Serious question. What should people retrain in? What jobs or training will provide long-term income potential? You don’t want to spend four years retraining for a job or career that only lasts for two years or seven years. My point is that let’s say a new technology comes out or new occupation. How long will it take for the AI and the robots to be able to perform that occupation? Can people train and actually work in that career before the robots take it over?

Is AI the proverbial apple in Adam and Eve? Are we justifying taking a bite of it just because it’s there? Are we helpless and unable to defend ourselves against it? My worry is that thoughts like these and questions like these are going through young people and their decisions about how to provide and proceed into a career. Are we headed towards learned helplessness?

Sadly my friend, the fact is that we are hosed.

Retraining is a pipe dream which will be sold for another 5 years, till most people are underemployed.

This is what happened to factory workers, and to an extent is going to happen to knowledge workers.

The real menace is hidden in the details though - knowledge work is assumed to have one core component - information. Accurate information.

In reality it has two - emotional salience and informational accuracy.

LLMs generate content- I foresee a future where people are underemployed as output verifiers. So a PhD in physics helps you QC an LLM.

The only job left is to own a firm, but even that will be closed because you will either be selling to capital owners or the majority of humanity.

The only hope of technology is that it creates a revolution which upends the preexisting incumbents. But the issue here is the under employment.