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Ask HN: How do you cope with existential threat regarding career?

42 pointsby throwaway1183over 2 years ago
With the recent development in AI, for example stable diffusion, my hobby as an artist has been almost non-existent. No matter how much time I spend on my art, I will not be able to compete with AI models. These things are not going to slow down. Often times, I feel like the process of using AI-generated art and augmenting it with my own projects is more productive than creating my own art from scratch.<p>Adding ChatGPT to the equation, the threat has doubled. It has just started, yet it can do remarkable things. This is like the AlexNet moment in the field of computer vision. There was a time before AlexNet. Now, most research and implementation involved using deep learning in one form or another. I have been in this field for a long time, but I don&#x27;t have any substantial work to show for it. I feel like my effort wouldn&#x27;t make a difference. As long as I am improving, these models are able to improve at a faster rate. Of course, I cannot compete with the top researchers at these big labs. So whatever I do will be insignificant.<p>I have been trying to change my field from AI to something else, but it feels like that would be a wrong decision. However, just being in this field would make the problem even worse because I would never be as competent as the quality demands. The skills that I learn from AI quickly become outdated compared to other skills like management and software engineering. Whenever you involve humans in the equation, you have to learn different things surrounding it. But if you are just doing AI research for a long time, all you get is the ability to read papers and perhaps implement them. It&#x27;s always a rat race where you are constantly chasing something new. I feel that doing a regular software engineering job would be much easier and exciting because it&#x27;s just a job and you can have other hobbies. But with AI, you have to read relevant papers on your spare time just to keep up. The innovation and progress are so fast that it&#x27;s almost impossible to catch up.<p>I feel like my career has ended before it even started.

18 comments

martindbpover 2 years ago
I spent months last year building algorithms to segment Chinese sentences into individual words (Chinese has no spaces) and disambiguate the meaning of the words (Chinese words often have many different translations). ChatGPT solved this problem practically as well as I have zero-shot. Here&#x27;s a very difficult example that&#x27;s not exactly correct, but better than what I could produce:<p>&gt; In the Chinese sentence &quot;这次公司裁员裁不到我头上.&quot; with the translation &quot;I won&#x27;t be fired during this round of layoffs.&quot;, list all the words separately with their individual word translations<p>这次 - this time, 公司 - company, 裁员 - layoffs, 裁不到 - won&#x27;t be fired, 我 - I, 头上 - during (literal translation: on top of the head)<p>I knew this day would be coming but since nothing was available at the time I had to try an implement a hodge-podge of algorithms to get the job done. But honestly, if I can integrate ChatGPT instead I&#x27;m kinda glad! Thousands of lines of code gone, a much simplified pipeline, and I can focus on higher level tasks instead. What&#x27;s important is the problem I&#x27;m trying to solve.<p>But it does show that a lot of NLP and CV tasks will be as simple as explaining what you want, and the result will mostly be good enough. But there will still be value in solving more unique problems, or knowing the best way to mold problems such as they fit the foundational models available, and knowing how to build on top of them.<p>To keep your sanity, my advice is have some problems in mind that you&#x27;re passionate about solving as well so that you diversity your mental investment.
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eunoiaover 2 years ago
Treat ChatGPT like an extremely knowledgeable junior who has read everything on the internet, but simultaneously doesn’t really understand logic.<p>You can leverage this for your own productivity. Ask your “junior” to generate sample code for an API you don’t quite remember. Ask it to generate some bash scripts you’ve been putting off. Review its output for correctness and go from there.<p>It’s an incredible productivity boost for a senior doing the integrating. It’s also no replacement for someone with immense domain experience doing the integrating…
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MattGaiserover 2 years ago
Arguably, skill wise things never really stop being a race in general.<p>150 years ago, decent literacy alone made you managerial material. 50 years ago, people were in the middle class screwing nuts on bolts. Today, literacy alone qualifies you for nothing and if you are illiterate, your prospects are dim indeed. Manual skill manufacturing is a minimum wage (or below minimum wage) job offshore. Typing used to be a middle class skill for women.<p>Imagine being a dev 20 years ago. I think many would be scared of not having work in a world where you can stand up beautiful reactive sites and deploy them worldwide in a day. AWS, React, GitHub actions, etc. All could be reasons for predicting mass unemployment.<p>Instead, there are more of us than ever.
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heresjohnnyover 2 years ago
Unless we get to a point where entire codebases can be maintained and extended with code that adheres to functional requirements and is free of bugs, there’s still some room for humans.<p>Consider highly contextual problems: today I faced an issue where some updated code could have negative side-effects given certain database state. A regular set of tests did not catch this issue – only my knowledge of the possible states did. I doubt an AI will be able to solve such problems any time soon.
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throwaway743over 2 years ago
Regarding your art, as someone who graduated from art school, the most important thing above all else is concept, not technicals.<p>If you&#x27;re just painting, sculpting, drawing, etc just to do it and enjoy it, then you have nothing to worry about since the enjoyment of the process is fulfilling in itself.<p>If you&#x27;re creating projects for the sake of expressing&#x2F;communicating something for yourself or an audience, then the focus needs to be on developing the concept and refining it, before deciding how to execute it or what the medium(s) will be. If there isn&#x27;t a strong concept then the work is dead in the water, AI or not.
gavinrayover 2 years ago
The only thing that changes is that instead of your time being distributed like this when you build something:<p><pre><code> &gt; [PLANNING] [SPECS] [IMPLEMENTATION] [TESTS] </code></pre> The &quot;implementation&quot; and &quot;tests&quot; sections become much less time-consuming&#x2F;tedious, and you focus more on the design, architecture, and specification of the code.<p>When you think about, the implementation is a detail and a means to an end. For instance, I hop around between a lot of languages.<p>I can&#x27;t always remember what the HashMap API is exactly in every language. Is it &quot;put&quot;, &quot;insert&quot;, &quot;create&quot;? -- does it have an &quot;upsert&quot; method? These sorts of details just bog you down. With AI-assisted development, you just &quot;I want to upsert an item in a HashMap of (String -&gt; Int)&quot; and then browse the suggestions until something looks right.<p>Sort of like a &quot;Code Architect&quot; role.<p>I&#x27;ve been using Github Copilot every day for 1.5 years, I can&#x27;t live without it. ChatGPT is quite an advancement, and I&#x27;m so excited for the future of the AI-assisted code authoring space.<p>Shameless plug: I wrote about this a bit here<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gavinray97.github.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;a-day-without-a-copilot" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gavinray97.github.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;a-day-without-a-copilot</a>
badpunover 2 years ago
Research is for the elite, while engineering can be also pursued by normies. It&#x27;s not wise to pursue a research career if you aren&#x27;t fascinated by the subject and don&#x27;t want to spend most of your time on it. If you want a not very demanding, but well paying job that allows for a decent work-life balance, then software engineering is indeed a better choice. Especially doing backend engineering in large, non-tech companies (banks, telecoms).
yunwalover 2 years ago
Use AI to make more complex art at a level that couldn&#x27;t be achievable without it, but yet can&#x27;t be done using only an AI. For example, have AI generate a photo of a sculpture for you and sculpt it yourself. This may or may not be great advice depending on what your specific artistic interests are, but people didn&#x27;t stop painting just because the camera was invented.
rcktmrtnover 2 years ago
&gt; As long as I am improving, these models are able to improve at a faster rate. Of course, I cannot compete with the top researchers at these big labs. So whatever I do will be insignificant.<p>Just because you aren&#x27;t on the cutting edge of technological &quot;progress&quot; doesn&#x27;t mean what you do is insignificant. It doesn&#x27;t have to be futile to resist. There are good things produced by technology of course, but honestly I&#x27;m not ashamed to admit I&#x27;m just sick of it and have no interest in the cutting edge anymore. Maybe I&#x27;ll be a fool 100 years when a few more cycles of tech &quot;disruption&quot; finally solve all material poverty, but I just can&#x27;t see the world that way anymore.<p>Solving the problem of how to make enough money to get by is a different question, but it&#x27;s not a new one. IMO the correlation between highly paid work and meaningful is lucky when you can get it, but nothing to count on. Sometimes compromises need to be made.
jvalenciaover 2 years ago
&gt; I feel like the process of using AI-generated art and augmenting it with my own projects is more productive than creating my own art from scratch.<p>There are two roads: doing what you love and doing something of value (where value is defined as what other people are willing to pay for). Hopefully, those can converge to a degree, but they don&#x27;t have to. I love making art, but that doesn&#x27;t pay for me, so I do other things to earn money --- that supports the art. Being able to do more cheaper is creating more value.<p>Given your skills in art and computers, you could look at a career in UX. It both pays and can be art. It is something of value that can then support your other more personally fulfilling endeavors. Or simply get good at being a digital artist that takes the best AI generated art, fixes it, and gets it out the door :-)
dakiolover 2 years ago
&gt; I feel that doing a regular software engineering job would be much easier and exciting because it&#x27;s just a job and you can have other hobbies. But with AI, you have to read relevant papers on your spare time just to keep up.<p>Either you don’t know what it takes to be a decent software engineer these days or you are being a bit harsh. I’m a software engineer. I don’t read papers, sure, but I keep myself up to date every week&#x2F;month reading books, doing side projects during working hours but also on my free time. Granted, I do so because I like it, though but it’s a necessary thing to do if you want to be good at your career.<p>Regarding your main question: forget about the noise. If you like what you do, keep doing it. If you are doing what you do just because of its employability, you already lost.
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camgunzover 2 years ago
You&#x27;ve got to really think about what you want your life to be like, and this is hard. If you want to be high income, that really narrows your career options and almost certainly means you&#x27;ll have to work lots of hours. If you don&#x27;t, you can kind of do whatever you want. So the first thing I think you should do is ask yourself if you really want to be high income, and really consider if you&#x27;d be unhappy making small websites for nonprofits, or working at a mobile app developer agency, etc. etc. You&#x27;re obviously smart, and there will always be work to do.
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unity1001over 2 years ago
&gt; Often times, I feel like the process of using AI-generated art and augmenting it with my own projects is more productive than creating my own art from scratch.<p>And this will likely lead to new, pioneering art, and even new art forms.<p>AI will likely be a tool that will enable artists to go into new horizons. Just like digital tools before it were.
gedyover 2 years ago
I guess it depends on what your art or career goals are, but assuming you don&#x27;t mean digital illustration, people do value real&#x2F;physical art objects like painting and sculpture. I don&#x27;t know if that pays the bills, but that is harder to automate away with clicks on some webpage.
Apocryphonover 2 years ago
Before we worry about the AI future, the end of low interest rates and its effect on cheap capital buoying the tech industry is probably a near-term existential challenge.
deanmoriartyover 2 years ago
Live frugally, save up, become financially independent asap. To me it’s clearly the only option.
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kidgorgeousover 2 years ago
Get certs in Machine learning, sleepwalk into quarter million plus jobs
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than3over 2 years ago
To answer your title question, there isn&#x27;t a way to cope with careers that become extinct due to technological progress. You just simply choose something that&#x27;s in demand, and hope you chose right.<p>What most people don&#x27;t realize is why everything works the way it does, and how we got to where we are. As a result, they are doomed to repeat the failures of the past as cliche as that sounds, and the most recent and latest trend is and has been in stripping you and everyone else of their agency and voice.<p>We receive many of our benefits through the division of labor. It is best described in a book from 1778 by Adam Smith called the Wealth of Nations. There have been follow-up books such as Landis which covered why some civilizations thrive while others stagnate with climate being a main factor, specifically how tropical climates make animal husbandry impossible and settlement at a high cost of mortality.<p>Our system worked so long as our leaders listened and acted on what we said, that hasn&#x27;t happened in a long time. Today they can&#x27;t differentiate the voice of bots on social media from actual people. They have written laws binding themselves to prevent any change, or only benefited special interests who got them chosen to be on the ballot with money.<p>Worse, global communism (or socialism) however you want to call it is intentionally attacking the moorings of our society through subversion, we aren&#x27;t taught about that in school and so don&#x27;t recognize it.<p>Most people can&#x27;t even properly define what socialism is, know its failings (which are not straightforward) and recognize the lies. Those same people then go and push socialist policies as if its the answer.<p>Worse, there has been a 50 year trend of not having a funding plan for things, and choosing to steal via ponzi from the future with creative financial engineering, corruption, fraud, and collusion.<p>We are coming upon a criticality point where everything will break, because machines can do most jobs better, and cheaper than people in almost all important factors.<p>We are not that far off from having machines that can do everything a human can, and do it better and more accurately.<p>Our leaders have failed in almost all respects that matter with regard to planning for the future, instead choosing to subvert, divide, and limit agency by political cycle, through many various means (media etc) while pretending to do their jobs in a way that nothing really gets done.<p>Eventually someone will come up with a way to break the existing theory of computation, and then machines can completely replace human productivity and shortly after that everything will break.<p>People say this is impossible, citing that theory, I&#x27;m not going to go into why you shouldn&#x27;t use a definition to define itself. Put simply, its possible because we exist, and are capable.<p>So how far do you want to go down the rabbit hole?<p>What does your philosophy and ethics say you should do? As a worker do you support this path. If you work for them you are supporting them. Do you support companies that replace their jobs with AI or continually offload costs onto their customers, reduce their agency, de-amplify your voice, and enslave you through debt?<p>Businesses will first replace the low hanging middle class jobs that cost them the most, then the lower paying jobs. In a perfect corporatocracy you would have only leaders that own machines, and some technicians to keep the machines running, and no workers because labor is the most expensive cost.<p>What can you do about it? Nothing really, not directly.<p>The chance to actually do anything about it was in the 90s, and that&#x27;s where the last generation utterly failed and broke the generational social contract.<p>We have, as the economists call it, dead men ruling, and they have made it practically impossible to right the course.<p>The only thing you can do is learn to become completely self-sufficient, develop a community with specialized skills and resources, and that might offer a slim chance at a future for your children.<p>Things will get much worse. We can&#x27;t avoid what&#x27;s coming, but we can work to ensure its a beginning and not an end for our children.