Comment by dhosek

8 hours ago

Yeah, I’m pretty much on a trajectory of building up as much retirement savings as possible before AI completely kills my career. The sweet spot seems to be about three years out. I honestly don’t know how to guide my 12-year-old son who loves math¹ and coding.

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1. Which at his age essentially means solving computation problems, although he figured out how to take something like 0.3535… and turn that back into a rational number without any guidance at all.²

2. I want to see how close to the general solution he’s gotten on his own, but given that he’s not had any formal algebra, it’s damned impressive and bodes well for his future development.

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dhosek

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waterheater  6 hours ago

As someone who's also thinking about their child's future, I've come to the conclusion that building their capacity for precise language by expanding their vocabulary and grammar in an array of domains and subdomains is the best way forward. Not only will they have a more detailed understanding of what's out there, but using specialized, narrow terminology with AI provides vastly better solutions than general prompt language.

uptodatenews  7 hours ago

Im going with this... scifi stuff still requires engineers. Its laughable and insulting to think these billionaire owners are going to make robots and llm loops to get real shit done

https://rcsnyder.github.io/open-frontier-curriculum/

Ya "claude can you build me the next cern Thanks"

  • dhosek  5 hours ago

    From what I’ve seen of what AI can do for coding, the part of software engineering that I like is going to be automated out of existence, much like the ability to do serious calculations by hand got automated out of existence with the development of computing. Writing code by hand will be as marketable as factoring 5-digit numbers in your head.¹

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    1. I enjoy doing both, but I doubt that anyone will pay me what I’ve been paid in the past for this five years from now.

  • adrianN  4 hours ago

    If you want AI-proof careers it seems risky to go into knowledge work at all. Robotics lag behind mere computation, so something where you do awkward work in places designed around human bodies seems a lot safer. Plumbing, landscaping or something like that perhaps.

    • lambdaone  2 minutes ago

      This is a romantic and very appealing idea that flies in the face of reality. The market for skilled trade workers like plumbers, electricians, landscapers and so on is more or less in equilibrium, and the demand side of it is relatively inelastic. Dumping hundreds of millions of new workers into these trades will not increase demand sufficiently to let anyone earn a viable living from them.

  • ACCount37  7 hours ago

    Why not?

    So far, every "AI will never be able to do X" is aging like fine milk. Or do you think that engineering is somehow more special than software development or math?

    • _carbyau_  5 hours ago

      Engineers know what needs to be tested, how, to what degree, with which materials, and with what safety margin.

      AI can be trained on that body of work. But then AI has enough issues in output that it needs to be verified.

      Otherwise we'll live in a world of titan submersibles ordered by CEOs running on hopes&dreams.

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