', nothing really new here - just that no one wants to be on the losing end.
Re: (Score:3)
yes, it's for clicks, like most of what is posted here.
but tbh a "sw programmer" and a "sw developer" are not the same. the most relevant skill i've seen in many juniors is the ability to use stackoverflow. well, they're using chatgpt now and, guess what, their "productivity" has skyrocketed. they still produce the same low quality work, but industry is already adapted to that and they do so much, much faster, so fewer of them are needed. that's pretty real, and it might even trickle up a bit: if you need l
Re: (Score:2)
Programmers and developers are not the same thing.
They're fake (Score:2)
So right off the bat you can cut that down to 14 open positions. Now you have to take into account a large productivity increase on the part of those programmers cutting that down to seven open positions.
Yeah every single job on Earth isn'
The continuing saga of the death (Score:5, Interesting)
I no longer need to pay someone if all I need is a short essay about otters. It used to be that high-school-level-grade-"C" skills in language, writing and organization were enough to get you a white-collar job in an office somewhere. Yeah, that might not be the case in a decade or so.
The economy will adapt. Employers will adapt. People will be forced to switch jobs. Everyone will re-sort themselves around until most people find something productive to do. There will be pain. It will suck. The alternative is for us to make no progress and freeze in place.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
We can't freeze in place. Change is constant even though people only pay attention or notice major expressions. So since the only alternative is impossible no worries. Adoption continues until the end. The end has a name . Human Extinction.
I'm not so sure. I mean, if we continue exactly as we are? Sure. But I think we've got a nice big population reduction coming after we wipe out enough of the economy via automation to remove work incentive from a large chunk of us. And I can guarandamntee you in this country nobody with the ability to change anything will give a flying fuck how many people are out of work or how many are starving in the streets so long as the fat-cats and the politicians can still eat.
Maybe we all should have swallowed our
Re: (Score:2)
What jobs? (Score:2)
Be specific please. Every time I point out that automation is drastically increasing productivity and that that productivity is only going to the top resulting in a gradually s
Re: (Score:2)
So I say again, what jobs? Be specific.
Robot and automation repair-person. I imagine there will be tens of those around the world by the time we're done. That'll do.
Re: (Score:2)
There will be jobs. That doesn't mean there will be equivalent jobs. Some people are destined for a major downgrade. A lot of people, actually. Some people will lose their homes. Most of those will be white collar workers with existing mortgages. And given the last decade of ultra-low interest rates, that's a LOT of people.
As for the price of education, that'll collapse too. You can only command the current price of education by dangling future rewards in front of kids.
The most important question in front o
You're dodging my question (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
https://www.macrotrends.net/co... [macrotrends.net]
Unemployment fluctuates between 3% and 9%. While there's a big difference between 3 and 9, that overall range means that, even at the dead bottom of the 08 crash, we still have over 90% employment.
Somehow, MOST people are finding SOME FORM OF employment that pays their bills. Most don't get a TikTok-worthy life, but that was always a fantast designed to make people unhappy about themselves.
That's meaningless (Score:2)
Every time I ask the question I get a ton of replies, none of which answer the question. All of which divert to something else. All of them say the same thing: "They'll always be jobs!"
But *none* of them answer the question.
Re: (Score:2)
That being said, you don't accept that, so I'm willing to take a stab at future predicting. AI is likely to continue the trend that te
You need knowledge workers? (Score:2)
We may be at the peak of the need for knowledge workers.
In order words, you need to actually know something about a topic worth investing time and resource into, that can't be replacement by word vomit and an entry prompt.
Anyone who thinks that AI, in the short term, will replace skilled software developers is delusional, AI can't decide based on rationalization, skill, experience, and instinct. Which is another way of saying if you're a non-skilled software developer, who thinks the meme's of copying from Stack Overflow correctly describe a developer's real
Re: (Score:2)
I would argue that LLMs and deep-learning are almost purely "Instinct"/ "experience" based.
Isn't this what scientists always try to tell us about dogs?
Based on this summary (Score:2)
I know, read the article probably, but no thanks.
From the summary, how dissimilar is a software developer from a software programmer where one will be displaced and the other will be needed further.
Re: (Score:2)
One you can give a vague description of a piece of software you want, and they'll go make it for you.
The other you can give a pretty specific description of a function you want, and they'll go Google it for you.
Could have little to do with AI... (Score:2)
Contradictory (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe so... but not necessarily. Programmers are on the block first because that is in some sense disconnected from domain knowledge or architecture. Programming as the simplest encapsulation of writing code is absolutely commoditized. Has been already, to varying success. Stage one was offshoring. Now it's off-species-ing? But software developer as the combination of code, domain, and architecture, still has wiggle room.
Looks like I dodged a bullet. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a former burnt out and underpaid AV/IT guy that was made redundant 14 years ago when his employer didn't heed his warnings about developing technologies and lost their lunch to Netflix. I couldn't reskill to pivot into a different tech sector role because the idea of spending the rest of my life behind a keyboard was giving me existential dread. I ended up working in what has turned out to be my favorite job ever as the senior janitor in a government owned building with full pension and benefits. I've spent the last 14 and will spend the next 20 years basically doing a scaled up version of what a suburban dad does at home on the weekends, clean up after the kids and fix things that get broken in my basement workshop.
Holy shit... I think I'm happy.
Re: (Score:2)
Well... except for the part where you have to clean up after kids. Maybe it's my disdainful vantage point, but I think kids are getting shittier...
Re: (Score:2)
In my case the metaphorical kids are mostly old people and government employees there for seminars on how not to get scammed on the internet, traditional Chinese dancing, or social support groups like AA or na. I have to admit that cleaning up the ground floor washrooms in the few days following the welfare payments to the homeless people living in the park can get quite messy; but for the most part I'm basically paid to listen to audiobooks while I putter around making sure that the building is clean and i
The disappearing BS jobs (Score:5, Insightful)
Admit it. Lots of office jobs are pointless drudgery, reading emails, making forms/reports and passing them to other cogs in the machine, as part of a "business process".
That work is dead, soon to be taken over by mindless but capable talkative drones, that could fully replace that. Many people grew accustomed to these jobs and are now panicking, because that's what they've done all their professional lives.
Imagine the consternation of a 19th century person, noticing how many of the jobs they knew no longer exist today, taken over by machines, and you'll see how the jobs we'll do in the future are not even imaginable today.
That isn't the end of work, though. What remains, are jobs that require your full intention and attention, probably sharing a lot with the former one, but delegating the appropriate parts to the machines, and closing the loop between a candidate solution by an AI, and the actual implementation. There is an infinity of problems on any domain that machines can't respond to appropriately, where they can go wrong. There's where humans are needed to intervene.
Re: (Score:2)
But there is no shortage of need (Score:2)
For board members, C-Levels and Vice Presidents of cupholder maintenance.
Are these the same people that have been screaming (Score:4)
labor shortage for 3+ years? That way more people are retiring than there are people to back fill them? Get tons of H1B imports, etc? As usual, heads I win tails you lose.
Care More than Losss of Blue-Collar Jobs? (Score:2)
Andrew Yang Karma (Score:2)
HA HA HA
https://www.genolve.com/design... [genolve.com]
Here's how I'm reading this. (Score:2)
"White collar jobs are going to be replaced, not my job though, due to AI being able to produce the same type of information management, but not my job because it pays more. Because with people that actually has the knowledge to do the work that I profit off of, can be easily replaced, but definitely not me, the person whose job can be replaced now by an excel spreadsheet."
Re: (Score:2)
One does graphics and sound and eschews database work because it lacks all artistic merit,
the other does read-a-record write-a-record all day, and knows 47 languages, poorly.