If you are white collar then it’s going to “disrupt” your field.

I work in tech. I got laid off last year. I wasn’t at Alphabet or Amazon or anything. Much smaller company. But AI “optimization” has ravaged the tech industry and not just programmers. Admins, database specialists, network specialists, developers, you name it. Our job market is absolutely fucked.

In my county, a major metro area in the US (like, top 10) craigslist used to be the place to get real job postings. If it wasn’t a recruiter then your odds of getting a callback from a job posting there is pretty high. There are plenty of postings for other fields like mechanics and tradesmen and so on. For the few tech categories: nothing in the last month. Zero postings. Not even recruiter ads. Literally nothing. It’s a wasteland.

I’ve been told to “go back to school.” I’ll be 41 soon. I’m still paying off my computer science degree. It’s worthless. What else should I go for? Accounting? HR? These are going to be taken by AI, too. Will it be a mistake? Sure. They don’t care. They’ll do it anyways.

When I got my degree my wife and I were homeless. We just got back out of the hole in the last 10 years. I was finally building savings. It’ll be gone in 60 days. She was laid off on Friday. Her industry is in property finance. Another gutted industry. She has to change industries, too.

What is to be done?

  • xj9 [they/them, she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    I’m still trying to understand how actually replacing people with AI is supposed to work, because the quality of the outputs is still essentially trash. I do understand that in the short term capital prefers to swing its dick around to prove a point, and maybe that’s all there is to it. However, I have a sneaking suspicion that AI hype is being used to cover for a very real economic slowdown that is actually driving the lack of job prospects and layoffs. Maybe capital is just hoping that AIs can do a good enough job to keep them floating until the recession is over.

    • BigBoyKarlLiebknecht [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      This post by Ed Zitron is pretty cogent to me - AI is the last next big thing for tech in its desperate search for continued hyper growth. Tech is essentially cooked, at this point - or at least, the familiar Silicon Valley of the last 10 years.

      There are plenty of comparisons of Nvidia’s valuation to that of Cisco during the dotcom boom. I remain convinced that some of the biggest tech names of the last decade are going to disappear over the next decade (Uber, DoorDash, et al). We’re in a very transitional time and things are going to change drastically, imo

      • flan [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        0·
        1 year ago

        honestly smartphones were the last next big thing, everything since 2008 has been desperate flailing. apps got better sure because of course they would but tech hasnt been able to recapture that.