Blue-collar jobs are gaining popularity as AI threatens office work
Blue-collar jobs are gaining popularity as AI threatens office work
Blue-collar jobs are gaining popularity as AI threatens office work
There is no shortage of hype around AI coming for jobs, and while the U.S. labor market has begun to sputter, hard evidence of AI-related job losses is scarce.
Geoffrey Hinton’s message on a recent podcast about artificial intelligence was simple: “Train to be a plumber.”
Hinton, a Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist often called “the Godfather of AI,” said in June what people have now been saying for years: Jobs that include manual labor and expertise are the least vulnerable to modern technology than some other career paths, many of which have generally been considered more respected and more lucrative.
“I think plumbers are less at risk,” Hinton said. “Someone like a legal assistant, a paralegal, they’re not going to be needed for very long.”
This needs to be shouted from rooftops. As much as I think AI is a useful tool, all of these scenarios suggesting AI is going to radically change the world must be viewed through the lens of convincing investors to invest more money and businesses to spend more on AI. There is some value there in helping people do some tasks more efficiently, but AI can't currently wholesale replace people and I don't think LLMs ever will.
Don't change your career path due to AI (I'm sure there are exceptions, but by and large).
I read stuff like this and wonder, have you ever actually tried to use AI to do something productive? Like for instance, write a complex SQL query in a large database?
Yes, and it’s fucking garbage.
Yes. I use AI every day at work.
This is not a great use case for AI generation because it combines long multiple select queries with having to know the DDL of all the relevant tables. It might get you an approximation that needs tweaking, but if you work with SQL every day I'm going to bet you'd do a better job at this in less time than it takes to have AI help.
Things it's bad at:
Things it's good at:
<class>
" repeat as necessary<function>
"<ResponseDTO>
create a mapper from entity to response. Use builder pattern and implement null checks."Any of these results may need massaging by hand. The AI can't do the whole job, especially at once. But it can write bite sized pieces, sometimes even mouthfuls, very quickly. It's not instantaneous but it's faster than doing it from scratch. For me.
But I get the most value out of having my work instantly reviewed. I miss stuff. I typo stuff. Yesterday it caught in seconds a spot where I'd put a similarly named but wrong class and had struggled for 30 minutes to see it. It noticed the pattern established in similar code wasn't followed once I passed the unclear IDE error and code.
I know my job well but my execution is imperfect. AI excels at noticing those variations and imperfections from the rest of the code or industry standards.
I use it daily, and I liken it to creative directing a fairly junior developer who has very little creativity or ability to think outside the box I build for it.
That said, I also remember when computers themselves were new and people were equally excited and equally skeptical. AI will improve. A lot. People will lose jobs, and jobs will be obsoleted in the same way nobody’s apprenticing as a type founder or letterpress mechanic.
I’m not too worried about there just suddenly being nothing for anyone to do anymore.
Agreed. This is just a fad bubble that will pass. I’m looking forward to seeing those businesses that laid off their workers for AI in the near future. 😂