Ask HN: What skills are future proof in an AI driven job market?
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ssunny678 6 days ago 77 comments
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For developers and non-developers alike: What's worth learning today to stay relevant in an AI first world
Discussion (77 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
* leadership
* data structures
* task/project management
* performance/measurements
* data transmission techniques
Honestly, if you really have to ask the question then none of this matters because it sounds like you are already delegating your career to AI which would make this list unapproachable.
This should be clear by the fact that it can solve complex math problems without understanding how to count.
Often better than many developers I've worked with come up with.
If you are only doing data entry into an LLM without understanding how any of this actually works then what do I need you for? I can just promote the janitor at half the cost to do your job.
Military (still need humans in loop most of the time I guess, even for drones);
Lawyers, accountants, some government jobs and anything that needs to send a human to the prison if something is messed up;
Daycare/primary school/middle school teachers. Looks like parents still want their children to interact with humans after all;
In my team, we need to redesign our products because the main user is AI rather than humans.
Anyway why do you want skills? If it's for economic purposes we are nearing cut off period after which no amount of skill will enable social mobility. Either u managed to lock in capital by now or ur done kind of situation...
So yeah maybe getting along with the right people... And mutual benefit with the right people.
Join the Army. Become a Combat Engineer Sergeant.
Enjoy getting told by your superiors that they are afraid of sitting in the same room with you, because your thinking cap gaze looks like you are always plotting to kill them in the most sophisticated and fun way imaginable. Never say a word, just give them a big friendly smile in return.
Leave with a treasure trove of abilities useful for the rest of your life, or to simply troll your neighbors, and give lifelong work to a local psychotherapist.
Big friendly smile. Two thumbs up.
I guess the enlistment age has been raised to 42 so this may actually be a realistic option for more people on this site lol.
Of course I was born just in time to be loaded up on psych meds as a child, so the military didn’t want me.
Have seen some smart comments from you. I am sure you’re doing fine.
Maybe try again, at least you were on psych meds.
You can become commander-in-chief these days by being off your meds. We live in interesting times.
AI is only as useful as the questions you bring to it. At least in its current form.
As examples, check out:
Cosinuss: https://www.cosinuss.com/en/
Medictool: https://www.medic-tool.com/
LifesaverSim: https://www.lifesaversim.com/
Also, deep domain knowledge is the other one..... knowing what good output looks like in your field is something models can't fake convincingly at the edges.
If they haven't and we have hit the exponential growth mark, nothing is safe and even the temporarily "safe jobs" will also suffer greatly from being crunched on both the supply and demand sides (there will be more labor supply for those jobs as the displaced try to flee to safe jobs, there will be less demand for the output of those jobs because the displaced will no longer have income to pay for those goods or services). And LLMs and robots will eventually come for many of those jobs too, likely at a rate that exceeds people's ability to retrain.
Better hope that either things have peaked, or that we can somehow manage to stop treating all forms of socialism as evil or we're going to see the violent unmaking of modern society in our lifetimes.
I don't have a strong belief this will happen however, and I hope it does not.
The only significant barrier is that it's not condoned by the medical establishment and by law (which I imagine will indeed take a few years to work around).
I, just feel like LLMs are not currently at the point where the medical profession can trust them with most things medical, including a psychological diagnosis since they are habitually hallucinating. This is why some of the medical professions, including those mentioned above, are safe in the short term, more or less. By the way, you can see the disclaimers by all these chat agents that they are not medical professionals. It's more of legal-protection clause than caring advice, obviously
One wrong diagnosis or comment, and the patient could either do self-harm or harm others, given the lack of real care available and the amount of people suffering from mental illnesses, due to societal pressures.
Honestly, given the pace of all things AI, I don't see any profession to be AI-proof.
2. Writing and structured thinking.
3. Data sense and judgment.
4. Leadership and negotiation.
also just understanding how the models work. I'm doing an AI masters right now and once you know whats happening under the hood the anxiety disappears.
bottom line: learn it and embrace it.
It is really ironic that humans are now trying to find patterns in the behavior of a program that works by finding patterns in human behavior.
But for the title question I’d say building houses.
management - it occured to me that giving instructions to agent is very similar to giving instructions to human employees - even the best of them make mistakes.
i learnt that asking claude code to "investigate for 3 potential root causes" is more effective than "investigate the root cause" in bug fix. this blows my mind as i realize that agent can be lazy, can be careless, and we can give better instruction to prevent that.
another reason why i said this is that giving enough context and defining blast boundary is more efficient than hand-holding/micromanaging and checking every tool call for agents. the management skill for human employees also works here.
critical thinking - you just need to have your judgement on the seemingly solid but actually halluncinated agent bs.
bootlicking - to get promoted after you find your gig
good communication/leadership - to keep yourself in that high position
As people often say, matter, energy, and information are the fundamentals of everything. I think we need mathematics, analytic philosophy, the arts and humanities, and physics too. Sorry we need every skill. /s
Now how does one get that if they aren’t an 18 year old in college with years and gorillions of dollars in government money to blow on an EE/CE program.