Not all that great for the people who now can’t get jobs.
Take me for example. I like to think I’m a pretty good software engineer. And I actually enjoy it. I’d be a pretty bad doctor and an even worse teacher (I’m also a man so that would limit me to teaching teenagers and older anyway, nobody wants men near children in education).
Don’t give much of a fuck about the companies, but a lot of people are now denied a career path that might’ve been THE thing they’re great at and enjoy doing. This is about several different fields, of which mine is one. I’m quite lucky I got in when I did. Otherwise I’d have to start considering suicide by now because I can’t stand manual labour or customer service.
the teachers i see employed at my school when i was in HS early 2000s who are male, that have been washed out from other stem majors, or have been gatekept from those fields altogether, not a good fit it pretty much reflect thier lack of interest in teaching.
Don’t you think that’s a bit much? People committing suicide because they can’t get their favourite career path? I have never heard of it being a problem. Before computers existed there were people like you and they didn’t all commit suicide. They chose the jobs that were available. Sure it takes some adjustment and it may not be a string of everlasting highlights, but let’s not get carried away here.
I don’t fully blame them, as much as it’s a but of an extreme take. I’ve been out a job for two years. It shohld be easy enough and yet I can barely get a response and almost never get any feedback. Sometimes I get “you don’t have enough experience in this thing that only a firm like us can provide but fuck you.” And then the alternative is being told to go get exploited for minimum wage and disrespect? I did all this and now I just have to start at square one plus debt for even less money than I was getting before? And I’m good with my hands but I’m not getting a job without other experience, so I have next to nothing to go by.
Well yeah, but your situation is much worse imo. Not being able to get a job at all and not getting your favoured career path are two different things. Not working when you want to work is much more depressing.
I understand that it must be hard to get a job right now. Especially if you work in a sector that is under pressure from AI. A lot of companies aren’t hiring because of it. But things will never be the same as they were before AI. So many people will need to get a different education towards a field that isn’t as threatened by AI.
I can guarantee they could also find a minimum wage job at McDonald’s or some such, no problem. It’s just the whole not wanting to do that that’s an issue.
Nope. I’ve read enough threads on Reddit where people can’t even get a Minimum Wage job because those are getting overwhelmed with applicants as well so those kinda jobs also have become hard to come by and require experience.
Well shit, some countries might be having it even worse then. Here at least there are still plenty of openings for grocery stores, fast food restaurants and gas stations. Pay is shit, work is grueling, but they never stop hiring. My point really was that these are the jobs we’ll have to start choosing from, as opposed to the jobs we want to do.
It’s all about the rate of change: neoliberal globalization has brought down wages across industries, so fewer good jobs are left, and the not-so-good ones barely keep up the same standard of living.
From a neutral historical perspective, some serious pearl-clutching about jobs is not ill-founded.
As you say, people in the past facing these circumstances didn’t all commit suicide. Yet some did it explicitly, some did it indirectly with alcohol or other vices, others just lived less fulfilling lives than they otherwise would have. Nonetheless, we are very much encouraging deaths of despair en masse with our current societal outlook.
Society will adapt. It always has.
People can make much more meaningful contributions to society than working at a desk in some software company. Let the AI do that. Humans are way too valuable for that. Meaningfulness of the work one does is one of the most important features of work satisfaction. Not everyone needs to be a doctor, nurse or teacher. Those are just the most common examples, but there are many more meaningful jobs where you are not simply an AI in human form slaving away at a desk job.
It is also simply not true that things like suicide and addiction rates were higher in the recent past. For example, look at drug overdose rates that have risen sharply in the past decades.
So for the last few millennia, technology has automated away mostly manual labor and created room for knowledge work. The stuff that used to require a human brain. The “slave jobs” you’re talking about.
AI has the opposite effect. Engineers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, nurses are going to be mostly worthless (surgeons will still be necessary for a while and nurses will still need to administer IVs and such, but largely anything that’s not physically interacting with a patient will be automated away quicker). Anything creative is out the window too. AI can write 500 movie scripts in the time you can write one… And we were already trending towards slop with streaming.
The jobs that are safest for now are the ones where you don’t need to use your brain but your body. Physical automatons are more expensive to buy and maintain than subscribing to some AI agent service and the workers they replace are cheaper.
You’re sweeping a lot under the rug with that first sentence: Society will adapt. Yeah sure, barring global catastrophe, it will. Doesn’t mean people won’t die and suffer in the process.
I’m making no claims about good vs. bad jobs here; people can self-actualize however they like in my book. Nor was I making any specific point about epidemiology of deaths of despair in the recent past, but I think that trend serves to illustrate the overall point.
What am I sweeping under the rug? I’m not saying that change will be easy, but I’m talking about the end result. Too many people have made the wrong choices and got fooled by companies dangling big paychecks in front of their noses to work shitty office jobs.
You insinuated that in the past, people killed themselves more and had more addiction problems due to the fact that they couldn’t get the job they wanted. That is simply not true and just guessing at things you can’t back up. I’m showed you that the opposite is true: the data only shows that deaths of despair are getting worse than before we had all these bullshit jobs. Whether that is because of them or not cannot be said, but it shows that what you’re saying is not true.
Find me a meaningful and challenging job that doesn’t get boring over time, that I don’t need a degree or any sort of artistic talent for.
I doubt you’ll be able to. The only job I ever held before my current career was refurbishing laptops and I can tell you most of us wanted to kill ourselves. Half the guys were on antidepressants.
What do you mean? There are plenty of jobs in health care alone that don’t require extensive training at all. They don’t get boring since you meet new people every day and it is meaningful work, which in turn is a big part of why people are satisfied with their jobs.
Edit: can the downvoters at least explain why they are downvoting? What I wrote is 100% true, unless I am missing something big here. So please enlighten me why you feel the need to downvote something so obviously true.
Do you really think doctors and nurses are the only people who work at a hospital or in healthcare in general?
Even in a hospital doctors and nurses are about half of all personnel. People need daily care, need food, need someone to help them get from one place to another, like when they need to get medical exams.
Outside of a hospital there are plenty of jobs that bring you into contact with people that don’t need an extensive degree. Maybe a couple months of training.
Those are not jobs that would give me any fulfillment whatsoever. What are the complex technical problems to solve in feeding someone? In moving them around? It’s exactly the same as factory assembly line work. A monotonous grind with no end in sight, nothing gets “done” because there’s a bunch more of the same every day until you retire.
I’m psychologically incapable of doing these types of jobs. Yes I’m medicated and no it doesn’t help too much. I have crippling ADHD. I’ve done factory work before and like I said, it makes me want to off myself. This was the type of job we were supposed to let robots handle, not the ones where we actually get to use our brains.
I also don’t see “bring you into contact with people” as a positive for a job in any way. I’ve found that any time I have to work with customers, they can be absolutely annoying idiots. Just hanging out with people I actually like is a completely different proposition. It’s just that when people need something, they rarely know what they need and you have the options of either making them angry by suggesting they’re wrong, or making them angry by letting them be wrong. To be clear, I don’t consider myself immune to this. See me walk into an automotive paint store or a doctor’s office and my questions and ideas are probably very stupid. But I make up for it by not arguing when I’m being corrected by the person that actually knows what they’re doing.
That was not the question you asked. Health care is only one of the options. Go ask an LLM for some more ideas that are more to your liking if you don’t have the imagination yourself.
It was. I literally said challenging. I can only do jobs that use the brain, because otherwise I’ll want to kill myself. These jobs no longer exist at the entry level in most fields. I don’t think we’ll even have junior doctors or lawyers for long, let alone engineers and such.
Like I said, I have a job already, but many others like me will have to work jobs they hate for the rest of their lives. I can’t be the only one who feels existential dread at factory labour type jobs (which includes the ones you described in healthcare, I don’t see them being significantly different from working in an Amazon warehouse once you’ve been doing it long enough to be desensitised to the whole “at least I’m helping people” thing which just isn’t enough eventually).
Not all that great for the people who now can’t get jobs.
Take me for example. I like to think I’m a pretty good software engineer. And I actually enjoy it. I’d be a pretty bad doctor and an even worse teacher (I’m also a man so that would limit me to teaching teenagers and older anyway, nobody wants men near children in education).
Don’t give much of a fuck about the companies, but a lot of people are now denied a career path that might’ve been THE thing they’re great at and enjoy doing. This is about several different fields, of which mine is one. I’m quite lucky I got in when I did. Otherwise I’d have to start considering suicide by now because I can’t stand manual labour or customer service.
the teachers i see employed at my school when i was in HS early 2000s who are male, that have been washed out from other stem majors, or have been gatekept from those fields altogether, not a good fit it pretty much reflect thier lack of interest in teaching.
Don’t you think that’s a bit much? People committing suicide because they can’t get their favourite career path? I have never heard of it being a problem. Before computers existed there were people like you and they didn’t all commit suicide. They chose the jobs that were available. Sure it takes some adjustment and it may not be a string of everlasting highlights, but let’s not get carried away here.
I don’t fully blame them, as much as it’s a but of an extreme take. I’ve been out a job for two years. It shohld be easy enough and yet I can barely get a response and almost never get any feedback. Sometimes I get “you don’t have enough experience in this thing that only a firm like us can provide but fuck you.” And then the alternative is being told to go get exploited for minimum wage and disrespect? I did all this and now I just have to start at square one plus debt for even less money than I was getting before? And I’m good with my hands but I’m not getting a job without other experience, so I have next to nothing to go by.
Well yeah, but your situation is much worse imo. Not being able to get a job at all and not getting your favoured career path are two different things. Not working when you want to work is much more depressing. I understand that it must be hard to get a job right now. Especially if you work in a sector that is under pressure from AI. A lot of companies aren’t hiring because of it. But things will never be the same as they were before AI. So many people will need to get a different education towards a field that isn’t as threatened by AI.
I can guarantee they could also find a minimum wage job at McDonald’s or some such, no problem. It’s just the whole not wanting to do that that’s an issue.
Nope. I’ve read enough threads on Reddit where people can’t even get a Minimum Wage job because those are getting overwhelmed with applicants as well so those kinda jobs also have become hard to come by and require experience.
Well shit, some countries might be having it even worse then. Here at least there are still plenty of openings for grocery stores, fast food restaurants and gas stations. Pay is shit, work is grueling, but they never stop hiring. My point really was that these are the jobs we’ll have to start choosing from, as opposed to the jobs we want to do.
Not really.
It’s all about the rate of change: neoliberal globalization has brought down wages across industries, so fewer good jobs are left, and the not-so-good ones barely keep up the same standard of living.
From a neutral historical perspective, some serious pearl-clutching about jobs is not ill-founded.
As you say, people in the past facing these circumstances didn’t all commit suicide. Yet some did it explicitly, some did it indirectly with alcohol or other vices, others just lived less fulfilling lives than they otherwise would have. Nonetheless, we are very much encouraging deaths of despair en masse with our current societal outlook.
lower wages is the least of peoples worries if they cant even find a job anymore.
Society will adapt. It always has. People can make much more meaningful contributions to society than working at a desk in some software company. Let the AI do that. Humans are way too valuable for that. Meaningfulness of the work one does is one of the most important features of work satisfaction. Not everyone needs to be a doctor, nurse or teacher. Those are just the most common examples, but there are many more meaningful jobs where you are not simply an AI in human form slaving away at a desk job.
It is also simply not true that things like suicide and addiction rates were higher in the recent past. For example, look at drug overdose rates that have risen sharply in the past decades.
So for the last few millennia, technology has automated away mostly manual labor and created room for knowledge work. The stuff that used to require a human brain. The “slave jobs” you’re talking about.
AI has the opposite effect. Engineers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, nurses are going to be mostly worthless (surgeons will still be necessary for a while and nurses will still need to administer IVs and such, but largely anything that’s not physically interacting with a patient will be automated away quicker). Anything creative is out the window too. AI can write 500 movie scripts in the time you can write one… And we were already trending towards slop with streaming.
The jobs that are safest for now are the ones where you don’t need to use your brain but your body. Physical automatons are more expensive to buy and maintain than subscribing to some AI agent service and the workers they replace are cheaper.
You’re sweeping a lot under the rug with that first sentence: Society will adapt. Yeah sure, barring global catastrophe, it will. Doesn’t mean people won’t die and suffer in the process.
I’m making no claims about good vs. bad jobs here; people can self-actualize however they like in my book. Nor was I making any specific point about epidemiology of deaths of despair in the recent past, but I think that trend serves to illustrate the overall point.
What am I sweeping under the rug? I’m not saying that change will be easy, but I’m talking about the end result. Too many people have made the wrong choices and got fooled by companies dangling big paychecks in front of their noses to work shitty office jobs.
You insinuated that in the past, people killed themselves more and had more addiction problems due to the fact that they couldn’t get the job they wanted. That is simply not true and just guessing at things you can’t back up. I’m showed you that the opposite is true: the data only shows that deaths of despair are getting worse than before we had all these bullshit jobs. Whether that is because of them or not cannot be said, but it shows that what you’re saying is not true.
Find me a meaningful and challenging job that doesn’t get boring over time, that I don’t need a degree or any sort of artistic talent for.
I doubt you’ll be able to. The only job I ever held before my current career was refurbishing laptops and I can tell you most of us wanted to kill ourselves. Half the guys were on antidepressants.
What do you mean? There are plenty of jobs in health care alone that don’t require extensive training at all. They don’t get boring since you meet new people every day and it is meaningful work, which in turn is a big part of why people are satisfied with their jobs.
Edit: can the downvoters at least explain why they are downvoting? What I wrote is 100% true, unless I am missing something big here. So please enlighten me why you feel the need to downvote something so obviously true.
Doctors need an M.D. Nurse is a 4 year degree. What can you do in healthcare other than janitorial work without a degree?
Do you really think doctors and nurses are the only people who work at a hospital or in healthcare in general? Even in a hospital doctors and nurses are about half of all personnel. People need daily care, need food, need someone to help them get from one place to another, like when they need to get medical exams.
Outside of a hospital there are plenty of jobs that bring you into contact with people that don’t need an extensive degree. Maybe a couple months of training.
Those are not jobs that would give me any fulfillment whatsoever. What are the complex technical problems to solve in feeding someone? In moving them around? It’s exactly the same as factory assembly line work. A monotonous grind with no end in sight, nothing gets “done” because there’s a bunch more of the same every day until you retire.
I’m psychologically incapable of doing these types of jobs. Yes I’m medicated and no it doesn’t help too much. I have crippling ADHD. I’ve done factory work before and like I said, it makes me want to off myself. This was the type of job we were supposed to let robots handle, not the ones where we actually get to use our brains.
I also don’t see “bring you into contact with people” as a positive for a job in any way. I’ve found that any time I have to work with customers, they can be absolutely annoying idiots. Just hanging out with people I actually like is a completely different proposition. It’s just that when people need something, they rarely know what they need and you have the options of either making them angry by suggesting they’re wrong, or making them angry by letting them be wrong. To be clear, I don’t consider myself immune to this. See me walk into an automotive paint store or a doctor’s office and my questions and ideas are probably very stupid. But I make up for it by not arguing when I’m being corrected by the person that actually knows what they’re doing.
That was not the question you asked. Health care is only one of the options. Go ask an LLM for some more ideas that are more to your liking if you don’t have the imagination yourself.
It was. I literally said challenging. I can only do jobs that use the brain, because otherwise I’ll want to kill myself. These jobs no longer exist at the entry level in most fields. I don’t think we’ll even have junior doctors or lawyers for long, let alone engineers and such.
Like I said, I have a job already, but many others like me will have to work jobs they hate for the rest of their lives. I can’t be the only one who feels existential dread at factory labour type jobs (which includes the ones you described in healthcare, I don’t see them being significantly different from working in an Amazon warehouse once you’ve been doing it long enough to be desensitised to the whole “at least I’m helping people” thing which just isn’t enough eventually).
So that’s what you were sort of cheering for.
deleted by creator