I became a parent about a year ago, completely unprepared for this future

It seems like our careers could just be snuffed out instantly with little recourse available. You’ve likely heard this sentiment before but it’s the right one so I’ll be the one to post it today: your job is not your purpose, and the economy is not the society. Obviously your whole comment is well founded and relatable, but I think this is the only cure for your anxieties. The world is a beautiful, beautiful place, with many more wonders to offer than the typical laborer is accustomed to. If we eventually have a society where everyone is happy with what they have and there’s no work left to do, that would be a cause for celebration IMO. This is all assuming that the intelligence explosion people are wrong. If they’re right… well, let’s hope they’re wrong.

I drove around today listening to the most recent Lex Fridman podcast, in which the founder of Boston Dynamics was describing replacing human labor with machines that were capable of learning by seeing. I have family in the trades. I pursued tech and fell in love with the field. Listening to the interviewee, I began to feel sick to my stomach at the glib description of what amounts to ripping away peoples' livelihoods with plasticized fingers. Work is equivalent to worth. We are not biologically or sociologically prepared to differentiate the two. How easy it must be for Sam Altman to drag the world kicking and screaming into the future. How pretty his offices.

> It seems like our careers could just be snuffed out instantly with little recourse available. I say "seems like" because I have no idea if that's real or perceived but it's very hard plan ahead. If the average business leader remains as unable to precisely express their desires as they are now, our jobs will be just fine. 80% of the work is in the wisdom and experience to ask the right questions to tease out what people really want and consolidate their conflicting desires.

I'm not going to worry too much about my career being snuffed out by AI until AI actually exists. Right now we have LLMs and they're a very far cry from any form of AI that could replace a software engineer wholesale. In my little corner of the software engineering universe I have not seen any credible hiring manager say they were going to fire developers and replace them with LLMs (I have seen this threat from one or two of the least credible and least successful hiring managers I know, which I think speaks volumes). Here is what I would worry about, as a software engineer if you are not using an LLM as part of your workflow and using it well, yeah you may ultimately lose your job and you may even deserve to lose it. Despite their flaws they're immensely powerful simply because they represent a whole new class of tooling. The tools in this industry change all the time and you never get …

Not to minimize your concerns, but as it stands, AI is replacing dick-all in the near term. Wondering what employment will exist in 3 years is a tad silly. This shit is confidently wrong without a tinge of doubt and the mitigation for that is babysitting to the point where nothing but the most trivial jobs can be entrusted to it. I wouldn't sweat it robbing you of your career when it can't even recite airline ticket policy properly.

My Son was born around the time ChatGPT-4 was released and I remember all the Geoffrey Hinton interviews which were really apocalyptic sounding, he is has a kind of kookie mad scientist vibe about him too. Our daughter is ten and when it comes to AI and stuff, I am not worried about our kids. It's us who will suffer most from it. Remember when you were young and had to explain your parents over and over again how the remote worked? Your kid is going to do that to you. Not explaining remote, but explaining the new world, which is going to be completely foreign to you but native to them. I already see these dynamics, and I'm someone who is in tech. It's not just the technology that changes, but the socio-cultural frame of reference changes with it too and it's harder and harder to connect with it as an older person. For her I am more worried about the large-scale war that started on the E…