There isn't. Just like with climate change and governments, we're all effectively in one big boat together. You can stop paddling towards the waterfall, but you can't stop everyone else from paddling and you can't get off the boat.
My kids are high school age. It's hard to convey the deep existential dread their generation has about the future.
* They are growing up in a climate that is worse than any prior generation had and getting worse.
* In the US, they are growing up in a time with less upward mobility and more economic inequality than the previous several generations had.
* Trust in social institutions and government is crumbling before their eyes.
* Blue collar jobs are already gone and white collar jobs have no certainty because of AI. Almost all of the money has already been sucked out of artistic professions and what little is left is quickly evaporating because of AI.
Imagine you're 17 like my daughter and trying to decide what to major in in college. You want to pick something that you think is likely to give you some kind of decent career and sense of stability. What do you pick?
Because, I'll tell you, she asks me and I have no fucking idea what to say.
I'm hearing this from my 12 y/o daughter and it's breaking my heart.
When I was in school (US, Ohio, 48 y/o) we got the "if you don't go to college you'll flip burgers" spiel from our teachers / guidance counselors.
Last week she got a variant of that except the teacher thoughtfully added "and burger flipping will be done by robots so you can't even fall back to that". The teacher threw in a healthy dose of suggesting creative jobs will all be destroyed and that "learning to manage AI" is the only viable future career path.
Trades are what my daughter brought up as a viable career path (and I was proud when she did). She also pointed out her school focuses heavily on "college prep" and is loathe to even mention that trades exist.
Edit:
I'm telling my daughter to lean on her interpersonal skills and charisma, and take every opportunity to lead groups. Being a physically present, inspirational, and effective leader is, I figure, a role that isn't going to go away any time soon.
I didn't go to college (beyond an Associate I grudgingly completed) and I didn't end up "flipping burgers". I concentrated on marketable skills in an industry that was growing, and I leaned into good writing and communication, and entrepreneurship. I've tried to hold this up to her, though I am quick to concede that the world is different now, by a large margin, from when I got started.
LLMs aren't going to remove the "moat" that comes from owning specialized tools (sewer and drain cleaning machines, pro-quality welders, etc), and having a procurement and service infrastructure.
Individual property owners who want to dabble already have that option from the myriad YouTube videos available to them (and arguably they're more trustworthy than LLM slop), just as they've had with books and other media in the past. I don't see LLM-based trade "knowledge" as somehow fundamentally different.
Commercial service and construction isn't going to get put out of business any time soon by "dabblers" learning from LLMs.
I'm not sure where you're based, but having friends who are tradies most of the procurement and service infrastructure isn't owned by them at all.
Putting in a new kitchen or rewiring a house isn't beyond the physical abilities of most people and their customers tend to be the same middle class knowledge workers which AI is expecting to cannibalize.
As to your point about the knowledge being freely available; just as it's easier to ask an LLM about software questions, the same is true for other fields. It might not be accurate, but it doesn't really need to be - it just needs to lower the barrier for people to try.
Basically what I'm saying is that I absolutely expect secondary side effects for the trades if it has a big impact on knowledge workers as well.
I should have been clearer, but by "blue collar" I was thinking more argriculture and manufacturing. Most of the farm jobs are gone from automation and most of the factory jobs are gone to China.
You're right that the trades are still an option and one my daughter is seriously considering. It's a mixed bag. Those jobs still exist, pay decently, and aren't likely to be taken away by AI soon. But many of them are brutal on your body and the sexism is rampant.
I’m not and never have - please contact me directly at the email address in my profile to give me more information about why you think I’m involved in such activities. I’d like to know if someone is joe-jobbing me.
I feel for you deeply. I’m equally fearful of this for my children, but one small blessing of my kids being very young is at least the ambiguity will probably be over by the time they have to decide. I don’t expect there to be good choices, but at least it will be clear?
How about professions that require licensing to practice (civil engineering, accounting, insurance, actuarial science, law, medicine, pharmacy, nursing), or work in the government sector (defense, military, municipal/state/federal agencies)?
I'd go with nail technician, barber, electrician, mechanic, beauty salon, plumber, coffee shop, window washer, construction
I see these types of jobs flourishing in my community. My barber is fully booked for the next month, and a hair salon owner in my street bought a new property and started a second hair salon... In the same street! And the second salon is also fully booked.
My other daughter is likely to go into something medicine-releated. That's a good suggestion. My oldest daughter really doesn't like touching people, so medicine is probably the last thing she'd ever want to do.
I think being a chef is a pretty future proof career choice. For AI to kill that profession it would need a very dexterous robotic body and the ability to taste, and it would need the special something that determines good taste.
Probably future-proof in that it won't get any worse than it already is, but the food industry is notoriously miserable. Shit pay, bad hours, extremely stressful work environment, lots of drug use, etc.
This series is seriously the best thing I have read about AI. Thank you thank you thank you for doing so much hard thinking and taking the time to write it all up. It's a monumental work and extremely valuable.
The next time someone asks me where I think AI is going, I'll just point them at this series.
We are already hitting the limits of demand in many areas of life. The fundamental currency that is not growing is human attention.
Sure, now you can be a musician and use AI to help you make an album in a weekend. Great. So can a million other people. Who's going to listen to them? Everyone is already inundated with more music than they could ever listen to in a lifetime.
Now someone who's never written a line of code can vibe code an app and upload it to an app store. Great. So can a million other people. Who's going to install those apps? When was the last time you found yourself thinking, "I wish I had more unmaintained apps on my phone!"?
Now someone who aspires to be a "writer" but lacks the willpower to craft sentences can throw a couple of bullet points at an AI and get a thousand word article out. Great, so can a million other people. Who wants to read more AI slop text on the web? There are already a million self-published authors whose books never get read. That's not going to get better when there are a billion of them.
All of us, every single one of us, is already drowning in information overload and is stressed out because of it. The last thing any of us want is more stuff to pay attention to. All of this AI generated stuff will just be thrown into the void and ignored by most.
Also, I said it way before LLMs, when X started firing people. Software is more or less on maintenance mode. You don't need that many developers anymore and so many new features.
You don't need to create the next Facebook, Shopify, X etc.... Because it already exists and controls the market.
Yes, obviously there are many negative externalities to a car-driven culture, but just like we can easily become blind to the diffuse societal costs of a piece of technology, I think a culture of nay-saying makes it very easy to be blind to the diffuse value of a piece of technology too.
Loud stinky cities full of pollution and climate change are obviously horrible.
But we easily take for granted how amazing it is to be able to drive to a mountain and go for a hike, or call an ambulance, or go to a restaurant when it's raining out, or safely travel in a city without risking being assaulted, etc.
Internal combustion engines are amazing and horrible.
Most people that are against car-centric cities like myself are not against cars 100% but against their level of priority in the design of our cities and societies.
Many of the scenarios you mentoned aren't even that big of a deal for many. I have walked in the rain many times and somehow I was still ok. You could argue that car culture has made us soft in some ways.
Nevertheless, if we reduced our emphasis on cars in society and the design of our cities to the point where cars were mainly used for those specific cases where cars truly are by far the best options (like ambulances) we would have more livable and walkable cities and ironically cities where it is nicer for those who really really want/need to drive since everyone and their mom wouldn't be driving because they aren't forced to drive to everything. Fewer people clogging the roads like my co-worker who would watch Netflix while she drove to work. Obviously she didn't have a passion for driving but was forced to because she lived in a sprawling metro with terrible transit options.
I agree a middle position where cities are dense and people-focused but where cars are still available would be ideal. That's pretty close to what I have here in Seattle and it's nice. I have a car and can park it by my house, but I don't use it for commuting to work.
(Well, I do right now because I'm recovering from surgery and can't walk to the bus stop. But I don't usually drive to work. Which is kind of my overall point. It's very easy for able-bodied younger people to think cars aren't necessary, but not everyone is so mobile.)
I don't disagree with your overall point, but I do think that ingenuity, problem-solving, impulse control, and the ability to delay gratification and reach long-term goals have always been valuable skills.
You might still only be a farmer if you're smart, but you can at least be one of the more productive farmers with a more smoothly running farm.
I agree. Studies show time and time again that smart people are more efficient even at tasks that may not look like they require a smart person. So while people might not have been paid to do thinking jobs I don't buy that the intelligent did not always have had an edge, all else being equal.
What if this is modeled around the premise that in any situation where reasoning can be used, someone would have access to super-human reasoning?
Where does the human in the loop somehow manage to utilize super-human reasoning better than another person?
I'm not suggesting it's impossible, so much as wondering if we can reach a place where the human is truly irrelevant to the process, and can't make a better decision than the superhuman entity.
I'm not sure this is ever possible. It's more of a thought experiment. What's between here and there? Right now we can use pseudo-intelligence from silicon to our advantage, and being smarter than average is clearly a massively outsized advantage. It's similar to how being able to automate tasks gives you an outsized advantage, yet in so many more ways. But what if that advantage thins or even vanishes?
The point here is not that intelligence is somehow the super property where if you have slightly more intelligence then your neighbor that means you are better even if they are stronger, need less sleep, are more dexterous, are more mentally resilient etc. The point is that intelligence is an advantage.
Agree. If you've ever spent serious time in the country with farmers, the level of ingenuity is impressive among many, and they benefit from it greatly. As the grandson of depression farmers, I noticed intelligence mattered a lot, even if just for survival.
We're all hand-waving away the fact that there is no un-claimed farmland in the US. It's all owned already. You can't invent your way into possessing farmland. You will have to buy it from someone who no longer has any willingneess to sell it, unless you get lucky and find a dying person with no friends or family. If all we have is farming, no one would part with the land, as it's a valuable, vital resource.
None of this Jack inherits but wants to live in the big city and be an architect. He'll inherit and keep because there is no architecture job to be had.
As someone who grew up on a farm, "you may be a farmer but you could be a productive one" is so intensely depressing. Farming is a shitty job that requires insane amounts of back-breaking labor, never-ending toil, and all this at a time when climate change is going to utterly fuck over farmland and destroy crop yields.
> I’ve been saying since last year that by the end of 2026, people will be mostly programming by talking to a face. There’s absolutely NO reason to type with the Mayor. You should be able to chat with them like a person. You’ll have a cartoon fox there onscreen, in costume, building and managing your production software, and showing you pretty status updates whenever you ask for one. This is the end state for IDEs.
This is a desirable end state for highly social but perhaps slightly sociopathic extroverts who want to spend all day talking even though they aren't talking to a person.
For anyone else, it's hard to imagine considering that a desirable way to spend eight hours a day.
>This is a desirable end state for [a category of people] who want to spend all day talking even though they aren't talking to a person.
When I am not in actual meetings, I do already spend all day talking to anthropomorphized facets of my personality that represent software architecture, security paranoia, operational practicality, user experience, etc. Often not by speaking aloud, but it's a conversation nonetheless.
So yes, this sounds absolutely grand.
EDIT: But I don't think it should be forced on everyone! Having the option to use the tools that work best for you should be the goal.
Unfortunately, the several million other people who live in the same voting unit as me didn't and ended up electing an asshat anyway.
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