this post was submitted on 02 May 2026
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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.
Society will adapt. It always has. People can make much more meaningful contributions to society than working at a desk at some software company. Let the AI do that. Humans are way too valuable for that. Meaningfulness of the work one does is one of the most important features of work satisfaction. Not everyone needs to be a doctor, nurse or teacher. Those are just the most common examples, but there are many more meaningful jobs where you are not simply an AI in human form slaving away at a desk job.
It is also simply not true that things like suicide and addiction rates were higher in the recent past. For example, look at drug overdose rates that have risen sharply in the past decades.
You’re sweeping a lot under the rug with that first sentence: Society will adapt. Yeah sure, barring global catastrophe, it will. Doesn’t mean people won’t die and suffer in the process.
I’m making no claims about good vs. bad jobs here; people can self-actualize however they like in my book. Nor was I making any specific point about epidemiology of deaths of despair in the recent past, but I think that trend serves to illustrate the overall point.
What am I sweeping under the rug? I’m not saying that change will be easy, but I’m talking about the end result. Too many people have made the wrong choices and got fooled by companies dangling big paychecks in front of their noses to work shitty office jobs.
You insinuated that in the past, people killed themselves more and had more addiction problems due to the fact that they couldn’t get the job they wanted. That is simply not true and just guessing at things you can’t back up. I’m showed you that the opposite is true: the data only shows that deaths of despair are getting worse than before we had all these bullshit jobs. Whether that is because of them or not cannot be said, but it shows that what you’re saying is not true.
So for the last few millennia, technology has automated away mostly manual labor and created room for knowledge work. The stuff that used to require a human brain. The "slave jobs" you're talking about.
AI has the opposite effect. Engineers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, nurses are going to be mostly worthless (surgeons will still be necessary for a while and nurses will still need to administer IVs and such, but largely anything that's not physically interacting with a patient will be automated away quicker). Anything creative is out the window too. AI can write 500 movie scripts in the time you can write one... And we were already trending towards slop with streaming.
The jobs that are safest for now are the ones where you don't need to use your brain but your body. Physical automatons are more expensive to buy and maintain than subscribing to some AI agent service and the workers they replace are cheaper.
Many of the jobs you mentioned, especially teachers, doctors and nurses cannot simply be replaced by AI because it doesn’t have the human aspect. A teacher needs to motivate people and be a mentor, understand kids’ reasoning and not display basic facts. We already had books for that.
AI is still very bad at solving the complex issues that doctors solve. It can’t do a physical examination and not everything is based on hard verifiable data, but also experience.
And nurses? I mean, you can think of that one for yourself.
Yes a lot of jobs are at risk. Not all are equally at risk though and “mostly worthless” is a looooong stretch.
Technically that's the parents' job as much as the teachers'. Just need to push for parents to shoulder more of the load. And who says we won't have a specialized motivator/mentor AI in a year or two?
But even a simple chatbot like ChatGPT is very reactive and can pretend very well to understand reasoning, just like a teacher. And every student can ask their chatbot for help at the same time. Personally, I'm from a small town in Estonia - I can tell you that when I went to school, I had multiple teachers who for sure would've been inferior to 2022 ChatGPT, let alone 2026 ChatGPT or Claude. We just didn't have better teachers available in this shithole. I've had an English teacher that didn't speak English (she was actually a history teacher and a poor one at that, they just didn't have a real English teacher to assign to us that year), an Estonian teacher that didn't really understand Estonian... IN ESTONIA. I have no idea where they dug her up from. And over the years, I think at least two IT teachers who barely knew how to use a computer. One of the German teachers and one of the History teachers also couldn't stop telling their personal stories. Learned nothing in either of those subjects that year. Luckily most of those horrible teachers only ended up teaching my class for one year at some point or another.
Actually the most valuable thing about school that technology can't replace is the physical building itself containing the students. Just having a bunch of other kids your age, who are also going through what you're going through. That's worth more than any teacher, as we learned during COVID when kids were deprived of it.
AI is still very bad at solving the complex issues that software engineers solve. Yet junior engineers are no longer finding jobs.
Yes, that's what I'm saying, there will be people whose job is nothing more than to do things like that, to provide the data. Then AI can guesstimate shit, and the doctor's job will be just to verify that the AI didn't fuck up. There's no need to pay a great doctor that can talk to the patient, do a physical, come up with a diagnosis and solutions if you can just pay a mediocre one that just takes liability for the AI if it fucks up. You can also pay far fewer doctors. Of course there will be radiology techs, physical examination givers (might literally become a low wage job of its own to fill out standardized tests). Etc. But you'll just have one or two specialized employees per task, rather than someone who needs a multi year degree and needs to know everything about the human body.
Good news then, because AI is literally 100% experience, 0% hard verifiable data. Chances are you're adding to some future AI's experience every time you fill something out on your EMR. Especially if it connects e.g radiology data to your notes.
I already said they'll still exist, but their job will be a physical interface between the AI system and the patients, more than anything. Maybe this'll take 10 years rather than 2, but it'll happen.
The ones least at risk are, like I said, low-paid physical jobs. Also any high-end executives. CEOs do nothing of real value, but they won't be replaced by AI because they're friends with the directors. Parliament/congress will still be around. Of course in my country they're talking about using AI to legislate as well. Or perhaps they've already started. We're fucking doomed, yay.
Safest bet in 2026 is actually trades, because that gets you a job where you still need knowledge and experience is worth something, but you also have to be present physically. Automating a plumber or electrician is harder than automating a doctor or an engineer, that's just how it is with modern AI. But with how many people are now unemployed, those jobs will also start paying a lot less than they used to.
Remember, for any job, it doesn't REALLY matter if the AI can do it well, only how well it can be sold to the government, or company stakeholders, etc. If an AI can do 20% of a person's job and the person costs 10x more than the AI to employ... That person can be laid off and other employees will have to pick up the remaining 80%, for no extra pay of course.
At the end of the day, as long as we still need jobs to live, we're all fucked. There's going to be no real middle class under capitalism anymore. There's a war on many fronts and our jobs going away or getting enshittified is just one.
To be clear I don't think anyone's losing their existing job tomorrow. Doctor, teacher, engineer, lawyer, whatever. I think getting into any of these careers is going to be very difficult soon, the salaries for new hires in particular, but also everyone in general, will drop hard, and AI will replace humans gradually, and perhaps not completely. But all of these jobs are going to be streamlined, with AI doing most of the thinking for you, and the human being there for liability only.
Sounds like a wonderful plan.
Pretend. Yes. Thank you. Teaching may be aided by AI. Just like books, blackboards, curriculums, videos, power points etc.
You told me I was praising AI. Then what do you call this? Guess each accusation is an admission in disguise…
Not the experience I was talking about. AI has read a lot of books. That’s it.
It's already what teachers are advocating for, since they have too much responsibility currently, and parents often don't have a big enough role in their kids lives.
Yes, and that's enough functionally. Actual understanding is not necessary if you can fake it to the point that people actually think AI is cognitive. Hell, did you read that article about Richard Dawkins now thinking Claude is conscious?
You do realize that videos and power points aren't interactive and can't generate their own lesson plans or grade tests, but AI can, right? You can see how that's different, right?
You were praising AI for causing people to be unemployed, essentially. I'm saying AI's a danger to our society because while it's still not conscious and in its current form never will be, it can displace large amounts of jobs because it's good enough. It will be used by capitalists to restructure society so we can all be in relative poverty.
LLMs have read a lot of books. There are other types of AI. Every day at work by interfacing with IT systems, you're providing training material for future AI solutions in your field. They might not be LLMs at all. The contracts to train them off your patient data may not exist yet. But they will. Probably it'll be Palantir sucking up to your government to get it. UK's NHS is already letting Palantir hoover up healthcare data.
But good thing we can get rid of many doctors and teachers eventually, like you said about us engineers. We'll need them for actually meaningful work in the trades and the hospitality industry.
Please stick to one thread. I’m not reading three different ones.
No it’s not LOL. Like you can pretend to be a very coginitvely smart and important person, but reality is different. People say a lot of things. Now we get to make memes about them.
Yes. I realize a lot of stuff. Maybe if you challenge yourself a bit more you could have figured that out yourself. I also realize books don’t have moving images like a video and that a laptop is not a blackboard. Thank you.
So in your line of thinking, if I say it’s a good thing that the oil crisis accelerated the transition to renewable energy, am I praising Trump and the Irani regime? If I tell you it’s a good thing Europe is improving their defence, am I praising Putin or Trump?
Aww so butthurt LOL. Grow the fuck up.
Make fewer comments in the same thread then.
Source on that please.
Never pretended to be either, I just said that if I'm not challenged with what pretty much amounts to puzzles of a sort, I get bored. I also said several times that this is because I have very severe ADHD not because I'm very "coginitively" (sic) smart or anything.
Well your previous comment sure sounded like you didn't know the difference, comparing AI to a blackboard. AI is closer to a teacher than to a textbook in interactivity. It regurgitates previously learned information, sure... But so do teachers. And while it can't really reason, it gets the job done better than a lot of teachers in small towns in particular, where there's really no competition for the jobs (rather, everyone's competing for the teachers).
The oil crisis has an upside because using oil is actually bad for the environment. What's the upside of millions of people losing their jobs? That they can enter other industries and drive wages down there? It's great for the capitalists, not for the rest of us.
I responded to this comment. You interjected yourself into that. Also, have some dignity and don't do a "no u". You're an adult for christs sake.
Sure here you are.
You kinda did by calling other people's work janitorial and factory work as if that was a bad thing.
That is not my lack of understanding, but yours. Both are tools for a teacher to use. How is this tool any different just because it appears to "talk back"? A powerpoint is more advanced than a book and a video more advanced than a still image. Teachers who dealt with the inventions at their time also thought it would change the job and the world completely. It didn't.
Yeah you're really going to have to back that one up. Especially since the data show otherwise
Read my initial comment that you responded to.... I'm not going to regurgitate shit because you can't comprehend or remember.
And I'm not going to respond to your other comment, since I already told you to use just one thread. Paste it here or I won't read it and it will just be a waste of your time.
And I responded to that reply in particular (i.e society adapting). You're now trying to merge threads that were originally about different facets of the same conversation. I have a tendency to branch a lot in my trains of thought, to the point where ideally I should be making several comments to reply to you, but I thought two might be a more manageable amount.
So neither one of us is going to prove anything. But I'm wondering what quality do you think a teacher has that an actually functional future teaching AI can't solve to at least 80% of the same capability for 10-20% of the cost, especially if you consider that the teacher can only attend to one student at a time, or address the whole class at once, but not attend to everyone's individual questions and such at the same time. If there's an average of about 25 students per class, 45 minutes a lesson, that's less than 2 minutes per student per lesson. Except most of that time usually goes towards teaching the whole class, so really most students get zero individual attention/mentorship. Which is an easy problem to solve by hiring more teachers... But to get even a single new teacher in most countries with decent social systems, you first have to finance a master's degree and then pay (in case of many European nations) union wages, which are actually pretty high compared to a lot of other jobs. And even then that person might decide not to stay in the role because teaching is very taxing work mentally, especially if you want to do it well. I know people who have worked in a school for a few years and then quit. Hell, I know a teacher who quit to work in straight up corporate tech support (and I do mean corporate: it was a B2B company, all the customers were companies), because that was... somehow less grueling. But make kids above a certain age be in classes of 50 or 70 instead of 20-30 and let AI do most of the work. You've suddenly eliminated close to half the teaching positions and it's easier to fill all the positions with people who are truly so passionate about it that being degraded by unruly kids every day doesn't burn them out.
How is a teacher any different just because it appears to "talk back"?
In the end both the teacher's brain and the LLM powering a future teacherbot, are neural networks. And if we are to believe that we live in a deterministic universe, free will as we know it may not even be real - in which case we have more in common with AI than we think, we just have vastly more stimuli and past experiences affecting our output and are of course significantly more complex.
Two studies from a nation already defunding its education (with individual states sabotaging their curricula too, since it's not nationally standardized), highlighting trends that were taking place before even ChatGPT came out and people actually started talking about AI. I'm talking about future agents that will wrap the LLM into something that can actually be proactive in a classroom setting, not just reactive.
... You replied to two of my replies. I replied to your replies. The point of the thread system here is to keep things organized so we know which comment was replying to which comment. Otherwise we'd just be on an oldschool bbs. But fine, I'll paste it here.
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 more with 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? Why else did you not take one of those roles, given that they're, by some standards, even more meaningful than that of a doctor? An orderly in particular requires much less education too, you could've jumped straight to helping people after high school if that was actually the primary metric by which you chose your job. I suspect you want to think that, but in reality you took the job that's well paid and has the types of challenges that make you feel good when you solve them.
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 might potentially go under for laying people off today and running out of the talent pool to hire from later? 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 what, 2%, of them can grab vacant jobs in your industry? Hospitals employ a lot of people and there are vacancies like any other industry, but they're not going to magically conjure up all the money to hire a bunch of new people just because they'd be beneficial to have around. And I'm not even going into education, because the vast majority of people working in education are teachers and teachers need a degree, usually a master's in pedagogy. And like I said, that doesn't even guarantee you'll have a job for long now that governments are looking into using more AI to "make education more efficient" (cut costs).
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 somehow a good thing. The positives don't even outweigh the negatives in the economic system we live in. Unless you're part of the ownership class. I don't know about you, but I'm not a billionaire so I'm not really benefiting here.
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. Or perhaps you handwaved it away because you understood it's going to be hard to argue your point unless in a perfect world without ever-increasing financial pressures.
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 to try to get people to go to the doctor. Oh and in the same timeframe 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 public transit costs money for tickets again. 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 some of the highest taxes in the EU, that also brings in tons of income from diplomats and MEPs spending money there), 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. And to pay the interest, there need to be more taxes.
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, which is what "workforce reform" really means.
If it seems to you that I ever implied that AI is going to replace doctors and teachers WITHOUT negatively 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 governments 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. Corporations will sell AI solutions to governments, who will have to take them because of the aging populace and therefore shrinking tax base.
> And I responded to that reply in particular (i.e society adapting)
I don’t care why it happened. Point is you tried to make this my fault…
> So neither one of us is going to prove anything.
This is not a “both sides” thing. You made a claim that it is enough to pretend to know something to teach someone else something, which is an outrageous claim. Yet you tried to put the burden of proof on me and when that didn’t stick try to share the blame. Not going to work and I’m not very fond of your bad faith arguments.
> But I'm wondering what quality do you think a teacher has that an actually functional future teaching AI can't solve
We’re going around in circles. You already asked this and I already told you (hint: it’s the human element).
> How is a teacher any different just because it appears to "talk back"?
Uhm. I’m pretty sure a teacher knows what it’s saying and doesn’t appear to talk back but actually does.
> In the end both the teacher's brain and the LLM
That doesn’t answer my question at all…
> Two studies from a nation already defunding its education…
Trying to pick apart the data that backs up what I said is not the same as backing up your own claim. Try a little harder.
> The point of the thread system here…
Yeah in comments between different users, not the same one.
> Which remarks exactly seemed derogatory to you?
Read my previous comment. And you didn’t answer how that made me into having a god complex…
> Then why didn't you choose a more meaningful job instead of the interesting one?
I am doing the most meaningful one… there is not much difference within health care. There is however a large difference with corporate jobs, like I already mentioned in my first comment.
> Somehow a bunch of people losing their jobs is good because what, 2%, of them can grab vacant jobs in your industry?
Not good for those people in the short term obviously, but better for the world in the long run. And health care is just one example. There are many other sectors that could use human capital instead of something an AI could replace.
Yes economic hardship is coming in the near future, especially when the AI bubble bursts. But yes we will find a way to adapt in the long run, as we always have.
So how would I fund all the health care and other jobs? Large corporations are already hardly contributing anything, and if they’re not even providing jobs, the argument that they’re good for the economy is completely gone. That opens up a path to simply tax the hell out of these corps. And I know that it is not going to be as easy, but I also do not need to make an entire economic balance sheet for one comment on Lemmy. That is ridiculous.
> And yet I'm the one "praising AI".
Indeed you are. I told you AI’s limitations, that they can’t be a person, can’t reason, can only fake having knowledge, can only fake interaction and understanding, only read a lot of books (or saw a lot of scans or EKGs or lab results, I know other AI’s other than LLMs exist doofus, I work with them on a daily basis) but that it doesn’t equal human experience that also incorporates a lot of stuff that you won’t learn in any book, especially in healthcare.
You on the other hand seem to think an AI is already doing a better job than teachers without anything to back it up. So yeah, praising AI beyond its capabilities.
> you just seemed ignorant of the whole issue of government efficiency being a thing taxpayers are usually looking for
Just because I don’t over explain everything like you do doesn’t mean I’m ignorant. This is just more of your own god complex showing, your own arrogance and ignorance like I already told you a bunch of times. And you wonder why I’m annoyed with you? This is not how you have a constructive discussion. So either keep your arrogance in check or you can discuss with yourself.
You also seem to have forgotten a teeny tiny problem here: an influx of patients because of aging baby boomers. The baby boom is about to turn into a health care boom. The first baby boomers are already nearing 80 years old. They will not stop presenting themselves to hospitals or care facilities because you or society doesn’t want to spend the money on it. This definitely means we will need more people in the short to medium term. Especially the people that you consider “janitors” or “factory workers”.
> Doctors being replaced with AI doesn't mean…
You also don’t need to mansplain this to me. This is a daily topic of discussion at the hospital where I work.
Why is that even something we need to assign blame for? I replied to your reply, because it was on a different subject. It was supposed to be a different discussion than the healthcare one, until you decided to merge them. You want one discussion, I wanted two different ones. Big deal, let's move on.
This is something that we're only going to be finding out in the future. But like I said, I don't expect AI to be as good as actually good teachers. I do expect it to be cheaper though. And good teachers aren't ubiquitous. There's currently no data either way, but you're saying it's impossible, I'm saying it's probably not and government's gonna want to save money.
Seen plenty of teachers in my time in school who had very little human element in their lessons. Plus like I said, they don't actually have time for their students.
And where does a teacher's knowledge come from? If the answer is books and studies, I have excellent news, LLMs have been trained on more of those than a human could ever learn.
What was the point of your data though? It's irrelevant, it has nothing to do with what I'm saying.
What I'm saying is that LLMs are cheaper than humans. I'm also saying that the quality of teaching will soon be "good enough". Who decides what's good enough? Bureaucrats in the government. It's subjective. There's no exact standard.
ORRRR you can use different comment chains to reply about different subjects. There's no rule of one comment per user lol
You just said you had a problem with me saying I dislike menial work. I never insulted you. I never insulted the people you work with, who I'm pretty sure work much harder than you or me. I said I'm incapable of doing that type of work because it'd bore me to death.
Yes, but unfortunately only physical jobs are now safe from AI. 5 years ago we didn't imagine software engineers being replaced by AI anytime soon. Now we don't imagine subpar software engineers having jobs in a few years.
And they'll also be under fire from AI.
But what matters are the results and the cost, not the actual understanding. If an AI has a similar success rate in diagnosis and treatment compared to a doctor, but is significantly cheaper and can be scaled up and down to see more or fewer patients depending on need.
AI doesn't understand art either, yet artists are being replaced. AI doesn't understand code either, yet software engineers aren't being hired anymore... And we used to think we'd be the last to be replaced, since we're the ones actually creating it. That was our hubris. You're now where I was a few years ago with yours.
And it's being trained off EVERY scan and EKG in the future. You only see those of your patients and maybe a few other study cases. AI will learn from millions. Which is the reason it'll be able to mostly perform diagnostics without even understanding what it's doing.
Yet you implied all they have is book knowledge. You should then know there are far more accurate types of AI than LLMs, and we're only getting better at creating them.
You just admitted that you realize they don't just learn from books. Once the deals are there (and the big AI companies are already working with governments so it won't be long), they'll literally be trained on your experience as you document everything in your EMR software. So why pretend it's only ever going to be stuff learned "in any book"?
Well you're simply handwaving important issues away, so I was hoping you were ignorant, but turns out you're just arguing in bad faith.
A daily discussion and yet you think it'll be impossible for it to happen? Alrighty then.
The god complex I mentioned is your idea that you're irreplaceable. You're not. I'm not. None of us are. You and I are easier to replace than a construction worker, plumber or electrician. We're not coming out of this without abolishing private property. Taxation won't save anything, because corporations can't have significant revenue taxes for fairly obvious reasons and profit taxes are too easy to skirt. VAT works the best, but good luck selling the general population on increasing that, it's too visible in how it affects prices.
What I said it is that the AI doesn’t understand things, doesn’t get what someone is saying. AI in its current form doesn’t understand a person. That is fact. I literally never said that it would not be possible in the future.
The claim you made was that AI is better than a portion of teachers right now and that is what I denied. How is it not a big deal when it turns out you’re simply wrong? How about we move on after you agree you were wrong?
That is your biased interpretation. They were still humans and not computers.
Can’t you figure that out for yourself? I don’t really get the feeling you really like to challenge yourself mentally, as this is an easy question to answer with a little brain work.
But fine: in the beginning their formal training as a teacher, as taught by other, more experienced teacher. And after a few years on the job their own experience as well. Reducing it to just books is a straw man argument that even you know is utter bullshit.
It has everything to do with what you were saying, since you claimed that the AI was already doing better than the bottom part of teachers. So why are we not seeing an improvement in education results from the time they were implemented? Strange how things are irrelevant when they disprove your claim. You’re arguing in bad faith again.
Now that is irrelevant because we were discussing that you though AI was doing better than teachers. Now you want to bring money into this? And I thought I couldn’t say you were praising AI? Then why do you keep doing it?
Nonsense. We have broadly discussed teaching and there are many other jobs that require physical communication with another human.
But it will still not understand. Which is what is necessary to make the translation from data to patients.
AI can read a gazillion scans and put out a result with a confidence % or whatever. But in the end the decision needs to be made what is best for this individual patient. It only knows books, guidelines and scans. That is not the hard part of medicine. It’s weighing all the options and information and deciding for each patient what needs to be done, taking into account a lot of factors that necessitate human interaction. This is where big data fails and the human element comes in. This is also what you fail to understand.
You also need a human to explain things to a patient. We are experiencing more and more patients every day who put their health complaints through ChatGPT and don’t understand an iota of what it’s saying and draw their own conclusions that cannot be drawn. You cannot bombard a patient with data and information like ChatGPT. You’re way too stuck in your own
LOL nice “no u” coming from mister cognitive challenge
Yes that would be pretty foolish of me to think. Good thing I never said that. More straw manning.
Never said that, nor hold this idea. Look above why a computer can never replace a person, since as I already mentioned a 1000 times, it lacks the human aspect. This is not something that is specific to me, so I don’t know why you’re making this about me specifically.
And that is impossible to change?
Edit: if all you’ve got is straw man arguments we’re done here.
When did I ever say AI would be better than humans in general? I said it's better than some humans and significantly cheaper than humans. You say I'm using strawmans, yet you're not arguing the points I'm actually making, only the ones you want me to be making so you could win. Bye bye, I'm out.
When did I say you said humans in general?
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.
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.