this post was submitted on 02 May 2026
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Not all that great for the people who now can't get jobs.
Take me for example. I like to think I'm a pretty good software engineer. And I actually enjoy it. I'd be a pretty bad doctor and an even worse teacher (I'm also a man so that would limit me to teaching teenagers and older anyway, nobody wants men near children in education).
Don't give much of a fuck about the companies, but a lot of people are now denied a career path that might've been THE thing they're great at and enjoy doing. This is about several different fields, of which mine is one. I'm quite lucky I got in when I did. Otherwise I'd have to start considering suicide by now because I can't stand manual labour or customer service.
the teachers i see employed at my school when i was in HS early 2000s who are male, that have been washed out from other stem majors, or have been gatekept from those fields altogether, not a good fit it pretty much reflect thier lack of interest in teaching.
Don’t you think that’s a bit much? People committing suicide because they can’t get their favourite career path? I have never heard of it being a problem. Before computers existed there were people like you and they didn’t all commit suicide. They chose the jobs that were available. Sure it takes some adjustment and it may not be a string of everlasting highlights, but let’s not get carried away here.
Not really.
It’s all about the rate of change: neoliberal globalization has brought down wages across industries, so fewer good jobs are left, and the not-so-good ones barely keep up the same standard of living.
From a neutral historical perspective, some serious pearl-clutching about jobs is not ill-founded.
As you say, people in the past facing these circumstances didn’t all commit suicide. Yet some did it explicitly, some did it indirectly with alcohol or other vices, others just lived less fulfilling lives than they otherwise would have. Nonetheless, we are very much encouraging deaths of despair en masse with our current societal outlook.
lower wages is the least of peoples worries if they cant even find a job anymore.
I don’t fully blame them, as much as it’s a but of an extreme take. I’ve been out a job for two years. It shohld be easy enough and yet I can barely get a response and almost never get any feedback. Sometimes I get “you don’t have enough experience in this thing that only a firm like us can provide but fuck you.” And then the alternative is being told to go get exploited for minimum wage and disrespect? I did all this and now I just have to start at square one plus debt for even less money than I was getting before? And I’m good with my hands but I’m not getting a job without other experience, so I have next to nothing to go by.
Well yeah, but your situation is much worse imo. Not being able to get a job at all and not getting your favoured career path are two different things. Not working when you want to work is much more depressing. I understand that it must be hard to get a job right now. Especially if you work in a sector that is under pressure from AI. A lot of companies aren’t hiring because of it. But things will never be the same as they were before AI. So many people will need to get a different education towards a field that isn’t as threatened by AI.
“Especially if you work in a sector” is exactly what you’re saying shouldn’t matter though, no? I could probably go get hired for something pretty quickly, if I was willing.
Definitely not. I said some sectors will be more affected than others and that people who are replaced with AI can work in (other career paths like) health care or education.
There are still sectors that have a lot of job openings and of course you don’t need to become a burger flipper but #2 is health care. And I’m sure you can imagine that with an aging population the job openings will only increase. There are a lot of jobs that only require high school, or if you want a better job, take a course.
Your first comment clearly said that sometimes leaving a sector for one with more available jobs is necessary. To be honest, I don’t fully disagree, but it does make the reply to my comment a bit contrary.
Anyway, changing paths isn’t always so easy for a variety of factors, especially if you’re in a situation like myself where you get little to no feedback on why you aren’t getting hired. Spending time and money on official training that turns out wasn’t even the problem is only going to make the problem worse.
Hell, here in Canada, for sure I could consider gping into healthcare but also many provincial governments are crippling healthcare(they’re trying to break everything so it can be privatized) so it’s not really a great sounding idea. Logic and morality do not often apply to the job market, unfortunately, and that can leave a lot of people feeling completely out of control. You work to build up a career and then it disappears for no reason leavjng you to start over like you’re a teenager again except now no one will hire you because they say you’re going to expect too much.
I don’t understand what you mean, how is saying you need to change from one sector to another contrary to saying some sectors are more under pressure from AI than others?
It’s the same thing using different words. What I mean is I think people will have change their career paths towards fields that are less affected by AI replacement than their current one.
As to your situation, I don’t exactly know where you have tried, and why you aren’t getting hired. But the change may have to be more drastical than taking a certain course hoping to meet the requirements of the same job openings you were going for before.
And the health care sector isn’t perfect either, but it has a lot going for it. One being the certainty of increasing demands – or at least for the next twenty years or so – because of an aging population. Not many sectors have that kind of thing going for them. Another could be solar panel installer or something similar.
I can guarantee they could also find a minimum wage job at McDonald's or some such, no problem. It's just the whole not wanting to do that that's an issue.
Nope. I've read enough threads on Reddit where people can't even get a Minimum Wage job because those are getting overwhelmed with applicants as well so those kinda jobs also have become hard to come by and require experience.
Well shit, some countries might be having it even worse then. Here at least there are still plenty of openings for grocery stores, fast food restaurants and gas stations. Pay is shit, work is grueling, but they never stop hiring. My point really was that these are the jobs we'll have to start choosing from, as opposed to the jobs we want to do.
Find me a meaningful and challenging job that doesn't get boring over time, that I don't need a degree or any sort of artistic talent for.
I doubt you'll be able to. The only job I ever held before my current career was refurbishing laptops and I can tell you most of us wanted to kill ourselves. Half the guys were on antidepressants.
What do you mean? There are plenty of jobs in health care alone that don’t require extensive training at all. They don’t get boring since you meet new people every day and it is meaningful work, which in turn is a big part of why people are satisfied with their jobs.
Edit: can the downvoters at least explain why they are downvoting? What I wrote is 100% true, unless I am missing something big here. So please enlighten me why you feel the need to downvote something so obviously true.
Doctors need an M.D. Nurse is a 4 year degree. What can you do in healthcare other than janitorial work without a degree?
Do you really think doctors and nurses are the only people who work at a hospital or in healthcare in general? Even in a hospital doctors and nurses are about half of all personnel. People need daily care, need food, need someone to help them get from one place to another, like when they need to get medical exams.
Outside of a hospital there are plenty of jobs that bring you into contact with people that don’t need an extensive degree. Maybe a couple months of training.
Those are not jobs that would give me any fulfillment whatsoever. What are the complex technical problems to solve in feeding someone? In moving them around? It's exactly the same as factory assembly line work. A monotonous grind with no end in sight, nothing gets "done" because there's a bunch more of the same every day until you retire.
I'm psychologically incapable of doing these types of jobs. Yes I'm medicated and no it doesn't help too much. I have crippling ADHD. I've done factory work before and like I said, it makes me want to off myself. This was the type of job we were supposed to let robots handle, not the ones where we actually get to use our brains.
I also don't see "bring you into contact with people" as a positive for a job in any way. I've found that any time I have to work with customers, they can be absolutely annoying idiots. Just hanging out with people I actually like is a completely different proposition. It's just that when people need something, they rarely know what they need and you have the options of either making them angry by suggesting they're wrong, or making them angry by letting them be wrong. To be clear, I don't consider myself immune to this. See me walk into an automotive paint store or a doctor's office and my questions and ideas are probably very stupid. But I make up for it by not arguing when I'm being corrected by the person that actually knows what they're doing.
That was not the question you asked. Health care is only one of the options. Go ask an LLM for some more ideas that are more to your liking if you don’t have the imagination yourself.
It was. I literally said challenging. I can only do jobs that use the brain, because otherwise I'll want to kill myself. These jobs no longer exist at the entry level in most fields. I don't think we'll even have junior doctors or lawyers for long, let alone engineers and such.
Like I said, I have a job already, but many others like me will have to work jobs they hate for the rest of their lives. I can't be the only one who feels existential dread at factory labour type jobs (which includes the ones you described in healthcare, I don't see them being significantly different from working in an Amazon warehouse once you've been doing it long enough to be desensitised to the whole "at least I'm helping people" thing which just isn't enough eventually).
So that's what you were sort of cheering for.
I answered:
Also: quit being so dramatic. If you don’t even want to try you will fail for sure.
And you suggested... Janitorial work.
I've tried not having an engaging job, that's how I know I wanted to kill myself dude... I've had to do boring work before. Several years in fact. Do you know what effect the words "think less" have on someone who hates being a mindless drone?
Understand that some people just aren't compatible with factory work, or the hospital equivalent of factory work that you suggested. I'm not wired that way. Good for you if you are.
AI is deleting options for these people. Young people growing up right now will all have to flip burgers at mcdonalds or change bedsheets for patients or do other similar menial work while us old fucks hold on at all cost to the jobs people actually want to do and our bosses will refuse to hire junior level employees for us to train. Because useful human brains are expensive to train and untrained ones are less useful than whatever AI can hallucinate up. Education won't solve this either, you need several years on the job to be more useful than an AI agent now and that number keeps going up. And that's going to happen in most fields. Bonus point: eventually even doctors aren't safe. AI can't be liable for patient well-being, but doctors can be made to "see" 100 patients a day using AI. Doctors will be expected to just sign off on everything unless they can see an error immediately. Teachers are also getting pretty redundant. If AI creates the assignments, AI writes the students' answers and then AI grades it... Why do we even need teachers?
Did I? These are important jobs that are much more meaningful than what you’re doing now. Calling it janitorial work or factory work is not only ignorant but also arrogant and demeaning to those people.
Being a mindless drone is what you are right now working for a company. You’re an AI in fleshy form.
Being stuck in dead-end office jobs working like robots is draining people and society. AI sucks and it is gonna suck for a while, but everyone can adapt, including you. So yes, take a course, learn something new and take charge. Even now you’re asking me for what you should do with the rest of your life. You should be able to figure that out. And if you’re not able, then yes, ask Claude or something. AI is coming, whether you like it or not, so you can either go with it or forever fight an uphill battle and become even more miserable than with these “janitor” jobs of yours.
You don't really know what exactly I'm doing now, but that's beside the point. I never said they were unimportant, I said there's not enough challenge to keep my brain occupied. I have pretty severe ADHD. If I don't get to do something new and interesting nearly every day, I'll start performing very poorly soon. If the entire planet was dependent on me doing the same exact thing for 8 hours a day and even if I knew it... Well in a few months, we'd all be dead. It wouldn't be unimportant, it would just not be meaningfully challenging for me and I'd get complacent. It's how my brain works and even medication doesn't help a lot. In my first job, I helped displace 2-3 tons of CO2 emissions per day by fixing used laptops slated for landfill, giving them what I'd hope was years of new life. It was great for a while, but it became meaningless for me because it was too easy. 2 years in, I knew that if I had to do it for much longer, I would never recover mentally. I didn't make it to 3 years at that job.
I mean you don't really know my situation, I'm actually the sole employee at my company. I decide when, how much and who to work for. I have a few favorite clients that know to give me tough problems rather than boring, repetitive things.
Well, some people don't want to be lumberjacks or construction workers. Some prefer knowledge work. Those who get into it just for the money will feel drained, I'm sure. But I know a lot of people like myself who do it purely because they love a good problem to solve. I don't think many of them would function well within normal "meaningful" jobs in the physical world over the long term.
My point was that anything you'd really need to take a course in, won't be hiring new junior employees by the time you're finished. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, writers, interpreters, artists are going to have their numbers thinned HARD. What we'll have left for young people is manual labor, customer service, cleaning, etc. Jobs where employees become useful fairly quickly as far as the learning curve is concerned and people are paid low enough that they're not worth replacing with machines. Tradies will have it safe for now, but I'm anticipating that there will be a LOT more competition for those jobs, particularly electricians because that's less physically demanding and smelly than plumbing or construction. Which means wages in the trades are also going to go down, particularly for fresh employees.
Anyway, as I said before, I already have enough years of experience in my field that I likely still have a future in it. If I wasn't raising a toddler alone as a single father, I could grind myself to early retirement in 10 years doing 200 hours a month, but currently I'm working more like 40 a month as a "mindless drone" and it's enough to get by. It's not me I'm worried about. I'm worried about other people who can't handle doing boring work day in and day out.
You’re a software engineer. You told me in your first comment. So no, I absolutely know those jobs are more meaningful.
You can still do knowledge work without being a mindless fleshy AI. You don’t need to be a fucking lumberjack. Quit it with the straw man arguments. I will ignore them, so you’re wasting your own time writing them.
And it’s good that you’re worried about other people, but the arguments you make to get there are utter BS. People can and will adapt and there will not just be lumberjacks and electricians. Maybe challenge your mind with that before making such comments.
You literally have no idea what projects I've worked on though. Hint: If I'm working on something in special needs care, I'm touching thousands of lives at once, not 10. But you probably equate me with the same people who develop online casinos or targeting systems for Palantir because I have the same job title.
You want to call me mindless so much, I think you need to look into yourself. What do YOU do?
I don't know how you can realize that the goal of the companies that own the AI you're praising is the abolishment of human knowledge work altogether. Knowledge workers cost money. Look, even before the AI craze, the goal of nearly every company looking to make a profit has been to make work as boring and efficient as possible. I've been through it. People get reallocated to bite sized responsibility. Only do one thing and do it like a robot.
What kind of jobs do YOU think will exist in the future that are going to require any sort of complex thought? Because I can nearly guarantee that eventually, the doctors in your hospital will be robots, but the bedpan changers will be human. Nurses will be there to administer IVs and such, but shouldn't have their own opinions.
And if you're going to say that doctors, nurses, teachers, etc, are safe because those are government jobs not private company jobs... Well, with an aging populace and an already unsustainable pension system, the government's gonna have to start saving money too.
Does it matter that AI can't be held accountable and it makes mistakes a human could spot? No, because it's significantly cheaper than paying a human that needs to pay rent and buy groceries. You just pay one human to take on the liability for the AI that replaced the other 10.
Mate. You called hospital staff janitors and factory workers that don’t use their brain. I think you need to tone it down a bit here.
If you want to know, I’m an MD if it wasn’t obvious and I work with many of the great people you feel the need to insult. I know the work they do with patients and their families. So while no, I don’t know exactly what you do I still think whatever they are doing is much more meaningful than developing software. Even if it has something to do with special needs.
Where am I praising AI? I literally said AI sucks.
Yes, every job will be affected, some more than others. Some sooner than others. Some jobs will remain but will be more efficient using AI. The aging population so far has only meant more work, not less, even though we already use AI.
I'm saying that's all that will be left soon. Paying staff that actually needs to use their brains is expensive and inefficient. The routine bits will remain, those are harder to automate and you can pay staff less for doing boring things.
But also I said that because of my severe ADHD, I can't do boring stuff like that. There need to be problems and I need to come up with solutions, and things need to be done. Like if there's no visible progress happening towards the end of something, I can't stay motivated. Since patients need help every single day, something like feeding them is completely mind-numbing to me since I can't "win" or "beat" it. It's not meaningless, but it's not something I'm mentally capable of staying motivated on. Get me? Like I said, my current line of work is basically the only thing I can do that keeps me motivated by being challenging enough, without requiring a degree.
Explains the god complex lol.
I could MAYBE stay motivated as an MD, hopefully that wouldn't get too boring for me. However, I could never finish the education I'd have to go through. I can't spend 7 years memorizing stuff, I'll last maybe one semester.
You said in an earlier comment something about people like me existing in olden times before we had computers. Yes, that's true. Back in the caveman days, someone like me would probably have been a hunter. Later on, a soldier on the front lines. Something where there's a chance of dying at any moment, to add at least some excitement. But I don't really want to be a soldier.
It's just a couple of patients and their families at a time though. Like I said, my projects affect thousands at a time usually, at a minimum. But that one was just an example, many of my other projects have been in much less meaningful areas of course. I'm just pointing out that the people writing software that you doctors use, usually touch thousands if not millions of lives, but you seem to think their work is meaningless. I'm also personally responsible for saving a few thousand therapists (PT, OT, SLP) and therapy assistants across the US about 10-30 minutes a day on filling out notes by improving their existing EMR system significantly (it was not great, I can tell you that). Try calculating the impact of that on human lives improved in the long term if every one of those providers can see one more patient per day for an example. How many people might get an initial eval appointment a few days earlier to get started managing their pain since the clinic was able to fit in 5 more patients per day? Could be hundreds, maybe thousands of people a year. Not a single life saved by me, but possibly thousands improved marginally.
I'm just saying it's pretty presumptuous to assume you know how meaningful someone's work is based on their job title. There are doctors out there helping victims of genocide in Gaza, and there are doctors doing Mar-A-Lago surgeries for rich Trump sycophants. There are software engineers writing medical software and software engineers creating online casinos, surveillance systems, etc.
I also literally never said that those people's (that you're talking about) jobs aren't meaningful to them, or to the people they interact with. I'm saying I personally can't find meaning in a job that 1) someone else could also easily do, 2) doesn't challenge me every single day, 3) is a monotonous grind.
You were literally saying it's great that people are losing well-paid jobs:
Another thing to consider: When there are 500 applicants for 10 positions at your hospital, they're going to fire some of the existing staff because they're paid too much and the new people can be paid minimum wage.
After talking to you, I've realized why people say doctors develop a god complex. One day when you're signing off on 300 treatments a day that AI conjured up while barely having time to skim patients' histories because of horrible KPIs, you'll realize what I mean when I say knowledge work is being destroyed.
LOL god complex? You’re the one calling people factory workers and janitors and telling me how much better you are than them because your software “touches people” whatever that may be. I’ve been telling you from the start to stop being so arrogant and that you’re not as special as you think. Might as well just say “no u” and be done with it. Even AI could have thought of that.
Also, where have I ever boasted about myself or my job? Please quote me.
Hmm, you were saying god complex?
How is that praising AI in any way, shape or form? You need to challenge yourself cognitively a little more.
In the US that might happen. I work in a normal country where health care isn’t run by for-profit hedge funds.
And you were calling me a fleshy AI lol.
Mate I'm just saying that the jobs you seem to think are so interesting, are pretty fucking boring. Why did you choose to be a doctor? I can guarantee that the nurses do more work than you do. The janitors that have to wash immobile patients, have even harder jobs. And yet for some reason, you didn't consider that to be an interesting job, despite the fact that it's certainly more personal and meaningful to the patient than yours.
I'm just trying to illustrate the point that just because someone isn't directly interacting with patients, doesn't mean their work doesn't affect people. This is that medical worker god complex again. There are probably hundreds of thousands if not millions of people whose labor you indirectly depend on to do your job without thinking about it, but since they're elsewhere in the supply chain, you and your coworkers who are visible to the patient, have the only really meaningful jobs. It's this sheer arrogance from you that made me want to point out that other people's jobs can also affect patients' well-being, even if it's indirectly.
If you can't put two and two together here, I'm not sure it's my intelligence that should be under question.
Idk if you've heard about these things called taxpayers, but they tend to not like it when their funds are being misused. Government's always looking out to cut costs. For an example, my country raised the visit fee from 5€ to 20€ on non-PCP visits so fewer people would visit doctors and they could cut down on healthcare costs. Now imagine if they could pay the employees half as much because there are so many candidates available.
Much of the western world is running into more and more government debt. Finland's finance ministry released a statement saying their debt's going to be bigger than their GDP soon. That's considered a pretty bad sign generally. Here in Estonia we're cutting costs instead. Some are even talking about privatizing the healthcare system. It's pretty fucked up. And the biggest cost in healthcare is always salaries, so for healthcare to remain a government affair, those need to be cut soon, for most countries.
Yes. In response to your derogatory remarks. How does that make me have a god complex?
Of course being a doctor is more interesting. And within medicine I also chose a specialty that interested me. I didn’t get the one I initially chose, but I did into the one I am doing now, and in the end I’m happy with it.
Point is: you can’t tell if certain jobs are boring because you’ve never tried them. You’ve never even seen what their day is like. So you’re making shitty assumptions based on your shitty prejudice.
That sounds a lot like something that someone who doesn’t actually have a point would say. So, please humour me.
You start a sentence with that and expect me to read the rest of the gibberish a fleshy AI has written down? Again, showing you’re dumber than the AI that’s about to replace you.
Which remarks exactly seemed derogatory to you?
Then why didn't you choose a more meaningful job instead of the interesting one? You could be doing something to patients in person. It's the nurses and orderlies* who do most of the actual work in a hospital, from what I've seen the few times I've been in one.
Could it be that you found those jobs boring? Not challenging you in the right way? Or... Why else did you not take one of those roles, given that they're, by some standards, more meaningful than that of a doctor? An orderly in particular requires much less education too, you could've jumped straight to helping people if that was the metric by which you chose your job at all.
You: "Good, let 'em ruin themselves, we need the people in healthcare and education anyway."
Millions of people are losing their jobs worldwide, many more have studied for 3 years to get a degree they won't ever be able to use. You're saying that's a good thing. Why? Because in 5-10 years time, some companies will go under for laying people off today? Those people need jobs now, and the healthcare system isn't going to need that many, especially since much of the western world can't afford its current healthcare systems right now.
Somehow a bunch of people losing their jobs is good because 2% of them can get jobs in your industry.
And yet I'm the one "praising AI". I'm the one saying that capitalists will fight to replace every worker they can with AI, you're the one saying it's a good thing.
Pardon me, you just seemed ignorant of the whole issue of government efficiency being a thing taxpayers are usually looking for. Especially since, you know, taxes are actively being raised in some countries to be able to even afford the current spending.
E.g here in Estonia, in the last 5 years we've had the income tax raised, VAT raised twice, and the price of medical visits (ER visits and first visit per case of a specialty doctor, but not GP visits) went from 5 euros to 20 euros. Oh and we got a nice new vehicle tax (not a bad thing in of itself) that comes with a new registration tax that also applies retroactively to old cars if ownership is transferred (can be a couple hundred to a few thousand euros to transfer ownership of a car worth 500 for an example). And we're STILL running a deficit, something Estonia didn't really do in the past.
As a result, different government departments are always trying to save money whereever possible. That includes things like having more students per teacher so that fewer teachers need to be paid. And this is Estonia, our government debt is just under 25% of GDP. If you take for an example Belgium, a nation with much higher taxes, that also brings in tons of income from all the visiting MEPs who spend money there but get paid by their own governments... Their debt is over 100% of GDP. Finland is going to be over 100% too. There's no set debt to GDP ratio that's bad, but the higher the debt, the higher the interest payments.
Doctors being replaced with AI doesn't mean they're going to be all replaced at once, nor are they going to be explicitly "replaced" by AI like software engineers. Rather, individual doctors are going to be expected to do more because "you now have AI helping you". Fewer young doctors will be hired because data will show that having X% fewer doctors of specialty Y per capita would result in only Z% fewer positive patient outcomes. Then in a few years, as AI tools get better, even fewer doctors will be needed. Etc. 2 years ago already we had an article here saying the national health insurance system found ways to save 21 million a year using "digital technologies and workforce reform". They're looking to either save another 100 million a year, or raise it via more taxation. Easiest way to do the former is to lay people off.
If it seems to you that I ever implied that AI is going to replace doctors and teachers WITHOUT affecting quality of care and education... Sorry, no, that's not what I meant. I meant the savings are going to be so significant that government will do it despite the reduction in quality. It'll be deemed as "good enough".
Call me a pessimist or whatever, but one thing governments and corporations have in common is that they like cutting costs at the expense of the common folk.