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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34907 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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if you're a woman who makes her living spinning fabric and selling it, knowing about the 'industrial revolution' or 'factory production of cloth' is incredibly relevant. Knowing about it three years earlier seems very useful. That "long term investment strategy" of continuing to spin fabric to feed your kids doesn't work.

What does she do with the information?

Develop another skillset... which is ALSO going to be disrupted in short order?

How does she act when, knowing that the change is coming, she still can't tell what the second order impacts might be?

That's my point. Knowing about the coming change is perhaps useful, but how much information must one obsessively seek out in order to make a good decision with that information? And how much time should one spend before it is counterproductive?

For instance, I'm pretty sure AI is coming for my job inside of ̶1̶0̶ ̶5̶ 2 years. But how in the hell can I predict which jobs are going to be 'safe' with any precision?

So basically, I've done the best I can by buying stocks in companies that might take off due to AI development, and I'm preparing myself to jump when the inflection point arises.

But I am not obsessively churning through AI news to try and predict the outcomes.

Develop another skillset... which is ALSO going to be disrupted in short order?

... In that non-hypothetical historical situation, yes, you develop another skillset. And that skillset won't 'also be disrupted in short order', given we're hundreds of years later and plenty of people hold occupations for decades. But, given the primary occupations aren't 'farm / household laborer' anymore, every single person eventually retrained, whether because they saw the way the wind was blowing or because the price of their labor went to zero.

But how in the hell can I predict which jobs are going to be 'safe' with any precision?

It's tough! But "plumber" or "doctor" are better jobs than "copyeditor" or "commodity artist", i think.

I'm not so sure about 'Doctor,'

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/14/googles-medical-ai-might-soon-answer-questions-about-health.html

Surgeon, maybe.

And while I agree with Plumber, I'm no longer very confident in my own predictions so I wouldn't be too surprised if we get "PipeGPT" sometime this year.

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