Author here! Thanks for all the comments. This post isn't meant as a lesson or a judgment, something to tell "just shut up and adapt like my ancestor did". The situation is hard, and I wasn't trying to dismiss anyone's anxiety. No one wants to hear "you'll be fine" when something bad just happened.
It's mostly a personal story. You can see it as a kind of tribute to a great-great-grandfather I never met, partly because I'd never heard a story like it before. It's banal but still a big adventure in the family. I find it fascinating that he grew up in a completely different world from mine and still felt some of the same doubts and anxieties I do today. And I'm really proud of him, because his "pivot" let my family stay in the village instead of maybe leaving to work in factories in the city. My father loved his job, and in a way that's thanks to him.
I appreciate your wholesome message, but I feel a bit is overlooked.
Horses and engines are in a tangible, corporeal domain. I almost feel like pivoting could be easier with that: the tools are still the hands. Also, pivoting might be easier especially when no one is in that space of repairing cars in a small village at the time. Low competition. I also think time allowed to pivot is much higher: automobiles were expensive and time to adoption is higher, I wonder how long it took to be able to make a living?
Data, numbers, programming, this is in a ephemeral domain. Competition is high, there are a lot of developers. Time to adoption is extremely fast. In the automobile era, someone may have had five to ten years to pivot. Now? Maybe a year?
Is it about making things? Maybe, but pivoting and making a career of it is not a straight path, and sometimes people get lucky in choosing the path.
>> Many blacksmiths added the mechanical skills needed to service and repair automobiles, particularly in smaller towns and rural areas. In short order, some of the more commonly replaced automobile parts, such as tires, were being stocked by blacksmith’s, others which were necessary to a vehicle’s repair were ordered by telegraph or telephone for delivery to the blacksmith’s shop. Blacksmiths and service stations soon had competition from the automobile parts store, another new specialty which blossomed along the popularity of traveling by car.
> In the automobile era, someone may have had five to ten years to pivot. Now? Maybe a year?
ChatGPT was released in 2023 and we're still not out of the job for the most part. It doesn't feel slow but we might have these five to ten years.
The total market addressed by current-shaped LLMs is not "software development" - it's approximately all of white-collar jobs. And with recent advancements in robotics, blue-collar work isn't really much safer. Hardware is getting better, and the one thing that was stopping robotics from entering our own workplaces and living spaces, the ability to make decisions on the fly in heterogenous, unpredictable environment - the judgement - is literally what LLMs themselves are embodying.
So I agree, we all likely still have 3-5 years to figure this out - but also no indication where to go, or if there even exists a direction to go in.
art and music for some, but personally I'm most interested in seeing where science goes. Reproducibility of experiments is gonna be first. How many experiments don't reproduce, or have unwritten biases in the papers. Room temperature semiconductors. Fusion seems actually a decade away, finally. Research into better treatments for diseases, how to help people be smarter, live their best life. There's plenty more to do now that making CRUD apps is so much easier. Maybe AI will become creative enough to not need humans for that, but it'll still need someone to drive it and choose which direction it goes.
Art and music? Ok for live performance. But recorded performance is directly in competion with genAI for revenue streams, with content used without permission for more genAI training.
megalomanu · · focus · HN ↗
It's mostly a personal story. You can see it as a kind of tribute to a great-great-grandfather I never met, partly because I'd never heard a story like it before. It's banal but still a big adventure in the family. I find it fascinating that he grew up in a completely different world from mine and still felt some of the same doubts and anxieties I do today. And I'm really proud of him, because his "pivot" let my family stay in the village instead of maybe leaving to work in factories in the city. My father loved his job, and in a way that's thanks to him.
adamredwoods · · focus · HN ↗
Horses and engines are in a tangible, corporeal domain. I almost feel like pivoting could be easier with that: the tools are still the hands. Also, pivoting might be easier especially when no one is in that space of repairing cars in a small village at the time. Low competition. I also think time allowed to pivot is much higher: automobiles were expensive and time to adoption is higher, I wonder how long it took to be able to make a living?
Data, numbers, programming, this is in a ephemeral domain. Competition is high, there are a lot of developers. Time to adoption is extremely fast. In the automobile era, someone may have had five to ten years to pivot. Now? Maybe a year?
Is it about making things? Maybe, but pivoting and making a career of it is not a straight path, and sometimes people get lucky in choosing the path.
Interesting historical read:
<a href="https://historycollection.com/10-industries-either-killed-created-automobile/" rel="nofollow">https://historycollection.com/10-industries-either-killed-cr...
>> Many blacksmiths added the mechanical skills needed to service and repair automobiles, particularly in smaller towns and rural areas. In short order, some of the more commonly replaced automobile parts, such as tires, were being stocked by blacksmith’s, others which were necessary to a vehicle’s repair were ordered by telegraph or telephone for delivery to the blacksmith’s shop. Blacksmiths and service stations soon had competition from the automobile parts store, another new specialty which blossomed along the popularity of traveling by car.
Miraltar · · focus · HN ↗
ChatGPT was released in 2023 and we're still not out of the job for the most part. It doesn't feel slow but we might have these five to ten years.
TeMPOraL · · focus · HN ↗
The total market addressed by current-shaped LLMs is not "software development" - it's approximately all of white-collar jobs. And with recent advancements in robotics, blue-collar work isn't really much safer. Hardware is getting better, and the one thing that was stopping robotics from entering our own workplaces and living spaces, the ability to make decisions on the fly in heterogenous, unpredictable environment - the judgement - is literally what LLMs themselves are embodying.
So I agree, we all likely still have 3-5 years to figure this out - but also no indication where to go, or if there even exists a direction to go in.
fragmede · · focus · HN ↗
dolmen · · focus · HN ↗