There is no shortage of hype around AI coming for jobs, and while the U.S. labor market has begun to sputter, hard evidence of AI-related job losses is scarce.
Geoffrey Hinton’s message on a recent podcast about artificial intelligence was simple: “Train to be a plumber.”
Hinton, a Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist often called “the Godfather of AI,” said in June what people have now been saying for years: Jobs that include manual labor and expertise are the least vulnerable to modern technology than some other career paths, many of which have generally been considered more respected and more lucrative.
“I think plumbers are less at risk,” Hinton said. “Someone like a legal assistant, a paralegal, they’re not going to be needed for very long.”
Liberal arts majors will be just fine. The world will always need child protective services workers and barristas.
Jobs AI can’t really do well currently.
Source: I’m a CPS worker and business is booming…for all the wrong reasons.
Edit: I detest AI because it makes people lazy. Anyone ever read a court document created by a 20 something who uses chat gpt? It’s a horror show.
Whether AI is actually good enough to replace jobs is irrelevant. Executive leadership believes it is, and thousands of jobs were already eliminated this year.
If one person can do the work if 10 people with the help of AI, why would a bean counter keep the other nine, all else being equal?
CoPilot generated code for me that would have taken a couple hours to write from scratch. I’m a software engineer. Let that sink in.
My career has seen a steady drop in employment since 2022. The statistics are out there for anyone to find.
FYI that employment drop has way more to do with a Trump tax law that was delayed to take effect that year than AI. I’ve been hit hard there myself, spending probably 7 total months unemployed since that time. Based on recruiter spam, I think it’s actually ticking up a bit these days.
But you’re right that the hype is distorting things by making C-suite execs believe dumb things.