What Young Workers Are Doing to AI-Proof Themselves

https://archive.ph/NtVHd

I don’t think kids should be insulating from AI. The examples in this article suggest for example that some people are dropping out of college and going into trade schools. I get that society needs electricians and construction workers and new software graduates are finding it difficult to get jobs. But having had a moderately successful career building software, I tend to think there is a lot of scope for the $40 trillion white collar economy to be disrupted (re-imagined/made more efficient), so still see potential for software engineering demand to stay high over the next decade as the true ramifications of AI plays out. Am I biased/coping? Is this moving faster? Slower? - What should kids be aiming for according to you? Computer Scientist? Biologist? Finance? Construction?

I still don't understand the logic that any job is safe from ai (if it lives up to expectations). Sure, it might not be directly impacted by ai but why is there this expectation that the excess labour from those directly impacted doesnt act to suppress the earning power of other jobs?

Especially considering that the implication is that humans just become a pair of hands with opposable thumbs?. Take the electrician in the article, sure its a skilled job but the barrier into it drops massively imo if you can just take a picture of whatever issue is at hand and ai spits out what is needed, no?

The "go into trades" thing has two major flaws:

1) The supply of work will skyrocket when everyone will flock there for work

2) Demand will plummet as the white collar people who bought these services will loose their jobs and income

And of course if robotics will get solved to an acceptable degree most of those jobs will also get mostly automated.

Disturbingly, AI is set to replace essentially any position that is useful, to the extent that it is useful and somehow some people still think they should adapt themselves to the system instead of working to adapt the system to them!

Basically all that would be left of desk jobs would be those which have unfair legal powers (including via licenses and credentials) or are pure accountability plays. Like politicians, lawyers, aircraft pilots, corporate accountants... And those jobs will suck because people will be accountable for work that is not their own.

These jobs won't require any skills because most people may be able to go through their entire career without doing any work. But they will get paid a lot just for having being selected for their position... While other people who may be more skilled than them might be broke and homeless.

They are doing nothing!!

1) No matter the age, they are using said AI to replace human

2) Within workplace, they are using AI to do their work so they are learning nothing

3) That is it, people are using AI to replace their own work rather than improve it, people are driving themselves out of work.

I'll say invest totally in domain knowledge now. The value of knowing how to invert a binary tree from memory has dropped to approximately zero. Web development as we knew it for the past 20 years is completely dead as an entry level trade. The power is shifting to people with useful knowledge and expertise that isn't about twiddling bits.

I'm somewhat skeptical of this "enter the trades" movement. Actually, I am more skeptical of that statement than I am of LLM's replacing white collar work in general. I think parts of coding are being replaced quickly because they are the parts that don't require discernment. Trades likely contain just as many automatable and just as many discernment parts as white collar work. At this moment in history, the automatable parts are being automated in the knowledge based world. People think the physical world is somehow different, but with world models (along the full spectrum of what that means) the physical world will be just as trainable as the knowledge based world.

tldr; Just like knowledge work, most trade stuff is probably mostly repeated (i.e. very trainable) task with a small amount of taste and discernment applied. The repeated will be trainable, the discernment may be trainable. I don't think the physical world is necessarily any safer than the knowledge world.

I am not quite sure with the controversy at archive.ph/(today) but If this may help anybody, I have used single-file to download from archive.ph and uploaded it to github

https://serjaimelannister.github.io/wsj-article/

and I have also uploaded the github link on archive.org for persistence/archival purposes.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260322213950/https://serjaimel...

I hope that this might help some people and I have another friendly suggestion to please donate to archive.org :-)

> People fear that programming is dead.

> People stop learning programming.

> Programmers become scarce.

> Programmers become valuable again.

Maybe it's wishful thinking but I'm not going to be surprised if it plays out like this. In some sense the reverse happened over the last couple of decades - everyone and their mother got into IT and the industry became saturated.