Comment by noufalibrahim | Hacker News Reader

Comment by noufalibrahim | Hacker News Reader

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Of course. This has been proven again and again on the economic level. People have to let go of old skills and learn new ones to survive.

For AI though, there is a mental angle which is being discussed now (brain gyms etc.) which was an early concern of mine. When we make something, there is an tangible value created for the buyer/consumer but there is also a more subtle positive effect the on the builder/maker. e.g. even if it's it's cheaper, faster, (and in an imaginary worlds), more healthy to buy packaged food, sitting down and making it subtly changes the chef who makes the food. Sort of the motivation for a grandmother baking a cake for her grandkids.

I've been able to realise many of my abandoned projects due to AI. I can spin up a few agents and have them build things completely without intervention more or less. Many of these are programs I use daily. This is definitely huge. However, I remember the kick of struggling with problems during projects which was where most, if not all, the learning happened. All that experience is what makes me able to command and control these agents properly. It had an effect on me beyond the outcome (most of the projects are dead/abandoned anyway). Another example - I remember an old company called "Bond" which had a robot to create stationery using a calligraphic hand. Contrast that to the almost spiritual effect doing calligraphy has on a master penman. Using automation to create fine calligraphy gets you the former but the individual and society loses the latter. It's not immediately clear to me what the end result will be but I do feel that a lot is being lost.

This is the problem.

While I agree that new skills must be learnt to survive, what exactly are these new skills in the AI-age?

I see this line everywhere - whenever someone's mourning their loss of a career, there's responses telling the person to "man up" (for lack of a better phrase) and learn new skills. Nobody says what these "new skills" are?

> Nobody says what these "new skills" are?

it's unknown, because those skills and work associated with them are not yet created.

Just like how being a live streamer (or youtuber) is not a known skill until the advent of streaming platforms and their associated economies. If you asked on the internet in 1995 what kids would have done for a job in 2025, none of them would've said streamer.

Understood. Then how does one brace for the upcoming slaughter? People knew that getting into software would become the hot new thing - almost guaranteeing a source of income. Hence the "push" for everyone to get into "coding", at least in my country (India) and from what I've heard on the internet - the US too.

How do people brace for the changes AI brings?

I don't have a clear answer myself. But there are multiple dimensions to this.

First is from an employment, livelihood perspective. I don't know the "right" answer but like with most things, it's easy to see the wrong ones - Bury your head in the sand and declare that this is just a passing phase, insist on going deeper into curmudgeon territory waxing nostalgic about the "Golden Era" of programming that's over etc. The opposites (trying out the new tools that are being released, reading up on things happening and developing a mental model of how things are moving etc.) seem to be sensible things to do.

Second, from a personal perspective. Here too, inversion is useful. Stopping to think is a bad idea. Like all our faculties, you lose what you don't use. So, actively learning things that are hard (a new "natural" language, a new phsyical skill that you wanted to) will help keep you sharp. Recreational programming is fine I guess and you can use AI to give you that you extra push when you're mired in an area that you don't care for and which you know how to do but are avoiding because of the tedium.

When the demand for work comes, it's quite clear to me that someone who's done what they can and has a some insight on what's going on has an advantage over the person who hasn't. Whether that translates into economical opportunities is beyond us to say but it's beyond our control as well so there's no point in worrying about it.

Fair enough. Panicking won't achieve anything. I appreciate your response.

That's a pretty philosophical questions when what you want is a concrete answer.

First step is to let go of the fear of it.

Sounds cheesy but reading Ekehardt Tolle helped me.

Fair enough, I am kinda scared about everything these days.

Which one of his books should I read (first)?

Ya fear of the unknown is not even anything uncommon for sure.

Honestly ive only read "the power of now",

Which I later learned was very mainstream popular, so I probably would have prejudged it had I knew. While not really original ideas he packages the concepts into very good words, so it made something click, for me at least, where other books hadn't.

They’re unknown because they don’t exist. There will simply be skills that haven’t yet been automated, but nothing will remain out of reach. The idea of having a career in a single field is probably dead, unless that field is minimum wage laborer.

I like that calligraphy example, I am afraid that's how a field would stagnate: the tools become advanced, but now with less and less people wanting to approach and struggle with learning the field, the human intuition, the community effort, and the mastery to push past the bleeding edge withers.

(Unless if AGI could do something like that.)

Think about ceramic dinner plates and other table items.

You can get a brand new dinner plate or cereal bowl or coffee cup for a pittance - but you can also get a hand-shaped, hand-painted cat-themed coffee mug at a significantly higher price. Adult education courses in ceramics support the base of amateur and semi-pro practitioners.

I have sometimes observed that dinner plates are surprisingly expensive in pricing. Or at least sometimes they seem to. You do get really cheap ones too. But on average it seems many are quite or somewhat expensive.

Still tho, it's with full benefit of industrial automation eh

Poignantly illustrated in this Asimov story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49668168

Stuff that used to be hard is easy.

You're blind to the stuff that's easy making previously impossible things hard.

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