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Comment by roca | Hacker News Reader

I suspect AI is going to make today's teenagers feel a lot worse. How can you imagine a future for yourself when any skill you might learn might be obsolete by the time you learn it?

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And the bleak general environmental prospects: I believe that much of what we consider regular youth behavior rests on the baseline assumption that unless something exceptional happens, their future lives will be like their parents lives, with some hope for upwards sprinkled in for the particularly ambitious. These days, even those who aren't really aware of unsustainability will at least have some suspicion that the pessimists might not be completely wrong.

The same way my brother learned to play guitar, despite the phrase "No matter what you do or how hard you try, odds are good a 10 year old in China can do it better".

For the kids I teach this is a reality. Was asked this week what types of engineering jobs I thought wouldn't be automated.

Tell them the AI is a tool because it is. Engineers of the future will use that tool to automate what are in fact the most boring parts of the process. This will allow engineers to create far more elaborate and advanced designs in less time just like CAD and simulation did.

If the AI starts actually replacing the most important things engineers do then we are talking about sentient general intelligence and that will be a whole different ballgame. That wouldn’t be AI replacing people but a culture war about whether AI are people and whether it is wrong to use them like slaves.

Right now what we have a large generative models, not sentient machines.

what was your answer?

I told them it was a difficult question to answer and that they shouldn't be wholly basing their decisions on what they see today. Job markets shift and so will their interests as they go into university. Be flexible and build up skills and they'll find something which works well for them. As an example I told them I studied biology and chemistry before moving into CS, and then after being a developer for years I went into teaching.

Presumably not that different from how it has always been where unless you're literally the first person ever to develop a certain skill, you've always had to contend with the fact that someone much better than you exists.

It's actually quite different. That "someone much better than you" has limited time and is probably expensive to hire, therefore there can still be opportunities for less-skilled people. When that "someone" is an AI, we expect it to be easily replicated to satisfy all demand, at much lower cost than the wages needed to support a human.

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