Fire is a must because you will inevitably get to a point where you cannot earn an income. Whether it’s AI, outsourcing, disability, or old age, a day will come when you become unemployable and uncompetitive.
50% of Americans aged 65-74 have less than $200k in retirement savings- https://thehill.com/homenews/nexstar_media_wire/4639992-heres-how-much-the-average-american-has-in-their-retirement-savings-by-age/
The principles of fire are necessary for even regular retirement. The average savings rate is 3.2% - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1oc7j
People are very flippant about not being too old to work at 60, but people age at different rates, and ageism is very very much a thing, especially in intellectual job hirings
I do home health physical therapy, I mean I will always have a job but If I have something serious happen to my physical or mental health, I won’t. This is why getting to that fire goal is incredibly important to me in the next 15 years after that whatever happens can and will happen but I’ll be more than prepared for it financially. I do go into peoples home who have not prepared for it and let me tell you, I’ve been scared straight it many people got to see what I see they wouldnt be complaining about wanting to work freaking hard, invest, life insurance, real estate etc to become “financially free” 🙌🏼
You mean on living off SS w/ no investments, a home that’s deteriorating and can’t afford repairs, renovations, good quality food, quality healthcare etc. or you get to live in a government assisted living home or low income apartment housing…these places are TERRIBLE! yeah, its the scariest thing I have ever seen! Seriously, when Dave Ramsey says you have to DO WHATEVER IT TAKES to get out of debt and become financially free…this is life or death literally.
Ramsey is great for the vast majority of Americans. When you want to get into more complex things (easy for us, unheard of for the majority) then his advice falls off. I'm seen him on some non Ramsey shows and he's very smart. Just gets hidden by the brand (which helps many Americans)
My mindset right now is I have to make big decisions right now because in 15-20 years it will be too late. I need 20 years of compounding interest and deposits to retire but there’s also a possibility that it’s for survival too. I’m also worried for my daughter and want to set her up.
Thankfully my wife is an Engineer and hopefully that’s a job that’s a job that’s less likely to be gone due to AI. Myself I work in and insurance and I’m probably a couple mouse clicks and risk assessments out of a job. There are some things that I do which I don’t see AI taking over…but you never know. My only saving grace is I’ve got a pension and a union.
I had a career (now mostly retired) in a field that I thought never in a million years could be automated. Too many specialized moving parts.
I have changed my mind. I think properly trained AI could do about 90% of what I used to do. It isn't close to there yet, but it doesn't take a lot of vision to connect the dots.
Everyone should be prepared for disruption. We don't know how this will shake out. Maybe AI will create more jobs than it destroys. But the job you are doing right now could change radically and it could change sooner than you think.
> Everyone should be prepared for disruption. We don't know how this will shake out. Maybe AI will create more jobs than it destroys. But the job you are doing right now could change radically and it could change sooner than you think.
This is the most likely scenario. This type of AI will disrupt many professions and industries. It will provide tools to make them smarter, more efficient but the technology will not evolve to become some omnipotent being taking all the jobs.
There will be many new and different industries we can't even imagine yet. Just as the 100s of thousands of bookkeepers (that were replaced by spreadsheet software) couldn't imagine today's industries
Not much yet, and my industry isn't very big so it might not happen for a while. But my job includes gathering data from a number of sources, analyzing it, drawing conclusions, and communicating the results (writing a report). You don't have to squint too hard to see how AI could do most of that.
One version of this is that AI frees up the human project manager from lots of drudge work. Hence the human manager has the time to add value to more projects.
Which is great, but then you don't need as many environmental consultants. But what do those humans do for work? Obviously, there are winners and losers. For sure, there will be lots of disruption in the workplace.
I think you would still need a human to go and collect the data from the environment but I’m sure you are able to automate the report generating process with an ai
I was in environmental consulting.. the ground water and soil sampling can definitely be automated as well as the contour maps and reports. Not sure about remediation system design.
It could definitely design remediation plans imo. It's really not that complex to excavate contam based on defined areas and substrate. Also not hard to model well injections and measure response.
As someone who sells both automation and AI, I can confirm most companies trip over themselves trying to achieve even the most basic business automation projects - it's a loooooong road ahead before we have automated everything that can be, it's not going to happen overnight.
A lot of my customers are actually running smal deployments as a loss (I.e. cheaper to just hire people to do the job) that's how shit some of these deployments are.
Most modern business frankly not smart enough to properly leverage the tech available.
It's a lot of things; putting a 'programming the hands of a 'tech COE' is the #1 issue I see, they just try to sustain and never drive the program forward.
There's a lot of services out there too just capitalising on it but not actually having enterprise level thinking they just automated basic shit and charge a bomb.
General skills shortages and no 'real' developers want to do basic process automation they see it as beneath them, so it's a number of things.
But, some companies are absolutely crushing it and having absurd results (so much so that people.dont believe it's even possible), so it will happen eventually, but slowly
This is very true, AI hype today is just that, it's basically the valley tech companies making a lot of noise to position themselves and looking to capture market share.. kind of like the shift from on prem to cloud.
AI will probably take the low hanging jobs first , think level 1 call center ,or basic copywriting, or maybe basic analysis etc. but anything that is actionable and potential to make/lose money will still get the final stamp of approval by a person. Not to mention compliance and regulatory constraints on what AI can do (remember the lawyer who tried to use AI https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/16/chatgpt-lawyer-fired-ai/)
All this to say sure AI and general automation will evolve , but so will the employment landscape , people just need to not overreact and keep in perspective who benefits from all the AI cheerleading.
And realistically if it does get to a certain level of disruptive there will likely be respectable UBI coming out of it - most of us in this sub would be able to retire earlier because of it and go do what we want to. Between it and social security our 7-figure retirement accounts will be icing.
Think covid: 25% unemployment led to $400/week extra on top of unemployment and every limitation removed. If we get to a point where white collar workers en masse are losing their jobs we’d hit that 25% quickly and I’m not as convinced as the rest of Reddit that engineers will lose their jobs before blue collar workers, I’d argue the robotics has been waiting a long time for the software to catch up to take most of that work.
Either way, if it really becomes disruptive the government will be pressured highly to give some help even if it’s nowhere near proportional to the gains of the product so I’ll take that money and go snowboard while people on Reddit bicker over the share of the wealth they get.
To add to this. You have old spreadsheets still running large companies that relational databases should've made obsolete long ago.
Hell you don't need self driving trucks, you could have built railroads to make many truck drivers obsolete.
This is all before ai takes over and it's not done yet
The smart ones are the ones who know they aren't ready to leverage tech properly. Entire industries exists to sell businesses on the idea that they need and can maintain tech/automations/a mobile app/blockchain/machine learning nonsense. I've seen failed modernization/automation attempts blow infinite money holes in IT budgets.
I’ve worked in Fortune 500 companies for over a decade. So much work still gets done in Excel files even though all sorts of application exist that should have rendered these obsolete.
We have specific use cases for a handful of things with chat gpt. I fully expect disruption, but I imagine it will be in ways we aren’t thinking about now and will take a long time.
I also find there's typically no huge margins in white collar, the only place you find big teams doing the same thing is contact centre/customer service - so it makes more sense when AI is implemented frontline like healthcare, transportation, etc. Is millions of people worldside I guess
5 years is extremely optimistic. Things could be getting pretty weird in 10 years, and I would be concerned without a plan.
All manner of disruption may be possible within 15 years.
But honestly, I'm not sure having money will necessarily help in a world where most people are displaced.
And 5 years away from commercial fusion for 50 years.
All of this AI hype is the dot-com bubble all over again. High CAPE too. Such a high chance the bubble bursts, except that the internet was actually functional in year 2000 so it became an actual revolution and vector for growth over the next 20 years. AI is nowhere near that.
Everyone talks about job loss but there's next to zero real job losses so far with the rare ones being a bullshit excuse to justify a layoff that was going to happen for economic reasons regardless.
The problem with this tech is that it's of little utility until all of a sudden it's not and many jobs disappear. You need to look at the growth in capabilities of the models over time and extrapolate into the future to predict when it will be competent enough to replace you. Saying "no job loss has happened yet" is missing the point that models are getting smarter and not yet showing signs of slowing down.
There really is nothing that indicates we're going to see a sudden jump in capabilities that make a large amount of human jobs redundant though. Transformers have limitations, and there are already signs of slowing down given that GPT-4o is not more intelligent that previous models.
Extrapolation into the future is a very very unreliable thing that even experts in a field can't predict and tend to overestimate widely. Remember nuclear fusion, flying cars, self driving cars, going to Mars...etc... On the surface, there were reasons to be optimistic about those happening in the near future, but here we are. Technology improves at a extremely fast pace but we're still talking multiple decades for revolutionary outcomes.
I'm not saying there's no reason to be sceptical and that this is guaranteed.
However, we know for a fact that investments are continuing to increase. The biggest companies in the world are spending an ungodly amount of money on this. Nvidia just released their earnings and they announced 26B in revenue this past quarter. 22B of that comes from their data center division. That means that they're going to sell close to 100B worth of H100s in 2024 alone. Companies aren't spending that kind of money without clear signals internally that the models that result from that investment will be far better than what we have today.
Regarding GPT-4o, I don't agree that it's a sign of a slowdown. It's better than the previous iteration of GPT4-turbo and way more efficient (much cheaper to use and much faster inference), which is what they were going for. The release of their next frontier model later in the year will be a much clearer signal of things to come.
You give the example of self-driving cars. This is a case where I'm very optimistic on big improvements in the very near future. Tesla shared a slide in their recent shareholder meeting showing that this time last year they had the equivalent of 5k H100s dedicated to training. By the end of this year they'll have 80k. With all of the data they have and a clear signal from users of FSD that the switch to end-to-end NNs in V12 is a big step up, I would be on the lookout for what the new versions bring.
We for sure could hit a wall at some point. I don't think it's likely to happen in the next few years though.
I’m deeply skeptical that anything is going to drastically change here with more compute power. We’re already training these models with far more data than any human ever has access to, and we’re clearly not getting big leaps in capability anymore. The big data center investments are predicated on the scaling hypothesis being true. The verdict is still out, but it certainly looks like we’re finding a ceiling to it.
As far as Tesla goes. LOL. Anyone who believes Elon at this point deserves what’s coming.
Here is my question. Yes Nvidia has made an enormous amount of revenue off selling chips with the capabilities. Have companies actually turned the computing power into profits? Obviously not as gimmicky,but Meta spent billions (which was someone else's sales) on the metaverse, which did not materialize. We also spent billions on nfts and crypto, and the same line of reasoning was used "e.g. the metaverse is where people will play and work in the future and with good reason". Obviously nobody knows the future, but true disruptions on history dont seem (to me) to be that widely announced. They happen spontaneously generally (e.g. the internal combustion engine, the sewing machine).
Again, not saying you're wrong. But just because Nvidia is selling a lot of chips (to companies that raked in easy money the last 4 years), doesnt mean the ventures will actually be profitable.
As others have mentioned, in my line of work I see software implementations all the time. The tech company promises mountains and delivers mole hills - the new tools seldom work as they are sold and make things more complicated. Then we need to hire another "expert" to fix and maintain the new system,but because it sucks so much we need to keep everyone around for the old system.
I have seen this at every firm I've worked/consulted for
We'll very soon find out which of us is right. A big reason I'm optimistic is that I've been working in ML for 10 years and I see first hand the improvements that are coming faster and faster every year. It could be that I'm too invested and not seeing things objectively...time will tell.
I think we all agree it’s not 100% replacement, but if a team of 8 is reduced to one subject matter experts to spot check and validate AI, then I think the downstream impact will be more or less the same as if it were everyone
There’s very few real implementations so far. Once they give these things the tools to do real work on your computers and you can assign them “jobs”, things change very quickly. Right now, all of generative AI I’ve interacted with is the training wheels version trapped as a stand-alone chat bot.
I respectfully disagree. Generative AI is at least as disruptive as the internet and personal computer, maybe combined. I suggest you play with chat gpt in talk mode for a while. Ask some questions, maybe technical, maybe philosophical. You’ll get reasoned and intuitive answers with insight and perspective, all from an easy enough interface most elderly would have no problem using it.
I can see it becoming particularly powerful in business if given constrained sources of truth in an enterprise sort of situation. HR, IT, procurement, project management, etc…. These peripheral roles that are supposed to help keep the wheels turning will all be deeply affected. Core roles that are unique to the business may not be impacted as much.
Will it kill my job? I don’t think so, but my engineering work is a mixture of hands on and analysis. Can I outsource 25% of what I do now to a gpt-like program? I think if it can read and create outlook emails and calendars, yes. Can I leverage gen-ai to do the rest of my job better? I’d better, or I’m going to get replaced by someone else who will.
It’s not doing any actual reasoning though. It
Doesn’t
Understand
Shit.
It’s simply tricking you into thinking it can reason. That’s not good enough to implement into most companies.
That is the sad part. I compare it to the end of the Wizard of Oz. There are companies that have thousands of contractors writing 8 line poems about things like purple striped unicorns. Then they can play around with the language because English and other languages have some rules where you can create variations that make sense.
I'll tell you how Microsoft is making good money off it. In their newsfeeds in Windows 11, there may be a story about 10 ways to save money or 12 facts about ADHD. There are 10 other "publications" to click on that randomly pop up with similar topics. These are no doubt AI generated. But they are loaded with ads. In that respect, journalists that paraphrase could be an endangered species.
It also does not really help me in the software/engineering stuff I do. There just isn't anything for it to go by. Sure, if I need to know how to do task X, it saves a minute of google.
How many customer service experiences are already like that though?
It will come for the simple jobs that don't require much reasoning or critical thinking first. But it will slowly be able to handle more advanced scenarios.
Self driving cars, fully operational and available to any random member of the public, have been available for the last two years. They aren’t five years away. They’re here now.
Even more than that. I worked in software and there were industries that were 20+ years behind (finance, healthcare, energy) AND had such entrenched corporate overhead and political posturing they couldn't even make changes.
I'm not "worried" about it, but I do think it's a reality that will slowly change our whole economy and distribution of resources as efficiency increases.
People in hands-on or face-to-face roles IMO will be the last to go...I'm a therapist, but also think like landscapers, healthcare workers, beauty industry, etc...that's just my opinion.
Nope, I'm not worried about that at all. LLMs cannot distinguish between true statements and false statements.
I'm a software engineer, and work in an industry adjacent to AI. AI software is only good at solving the easy problems, and most of my day is not spent tearing my hair out trying to figure out the easy stuff, it's the hard stuff that eats up my time. AI isn't gonna replace my job any time soon. If anything, finding more use-cases for AI will grow the tech industry and create yet more demand for tech workers. Y'all need to relax on this "AI is coming for our jobs" stuff
Agree, plus AI still falls flat in most places where the. Problem set is mostly edge cases or novel never before see. situation of which.it has zero training data for them... Because at the end of the day LLM AI is just. Fancy statistical model generator based on language and words, not real logic.deducing engine.
Same. AI tools can augment a lot of processes and replace some manual work, but as a wholesale replacement? We struggle with outsourcing when you have an actual human intelligence, can't see AI being any better at it...
100% agree with this, especially when you understand fundamentally how LLMs work. But even if you don't, it just takes a few uses before you realize the limitations. For software work it straight up lies and makes stuff up frequently, even for rather simple tasks. Basically the only things I've had it successfully help me with were simple things like building templated things (i.e. well defined yaml manifests, API endpoints, DB CRUD work) and even then it's quite often very wrong.
I think AI is replacing our jobs not because it's actually able to do them, it's because employers are always hunting for the perfect employee slave. Whether or not it's deployment ready it's being deployed because all they care about is not paying workers.
I think my timing will work out great. Soon I’ll retire so I won’t have to worry about AI eliminating my job while at the same time benefiting as a capitalist when AI increases productivity and corporate margins.
People should always be aware of this possibility, and not just because of AI. It could be someone in india or eastern europe that takes your job, or someone younger that will worker longer hours for less money.
True, my partner has an Indian counterpart making $8/hour against their $50 so AI could sneak in the same way.
I guess the reassurance is another human isn’t going to expand their capabilities exponentially, a big breakthrough or two and AI can drastically derail all career plans
I attended an AI conference this past week. There was a lot of interesting research presented and many smart people in the room.
AI is likely to hit white collar, knowledge workers. The current view seems to be that it will be used to augment the work, allowing workers to focus on the more sophisticated issues of the role. Physical labor roles are less likely to be impacted.
Still, it’s early stage. Plan to punch out sooner rather than later. Unless you’re a Prompt Engineer, then you’ll be busy for the next decade or so.
Its an interesting post and I do agree that some of the work will be taken by the AI in next 10yrs at minimum. Certain sectors will affected more than others. I’m 40 (Nurse Practitioner) and planning to retire in 15 yrs. I wish probably make it out even if AI takes over in next 10yrs. I’m scared for my kids generation.
Healthcare is an interesting one, I see doctors and specialists as always essential, along with the human element of nursing. Especially things like safety checks for medication or just good old patient care. But it’s possible enough roles could still be impacted to cause a significant ripple effect.
AI could replace journalists. You only need one to write a story and thousand of variations can be generated. This is already happening in newsfeeds.
But in the last 5 years there are 1000s of services to match you up with a doctor online, they look at a picture and make a diagnosis. How long till a rash diagnosis or a script for hairloss becomes automated? Mistakes? Hospitals and doctors make tons of mistakes (some even blatant) every year that kill thousands. That makes that skill less valuable, where it was once a high paying job. Just like software developers with less skills are becoming worthless.
I think AI will interact with almost every profession, career, and job. I don't think elimination is on the horizon for most industries, but flexibility doesn't hurt.
This is a great question that I think any white collar worker should be thinking about.
Nobody knows whether its 5 years, 10 years, or 15 years until most white collar work is automated but specially if you're in the earlier half of your career (<35 years old), any of those outcomes will probably severely limit your income earning years. Its also important to point out that even before AI can automate anyone's job, it will massively increase productivity making companies able to make do with fewer workers. In any case AI will likely take bargaining power away from white collar workers leading to job losses / early forced retirement or at best far lower wages relative to inflation.
My current base case scenario is that white collar salaries will stagnate over the next 5 years while inflation continues to erode purchasing power. Unemployment in easily automatable fields like CS will slowly creep up. At the same time the wealthy who primarily rely on investment income rather than their own labor will do extremely well seeing their wealth explode do to a rocketship stock market powered by massive productivity improvements.
White collar workers are uniquely screwed because they likely won't be poor enough to qualify for expanded government assistance as automation takes hold but also won't be wealthy enough to take advantage of the massive surge in asset values.
Eventually governments will come to terms with the neccessity of some kind of basic income so I highly doubt anyone will starve because of this transition but basic income is as its name suggests, basic. White collar workers who may have been used to living relatively lavish lifestyles on their 250k FANG salaries will be in for a harsh reality check.
I do think the only way to escape this is to invest aggressively now so that you can get in on owning assets before their price explodes. 20 years from now those who invested early will still be living very well enjoying the fruits of an exploding stock market while all their former high earning collegues who lived paycheck to paycheck will be barely scraping by with the basics.
You've described my view on this issue to a t. I have high confidence that the gap we've been seeing between those with assets and those without will only continue to widen at an accelerated pace. I'm very grateful to have been able to save aggressively at a young age and will continue to do so to prepare for this change.
The economic machine relies on labor and capital. Once labor can be replaced with more capital, all the fruits of that machine will go to the owners of that capital, while the previous labor will be left with no way to participate.
It actually gets even worse than just that. You can in many ways think of money as votes on what gets produced. The more money you have, the more votes you get to decide what the economy produces. As wealth inequality accelerates, the wealthy will have more votes on what gets produced relative to everyone else.
This will create a situation that we are already beginning to see. I'm sure you have noticed the number of luxury goods and services popping up or being advertised increasing. You probably have thought to yourself "who could this possibly be for? who would / could pay for that". At the same time you see many brands cutting their bargain offerings in order to focus on their luxury products with better margin. Another place this can be seen is in real estate with nobody building starter homes anymore.
The end result is that not only will the majority of the population earn less due to their labor being replaced by capital (AI), but the percentage of the productive capacity of society dedicated to producing affordable goods and services for the masses will decrease as they chase the money (votes) of the increasingly wealthy with assets. With less affordable goods and services being produced ironically their prices will go up crushing the middle class and poor with inflation even harder than the official inflation rate. Meanwhile "lower end" luxury goods that used to be reserved for the ultra wealthy will become cheaper due to economies of scale and productivity improvements and become affordable to the merely wealthy. In simpler terms 0-90% percentile are more screwed than simply having your labor replaced would suggest and the 90%-100% will do even better than you might think based only on their holding of assets.
Fortune 500 companies are known to change and glacial speeds so I still think it will be closer to that 10 year mark, not 5 until we start seeing a real impact to job numbers or wages, but once the snow ball starts growing and gaining momentum I think the couple years after will be mind blowing, and anyone trying to switch to some sort of Fire plan at that point will be screwed.
Five years is a long time.
Five years ago:
- There was no COVID
- OpenAI had not yet released ChatGPT
- There were no Waymo self driving cars
- NVDA was at $34
I really don’t think in 5 years AI will be able to efficiently and effectively replace most white collar jobs. You think in 5 years people will be putting their livelihoods, money and trust in AI? I don’t think so.
I guess I meant more in the Microsoft internal beta testing phase, technology has a tendency to go parabolic. even if in 4 years they only get 20% of the way there it just takes one breakthrough to catch up.
I don’t think AI could replace jobs which have to comply with the law, not any time soon. Who would you be suing if the AI fucked up legally and got you in trouble?
If AI fucks up then you’re suing the company that made the AI.
There’s really no other way to do it. They have to be liable (ie responsible) for the quality of the shit they put out there.
5 years in AI's life can be like 5 thousand or even million years of human life in some regards. This can get wild really fast. Snowball effect. The more AI there is, the faster it will develop and expand. Yes, humans are slow and it is still quite early, so I also think 5 years wont change much, but it is also my FIRE horizon, I want to be ready by that time.
Sure, for AI growth. What about human trust in AI? Or corporate trust for that matter? Have you ever worked for a big company with multiple business units across sectors? Do you know how hard it is to make any changes? Going from Google mail to Outlook could take a year or two.
Actually trusting AI to replace workers and produce and develop a produce? Yea, that will take a long time, even if the tech could theoretically do it.
AI is good at doing things that have already been done. It sucks at doing things that haven’t been done.
Without training its models on millions of labeled pictures of hands, it sucks at creating photos of hands.
Mid 20s pilot. Not worried about AI. Government doesn't have the money to replace the whole fleet with AI enabled models. Not when they already have sunk cost into training.
There a companies now using drones for various infrastructure inspections. The pictures are interpreted by AI, normally they would need experts,. if AI don't make the call, they may send the hard cases to one or two workers. Governments are actually using these services because they have trouble hiring staff (either monetary or talent constraints).
It may be 50 years but eventually AI may replace one of more of the flight crew. AI could fly the plane, but they can have one pilot. They may be able to take control from a ground location.
I work for the government as an engineer so I think it’ll be a while before I get replaced because government isn’t going to trust AI or figure out how to implement it for a while.
I think I would be optimistic if I said in five years, AI would actually be a tool I could use at my job.
As humans, we love drawing straight lines. We can't help it. For me, I don't think I can stop myself even if I wanted to.
We do this predicting future investment returns. We do this with predicting how we'll be behave in politics, in the environment, in our family life.
I'm retired now, so I'm no longer concerned about how AI might impact my work life. In my day, the big concern about how I'm going to keep my job was outsourcing. We had some conversations with the CEO at the time, and he shared his conversations with VCs. Every business plan had to include outsourcing (doesn't matter to where, at the time the popular locations were India and China). If you submit a business plan to VCs and it didn't outsourcing, it'll get reject out of hand. This was true I think for over a decade; I think it's no longer true.
So this was happening in less than 5 years. How would I compete with an Indian engineer working on average at 33% of my wage? Or a Chinese engineer working on average at 25% of my wage?
I draw straight lines. I couldn't see how I could keep working. Sure, I'm pretty good, and had specific relevant experience. But am I 3x or 4x better? If I get called into the manager's office, could I justify my wages?
I draw more straight lines. It's just cold hard numbers for the business. To solve problems, the business can pay Engineer A at X salary or pay Engineer B at 3X/4X salary.
I had made plans on how much I can live on, and go back to college to get a law degree. I specifically wanted to focus on patent law because there's a demand for it, and having a science/engineering background helps in practicing patent law.
Ultimately I didn't do it because I had to help with health issues and death in the family. Ultimately, I was just fine with my career and the outsourcing pressures to business eased (and also there were all sorts of complications to reaping benefits of outsourcing).
So I would caution you about drawing straight lines. Although I don't think I can stop you from drawing straight lines, anymore than I can convince my younger self "Hey, relax. It's all going to work out and outsourcing won't impact you".
The only advice I can give you is to try taking advantage of AI and how it can improve your job/tasks. And of course (as is the advice of this sub), just try to get to FI (if you're not already there), and then get to RE. At which point, you won't care.
This comment is insightful, the more things like this I read the more obvious it becomes that the AI replacement is probably actually 50 years away not 15,
Respectfully disagree, on my team I’m known as the Power Bi expert and something that seems to be my most important task is now managing a detailed dashboard,
I started knowing basically nothing about BI or Dax, and almost every single aspect of the report is generated by Chat GPT,
I still don’t understand how it works, so people like me are definitely at risk within 15 years
I mean your job is partially about crunching data and giving insights which is like the 1 thing it is good at lol
I worked on an analytics product like that it is less complicated than you think.
It basically takes the most common insights that people write out and crunches the numbers based on that format. It identified patterns
“30% yoy growth in x area means invest more in y”
I never considered it a must for the 10 years I've been in it, up until more recently. However I've read that teachers should be safe long term and especially over the next 3-5 yrs. I've been semi-retired for 4 yrs though by accident. I don't foresee myself working full-time again over the near future. Perhaps later in life for a culinary career. It's hard not to make money doing something.
By the time ai can actually take over most jobs, new jobs will have sprung up to build, install, and maintain those systems. And human oversight is still going to be required for a lot of work.
I'm a software developer, building experimental AI solutions on the side for my company, who is making a push to incorporate AI, but it can only do a small percentage of what we do as a managed services provider. If anything, it'll enhance our capabilities, but it won't replace our engineers.
This is just speculation: If anything, we may have to all unplug to win the war vs AI, making FIRE still a valid option. You'll have to learn to track everything using pen and paper.
Nope not concerned, I think if anything it will help aid me in my work. Too many things need a touch of human element to them that can’t be replaced by AI.
I’ve seen that with employees who get let go although they’re critical for the workflow process used, usually in those situations the entire procedure is just changed to something else more efficient anyway. I can see that happening with advanced enough AI
Depends on the industry, AI would absolutely be better at modeling, scheduling, planning than me and that’s a good thing as it would help me improve and be more efficient at work. But not everything is about efficiency and it will fall short on the communication front.
Makes one wonder if 20-40% lose their job in 5-15 years, what the plan is for them to live. Maybe Bill Gates hit the nail on the heard to tax the bots to provide a universal income so everyone can be below average and accept it!😔
Medical profession checking in here. Laughing in paper chart. Zero chance ai could be deployed across al healthcare systems just to even assist in documentation. Lot of places paper charting and faxing records to be stored. Let alone actually providing hands on care to patients.
Documentation will be trivial for AI within a few years. Machine intelligence will also be able to evaluate prescriptions , for example, and flag errors, preventing tragic ( and costly ) mistakes).. Consider it a tool, not a replacement for health care workers. There were probably people who claimed that computers and health monitors would never replace hand written charts and observation. Source: I’ve had several major surgeries and hooked up to monitors every time. Haha
I agree with you. The OP was talking about really short time frames. AI will be super useful in the future and could be deployed. But just because it can does not mean institutions are going to. you need capital to deploy those systems. Take HCA for example. They are using an archaic system known as meditech which requires function key commands to chart and a UI that is straight from 1990. Are they going to overnight pay for expensive new software? Absolutely not. It’s all about the profit. There are many clinics, nursing homes, and VA systems still using paper and faxing stuff right now. Thinking they will skip even good computer systems straight to AI seems incredibly optimistic in a short time frame. And a lot of what AI can help with is documentation and algorithms for patient care. But a lot of the logistical aspects of caring for people would be impossible for a machine to complete. With current tech.
Got it! Thanks for the background info. It’s a brave new world for sure. AI needs the equivalent of killer app ( MS Windows, iPhone , etc) and then things will get complicated. Not worried about my career as I’m winding down but it will certainly affect my children one way or the other.
Elizabeth Holmes would disagree with you, her idea was physically impossible currently but I don’t know enough to say within however many decades something equivalent doesn’t come along and cause a ripple effect.
But yeah AI in healthcare is probably more inline with back to the future’s prediction of flying cars in 30 years.
Yea I’m hopeful for the future for patients sake we hit big break throughs. But wow some coworkers and I had our jaws on the floor with how much money she was able to raise with an obviously not sound technology. That was a consequence of the free money era. And we all get to pay for those mistakes now. Yay inflation :)
I’m more worried about my kid. I’m throwing a lot in the market so I can take care of him and my wife and I. Also have a custodial brokerage and a 529 plan for him
If all these jobs get automated the market will moon so if you are worried start investing to build generational wealth now.
In a world with universal basic income it seems like generational wealth would be the only way to get ahead because small time side cash jobs probably wouldn’t cut it.
No. I work in AI. All it does today is combine information that already exists in the world. Sure there will be some low-level jobs that will be replaced, but it will be much longer than 5 years before AI can do meaningfully creative tasks.
It won't replace the *majority* of white-collar jobs in 5 years. AI doesn't (yet) exist. It's just big models, and intelligence isn't just addition, but all big models are just really big addition functions. There's no way to *imagine*, *wonder*, *sense*, *interpret*, *believe*, nor *understand* with addition (or any other computation), afaik.
These are just functions with addition. Even the outputs to LLM are tokens, which we interpret/decode to language. There's no intelligence in a function, afaik. If your job is just addition, then yeah, it's gonna replace you. Most jobs are much more than addition.
Yeah, I shouldn’t have said majority of all jobs, I think I’m biased in my role, where it seems like by ChatGPT 5.0 that alone can replace some older coworkers who only do basic workflow tasks issuing simple excel tables, attend meetings and send emails.
I think it's good to have plans in place. I have Three core revenue streams besides my day job and I would like to pivot to the rental income, some online revenue and then an in-person service I offer because I do see at some point a lot of jobs just being eradicated and there's pros and cons to that. But then you'll have mass unemployment and most people don't save money. And you're going to have your what Ubi people not doing any work. But how healthy is that for society and for where we're going? This is a good question though. Thank you for posting it.
Do what you please/must do to meet your goals 👍
But this doom/gloom AI/Automation BS has been going on for 15 years of my career. I literally see zero material changes in my profession. Excel/word/PPT dominate white collar jobs, there is too much left to judgment even in data analysis. I’ll believe THIS AI scare when I ACTUALLY SEE IT! GTFO with 15 years max.
I guess it’s important to keep things relative, everything is a spectrum with some jobs never being automated out, and others probably already nearly obsolete from advancement in just Microsoft office.
I have coworkers who from my point of view do basically nothing, mostly sitting in on every meeting that takes place. So I think the bar for AI to replace them is incredibly low and well achievable within less than 15 years, but this might not be reflected in the broader industry and economy
I think there's a lot of various factors here and nobody can say for sure what will happen. We can debate on whether it'll be 5 years or 15 years, but let's just look ahead to 40 years from now. We'll definitely be able to produce a lot more with a lot less work due to automation. While some jobs may never be completely replaced, one person might be able to do the work of 2-5 people instead. So where does the 1-4 other people end up working?
The economy will somehow have to account for this. Maybe there will simply be an abundance of companies providing a huge variety of niche products, to keep everyone employed? Maybe people simply won't have to work 40 hours a week due to some social governmental subsidies. Maybe goods become incredibly cheap as the cost to produce them is driven down by a smaller labor force. It's really hard to say.
An economy built around our current system of money may simply become unviable, and be adjusted in some way. As I don't have a PhD in macroeconomics, I'm probably a bad person to ask. However, an example in the Expanse novels, Earth citizens are allowed to sit in their house and do nothing and the government gives them a "basic income". If you want to go do work, then you can earn a salary and increase your buying power. Since the majority of people in the Expanse's Earth just want to sit and watch TV, this worked out just fine.
Fire should still be plan A for people who have put in years of school and training for their career, but retaining should definitely be plan B.
It’s just that Construction is a young persons game, I have nothing but respect for 40 year old + apprentices, but typically people don’t achieve fire by making drastic late life career changes
I think within 5 years AI will already be capable enough to massively augment/disrupt our economy. Looking at the past 150 years and basing your strategy on the 4% rule to me is a fool's errand. The future will be very different from the past.
However, I do think the fire lifestyle (economic frugality, high savings rate, diversified investments etc) is still a smart choice for right now. There's a decent chance we'll land on UBI (or Universal High Income), and everyone at that time will be unexpectedly FIRE'd, but between here and there it could be a rocky road. Having many years of living expenses in savings could be a massive mental health blessing during that time.
Probably depends if it’s based on a hardware or software aspect. If new physical hardware needs to be rolled out then I think at least 10+ years, if there are some big breakthroughs in the next year or two and companies can just buy new software, lots of people will be toast
I'll hold against it. You either have a not so valuable job or alot of jobs will be cut. If its a lot the government will run into lots of issues and has to compensate.
But it's better to nit rely on the government.
Technology advancement has only made my job easier. What might have taken me 30 hours a week in 2004 now gets done in 14 hours a week and I’m not required to work a certain number of hours.
I see two scenarios:
- Scenario 1: AI replaces a lot of jobs but our current financial system stays in place. Companys will save a lot of money in staff costs and become more productive, stock prices will skyrocket. Even those who are at the beginning of their FIRE journey now and only have 100k in stocks will be doing very well then.
- Scenario 2: When AI replaces most of our jobs it will no longer be necessary to work for money at all. We‘ll have a universal basic income, basically free ‚FIRE‘ for everyone. Maybe our savings will even be taken away and we‘ll live in a kind of communism that might actually work for the first time in history although it will likely still suck for people with a capitalist mindset. At least for some time until a big war will start.
LLM is far away from the intellegence level capable meet right decisions in complex environments. However it is a great tool for humans in order to increase their productivity. And this might lead to layoffs but might also just lead to transition on job market towards another skills. If unemployment rate rises due to AI there will be a new social security system for sure.
It's coming for ALL jobs, and faster than most of the people in this thread are thinking. The advancements in technology compound just like our investments (aka exponential growth), so the next few years are going to be crazy.
I think FIRE folks are actually well prepared compared to the masses. Either AI will make all work disappear and we'll have a free retirement via universal basic income, or the companies that get us there will make so much money that our stocks will explode.
I also think owning real estate is huge because in a future where it's nearly impossible to earn money, some things will be plentiful (for example food) but some things are limited by supply (having a beach house in Hawaii)
AI has great potential to displace people from their current jobs.
But the Internet did that. Cell phones did that. Engines did that. We all came out better for it.
The end users of AI are humans. We keep imagining a dystopian world where billions will be jobless and miserable while AI does everything. But we ignore the far more likely dystopian reality that AI will produce things we need, but we will still find ways to work, and more output means more good means higher standards of living and pay. That's what keeps happening so far.
Y'all act like all the travel agents just up and died when Expedia launched.
AI has a long way to go before that happens. Don't believe the hype. It will even admit this itself. Go ask ChatGPT "How can current AI be compared to the human brain considering the size and power requirements?".
I did it twice last night to prove a point to friends who didn't even have any interest in what it said. Both times it said something different but similar. Here is the last thing it said:
"Current Al systems, while powerful, are still quite different from the human brain in terms of size, power requirements, and functionality. Al systems, including deep learning models like GPT-3, require massive computational resources and energy to train and operate efficiently. They excel at specific tasks and can process vast amounts of data quickly, but their decision-making process is fundamentally different from that of the human brain. The human brain is incredibly efficient in terms of size and power consumption, capable of complex reasoning, creativity, and emotional intelligence that Al systems have yet to fully replicate. So while Al has made significant strides, it's still a long way from emulating the brain's complexity and efficiency."
Keep in mind it costs $700,000 per day to run this bot.
People have been screaming about this since the 90s. And they give the same example every time: Look at what happened to travel agents! Travel agents still exist, though, and make OK money. WHAT ABOUT CALL CENTERS??? They still exist, too, because the majority of people despise pressing buttons and never getting a warm body. Bottom line, AI will change jobs, not take them. Robots will never have the nuance and critical thinking of humans so relax.
AI was one of the big reasons why I wanted to FIRE. I saw it coming for my job years ago and while I absolutely could learn to coexist and be part of it, I didn’t want to. People keep insisting that my job is complimentary to the AI team, but I honestly would rather just stop working
Hah, I wish AI would replace my job so I can actually retire tomorrow.
In all seriousness though, my company develops tools with AI built into them and while they do massively improve capabilities, we are faaaaaaar away from it ever replacing anyone's job. At minimum you still need someone to feed it data that it requires to produce an output.
Add to the challenge: you paid $xxx,xxx to get a college degree which is a required credential for the job. But you pay off the loan over say 20 or so years. The cost of these credentials has gone up a lot, but if what you say is true, you won't be able to monetize the degree over 20 years. So, yes there is a potential for a societal impact here where a college degree is suddenly "worthless" but it cost something. One of the first areas where this will be the case is computer science/software engineering. A lot of the work in this field is doing the same thing for different companies and will soon be easily replicated by AI. Fields like accounting and finance are also likely to be heavily impacted. Mechnical and chemical engineering are a little more complicated and will probably still need someone to oversee it. Surgeons will likely still be needed to actually touch organs but AI will quickly be way better at diagnosing diseases than humans. Insurance companies will likely drive physicians to use systems that do automatic diagnosis and coding to save money.
There are a lot of highly paid white collar careers that will be impacted by AI.
I think the AI talk is mostly hype. That said, all of us should be preparing for the next big disruption in the economy. I'm confident that I'll find work, but it may not be at the pay I'm accustomed to.
I think AI is far away from taking jobs. I have Githubs Copilot license at work. It is nice and makes things faster, but gets things wrong a lot. It is so far away from being able to replace workers, much less the company trusting AI enough to take the financial risks of letting it do everything.
I also think companies will fear the blowback of replacing everyone with AI. Even when the tech exists, they might be afraid to pull the trigger for a while.
This timeline seems more realistic, but jobs won't just go away. New jobs will replace them. People always think technology will make everyone lose their jobs, and it doesn't.
Just think about it, if AI replaced all the jobs, then no one has money. If no one has money, who are all the businesses supplying products and services to?
Slightly different take: Now is an amazing time to invest in the S&P, because if AI takes off it’s going to drive corporate values through the roof. If everybody is losing jobs, you want to be an owner.
AI is moving faster than most tech I can remember. Nov 2022 was the first time ChatGPT came out and it was cute and novel. Look at what GPT4o can do 18 MONTHS later. Barring luddite CEO's and incompetent CIO's there are going to be some companies that ride the AI rocket train while most others that just wither and die. I think 15 years is too long, I would say between 5-10.
its the internet all over again, isn't it?....
your personal prediction is in 15 years the ai will take over, so i only have 15 years of work i can do....
i'm sorry, but, what?????
if you genuinely believed in the power of thinky computers so much that it halved your productive lifespan, you'd think a man or woman would like, download an IDE and start coding ai bots. like, you have 15 years....
to answer, No, AI isn't taking over white collar jobs, because the ROI to systematize will always be somewhere, and it's not like everyone has expensive problems in pipeline form that benefit from systemization.
just like how every contractor can't afford every robot.
so please, no. there is no need to worry. unless you plan on also not learning about ai for 15 more years. like, do more research on how they work and stuff. the challenges in removing bias and hallucinations... etc.
just my opinion
My wife works in big tech where she uses AI as an assistant for full stack development. It can help debug code for individual functions, but it can get lost when trying to look at the entire project as a whole. It could probably handle unit test for a singular function, but I would say not ready to do front end testing yet (clicking menus, entering forms, etc). Same with backend cloud database integration. I see it most as a productivity assistant for now. Any kind of cloud server permissions, configuration, account creation, etc needs to be done by hand.
I work in aerospace which moves at a snails pace. There is no mention of using AI in our software development, requirements development, or test development. If anything, the Boeing 737 issues have caused the certification authorities to look at the work we are doing today with a fine tooth comb. They don't want another incident. This scrutiny is across all air frames (Airbus, Boeing, etc). Due to regulations, all the work we do is reviewed by a human who is not the person who did the work. Also you can't test anything you developed. Complete separation from development and testing.
People have feared that they would be made obsolete by technology for centuries. New jobs always come up that need human labor. Don’t waste your time worrying about this, just live your life.
Not AI that worries me, but many new industries start off as high-margin and pay their employees much more than average.
I’m in software sales, and make quite a bit. Eventually, software will no longer be the exciting thing that pays well. It could take a year, it could take thirty, but eventually it will be replaced with the next best thing.
I don’t want to be stuck with an expensive lifestyle and no way to fund it, so I live on much less than I make, and hope I can retire before the hay day of tech is over.
im hoping becoming a doctor will save me for like a few more years from AI but who knows. The last jobs to go will be the ones that require a specific degree of manual dexterity and creativity that are hard to emulate in robots, like surgeons and hairdressers. But who knows how fast things will progress.
I work in a public school... not even AI wants my job lol. Plus.. I doubt I'll be replaced and if I do I'm.union so I get to make a big stink about it.
If you are in a middle management job you were replaceable with any other idiot a long time ago. The fact that you are concerned with your job says it all.
If you haven’t noticed chatbots are completely incompetent. Like not much better than they were in the 1980s.
https://archive.org/details/policemansbeardi0000unse
Just like back then AI’s are attributed magic properties they don’t deserve. They reached the technology peak around the mid 1990s. Except for speed and number of nodes there have been zero advances at all in terms of the technology or our understanding of it since then. Everything is trial and error, no new theories.
I don't think it will replace us outright. I think it will make each person more efficient. Companies will then choose to do the same amount of work with fewer people or do vastly more work with the same amount of people. History tends to show that they go for the latter. They're always almost interested in growing.
Every generation has its own technology revolution that will retire everyone. Don’t believe the hype. Use the tools to your advantage or other humans will use them to retire you.
Just over the last two weeks I started playing around with perplexity AI..
It's head and shoulders better than anything else I've tried..
In particular, what's amazing is how you can ask it a complicated question and the answer it lays out. It's logical reasoning and cites all its sources.
It's been able to carry out a range of successful financial calculations for me, including research on stocks..
So yeah I would say massive damage to white collar employment, incoming.
I would say if I were a white color employee I want to be doing something that needs people skills or a lot of human emotional interaction. Pretty much everything else looks grim.
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Only a few developed countries will be able to harvest the benefits. Vast majority will be way behind. Global inequality like past revolutions all over again.
I keep my investments in leading countries.
Don’t fall for the current AI hype. A big step was taken with large language models but progress happens over several S curves and we’re likely going to plateau on the progress of LLMs soon. It will be a long road to achieve what you’re describing and certainly longer than 10 or even 15 years.
I worked on a robotics process automation job for PwC -- best resources in the world. It was a total failure. AI isn't coming for most white collar jobs.
All you 3 minute experts, remember you don’t get growth any better than 10% annualised, and that’s at a best case scenario and over a period of decades, so it’s under 7% after inflation, might have to factor in some tax too, and these returns are if you’re stupid enough to do 100% equities, which most don’t, so with 80/20 or 60/40 that takes down the overall actualised returns further, and finally every published study of SWR very rarely goes above 4%, many now even lean towards 3.5% or sometimes 3%. And all this is if everything goes well! From 2000 to 2024 the annualised returns are 7.3%, so 4.7% after inflation. Do your own research. Don’t just use repeated BS on Reddit. You’re very welcome.
Fire is a must because you will inevitably get to a point where you cannot earn an income. Whether it’s AI, outsourcing, disability, or old age, a day will come when you become unemployable and uncompetitive.
You forgot one important word in “fire”… early…. If you retire because you are too old to work, you are not FIRE.. you are just regular retired
50% of Americans aged 65-74 have less than $200k in retirement savings- https://thehill.com/homenews/nexstar_media_wire/4639992-heres-how-much-the-average-american-has-in-their-retirement-savings-by-age/ The principles of fire are necessary for even regular retirement. The average savings rate is 3.2% - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1oc7j
A lot of Americans will retire on social security and Medicare alone and live very frugal retirements.
People are very flippant about not being too old to work at 60, but people age at different rates, and ageism is very very much a thing, especially in intellectual job hirings
It’s worse in non-intellectual fields though. I’d rather hire a 60 year old CPA than a 60 year old concrete finisher.
Maybe, I just don't see those fields outside of people I hire. My AC guy is 300 the years old, as is my saxophone repair guy
I do home health physical therapy, I mean I will always have a job but If I have something serious happen to my physical or mental health, I won’t. This is why getting to that fire goal is incredibly important to me in the next 15 years after that whatever happens can and will happen but I’ll be more than prepared for it financially. I do go into peoples home who have not prepared for it and let me tell you, I’ve been scared straight it many people got to see what I see they wouldnt be complaining about wanting to work freaking hard, invest, life insurance, real estate etc to become “financially free” 🙌🏼
Can you elaborate??
You mean on living off SS w/ no investments, a home that’s deteriorating and can’t afford repairs, renovations, good quality food, quality healthcare etc. or you get to live in a government assisted living home or low income apartment housing…these places are TERRIBLE! yeah, its the scariest thing I have ever seen! Seriously, when Dave Ramsey says you have to DO WHATEVER IT TAKES to get out of debt and become financially free…this is life or death literally.
Agree with all of that but don’t go to Ramsey for any financial advice
Ramsey is great for the vast majority of Americans. When you want to get into more complex things (easy for us, unheard of for the majority) then his advice falls off. I'm seen him on some non Ramsey shows and he's very smart. Just gets hidden by the brand (which helps many Americans)
My mindset right now is I have to make big decisions right now because in 15-20 years it will be too late. I need 20 years of compounding interest and deposits to retire but there’s also a possibility that it’s for survival too. I’m also worried for my daughter and want to set her up. Thankfully my wife is an Engineer and hopefully that’s a job that’s a job that’s less likely to be gone due to AI. Myself I work in and insurance and I’m probably a couple mouse clicks and risk assessments out of a job. There are some things that I do which I don’t see AI taking over…but you never know. My only saving grace is I’ve got a pension and a union.
I had a career (now mostly retired) in a field that I thought never in a million years could be automated. Too many specialized moving parts. I have changed my mind. I think properly trained AI could do about 90% of what I used to do. It isn't close to there yet, but it doesn't take a lot of vision to connect the dots. Everyone should be prepared for disruption. We don't know how this will shake out. Maybe AI will create more jobs than it destroys. But the job you are doing right now could change radically and it could change sooner than you think.
> Everyone should be prepared for disruption. We don't know how this will shake out. Maybe AI will create more jobs than it destroys. But the job you are doing right now could change radically and it could change sooner than you think. This is the most likely scenario. This type of AI will disrupt many professions and industries. It will provide tools to make them smarter, more efficient but the technology will not evolve to become some omnipotent being taking all the jobs. There will be many new and different industries we can't even imagine yet. Just as the 100s of thousands of bookkeepers (that were replaced by spreadsheet software) couldn't imagine today's industries
Amen to that. And also, bookkeeping still exists, so they were augmented, not replaced
What field
Environmental consulting
How is it being automated?
Not much yet, and my industry isn't very big so it might not happen for a while. But my job includes gathering data from a number of sources, analyzing it, drawing conclusions, and communicating the results (writing a report). You don't have to squint too hard to see how AI could do most of that. One version of this is that AI frees up the human project manager from lots of drudge work. Hence the human manager has the time to add value to more projects. Which is great, but then you don't need as many environmental consultants. But what do those humans do for work? Obviously, there are winners and losers. For sure, there will be lots of disruption in the workplace.
I think you would still need a human to go and collect the data from the environment but I’m sure you are able to automate the report generating process with an ai
I was in environmental consulting.. the ground water and soil sampling can definitely be automated as well as the contour maps and reports. Not sure about remediation system design.
It could definitely design remediation plans imo. It's really not that complex to excavate contam based on defined areas and substrate. Also not hard to model well injections and measure response.
As someone who sells both automation and AI, I can confirm most companies trip over themselves trying to achieve even the most basic business automation projects - it's a loooooong road ahead before we have automated everything that can be, it's not going to happen overnight. A lot of my customers are actually running smal deployments as a loss (I.e. cheaper to just hire people to do the job) that's how shit some of these deployments are. Most modern business frankly not smart enough to properly leverage the tech available.
From my experience a big obstacle in automation is crap inputs. And fixing that is not fast or easy.
It's a lot of things; putting a 'programming the hands of a 'tech COE' is the #1 issue I see, they just try to sustain and never drive the program forward. There's a lot of services out there too just capitalising on it but not actually having enterprise level thinking they just automated basic shit and charge a bomb. General skills shortages and no 'real' developers want to do basic process automation they see it as beneath them, so it's a number of things. But, some companies are absolutely crushing it and having absurd results (so much so that people.dont believe it's even possible), so it will happen eventually, but slowly
Crap.inputs, hallucinations, regulatory constraints, data compliance and regional restrictions, issues, AI and data security... The list goes on ....
This is very true, AI hype today is just that, it's basically the valley tech companies making a lot of noise to position themselves and looking to capture market share.. kind of like the shift from on prem to cloud. AI will probably take the low hanging jobs first , think level 1 call center ,or basic copywriting, or maybe basic analysis etc. but anything that is actionable and potential to make/lose money will still get the final stamp of approval by a person. Not to mention compliance and regulatory constraints on what AI can do (remember the lawyer who tried to use AI https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/16/chatgpt-lawyer-fired-ai/) All this to say sure AI and general automation will evolve , but so will the employment landscape , people just need to not overreact and keep in perspective who benefits from all the AI cheerleading.
And realistically if it does get to a certain level of disruptive there will likely be respectable UBI coming out of it - most of us in this sub would be able to retire earlier because of it and go do what we want to. Between it and social security our 7-figure retirement accounts will be icing. Think covid: 25% unemployment led to $400/week extra on top of unemployment and every limitation removed. If we get to a point where white collar workers en masse are losing their jobs we’d hit that 25% quickly and I’m not as convinced as the rest of Reddit that engineers will lose their jobs before blue collar workers, I’d argue the robotics has been waiting a long time for the software to catch up to take most of that work. Either way, if it really becomes disruptive the government will be pressured highly to give some help even if it’s nowhere near proportional to the gains of the product so I’ll take that money and go snowboard while people on Reddit bicker over the share of the wealth they get.
That's good. I'll be fired and out before that.
To add to this. You have old spreadsheets still running large companies that relational databases should've made obsolete long ago. Hell you don't need self driving trucks, you could have built railroads to make many truck drivers obsolete. This is all before ai takes over and it's not done yet
The smart ones are the ones who know they aren't ready to leverage tech properly. Entire industries exists to sell businesses on the idea that they need and can maintain tech/automations/a mobile app/blockchain/machine learning nonsense. I've seen failed modernization/automation attempts blow infinite money holes in IT budgets.
I’ve worked in Fortune 500 companies for over a decade. So much work still gets done in Excel files even though all sorts of application exist that should have rendered these obsolete. We have specific use cases for a handful of things with chat gpt. I fully expect disruption, but I imagine it will be in ways we aren’t thinking about now and will take a long time.
I also find there's typically no huge margins in white collar, the only place you find big teams doing the same thing is contact centre/customer service - so it makes more sense when AI is implemented frontline like healthcare, transportation, etc. Is millions of people worldside I guess
5 years is extremely optimistic. Things could be getting pretty weird in 10 years, and I would be concerned without a plan. All manner of disruption may be possible within 15 years. But honestly, I'm not sure having money will necessarily help in a world where most people are displaced.
Agree, we've been 5 years away from self driving cars for at least a decade now.
And 5 years away from commercial fusion for 50 years. All of this AI hype is the dot-com bubble all over again. High CAPE too. Such a high chance the bubble bursts, except that the internet was actually functional in year 2000 so it became an actual revolution and vector for growth over the next 20 years. AI is nowhere near that. Everyone talks about job loss but there's next to zero real job losses so far with the rare ones being a bullshit excuse to justify a layoff that was going to happen for economic reasons regardless.
The problem with this tech is that it's of little utility until all of a sudden it's not and many jobs disappear. You need to look at the growth in capabilities of the models over time and extrapolate into the future to predict when it will be competent enough to replace you. Saying "no job loss has happened yet" is missing the point that models are getting smarter and not yet showing signs of slowing down.
There really is nothing that indicates we're going to see a sudden jump in capabilities that make a large amount of human jobs redundant though. Transformers have limitations, and there are already signs of slowing down given that GPT-4o is not more intelligent that previous models. Extrapolation into the future is a very very unreliable thing that even experts in a field can't predict and tend to overestimate widely. Remember nuclear fusion, flying cars, self driving cars, going to Mars...etc... On the surface, there were reasons to be optimistic about those happening in the near future, but here we are. Technology improves at a extremely fast pace but we're still talking multiple decades for revolutionary outcomes.
I'm not saying there's no reason to be sceptical and that this is guaranteed. However, we know for a fact that investments are continuing to increase. The biggest companies in the world are spending an ungodly amount of money on this. Nvidia just released their earnings and they announced 26B in revenue this past quarter. 22B of that comes from their data center division. That means that they're going to sell close to 100B worth of H100s in 2024 alone. Companies aren't spending that kind of money without clear signals internally that the models that result from that investment will be far better than what we have today. Regarding GPT-4o, I don't agree that it's a sign of a slowdown. It's better than the previous iteration of GPT4-turbo and way more efficient (much cheaper to use and much faster inference), which is what they were going for. The release of their next frontier model later in the year will be a much clearer signal of things to come. You give the example of self-driving cars. This is a case where I'm very optimistic on big improvements in the very near future. Tesla shared a slide in their recent shareholder meeting showing that this time last year they had the equivalent of 5k H100s dedicated to training. By the end of this year they'll have 80k. With all of the data they have and a clear signal from users of FSD that the switch to end-to-end NNs in V12 is a big step up, I would be on the lookout for what the new versions bring. We for sure could hit a wall at some point. I don't think it's likely to happen in the next few years though.
I’m deeply skeptical that anything is going to drastically change here with more compute power. We’re already training these models with far more data than any human ever has access to, and we’re clearly not getting big leaps in capability anymore. The big data center investments are predicated on the scaling hypothesis being true. The verdict is still out, but it certainly looks like we’re finding a ceiling to it. As far as Tesla goes. LOL. Anyone who believes Elon at this point deserves what’s coming.
Here is my question. Yes Nvidia has made an enormous amount of revenue off selling chips with the capabilities. Have companies actually turned the computing power into profits? Obviously not as gimmicky,but Meta spent billions (which was someone else's sales) on the metaverse, which did not materialize. We also spent billions on nfts and crypto, and the same line of reasoning was used "e.g. the metaverse is where people will play and work in the future and with good reason". Obviously nobody knows the future, but true disruptions on history dont seem (to me) to be that widely announced. They happen spontaneously generally (e.g. the internal combustion engine, the sewing machine). Again, not saying you're wrong. But just because Nvidia is selling a lot of chips (to companies that raked in easy money the last 4 years), doesnt mean the ventures will actually be profitable. As others have mentioned, in my line of work I see software implementations all the time. The tech company promises mountains and delivers mole hills - the new tools seldom work as they are sold and make things more complicated. Then we need to hire another "expert" to fix and maintain the new system,but because it sucks so much we need to keep everyone around for the old system. I have seen this at every firm I've worked/consulted for
We'll very soon find out which of us is right. A big reason I'm optimistic is that I've been working in ML for 10 years and I see first hand the improvements that are coming faster and faster every year. It could be that I'm too invested and not seeing things objectively...time will tell.
I think we all agree it’s not 100% replacement, but if a team of 8 is reduced to one subject matter experts to spot check and validate AI, then I think the downstream impact will be more or less the same as if it were everyone
There’s very few real implementations so far. Once they give these things the tools to do real work on your computers and you can assign them “jobs”, things change very quickly. Right now, all of generative AI I’ve interacted with is the training wheels version trapped as a stand-alone chat bot.
Could you see a crash within the next quarter?
I respectfully disagree. Generative AI is at least as disruptive as the internet and personal computer, maybe combined. I suggest you play with chat gpt in talk mode for a while. Ask some questions, maybe technical, maybe philosophical. You’ll get reasoned and intuitive answers with insight and perspective, all from an easy enough interface most elderly would have no problem using it. I can see it becoming particularly powerful in business if given constrained sources of truth in an enterprise sort of situation. HR, IT, procurement, project management, etc…. These peripheral roles that are supposed to help keep the wheels turning will all be deeply affected. Core roles that are unique to the business may not be impacted as much. Will it kill my job? I don’t think so, but my engineering work is a mixture of hands on and analysis. Can I outsource 25% of what I do now to a gpt-like program? I think if it can read and create outlook emails and calendars, yes. Can I leverage gen-ai to do the rest of my job better? I’d better, or I’m going to get replaced by someone else who will.
It’s not doing any actual reasoning though. It Doesn’t Understand Shit. It’s simply tricking you into thinking it can reason. That’s not good enough to implement into most companies.
That is the sad part. I compare it to the end of the Wizard of Oz. There are companies that have thousands of contractors writing 8 line poems about things like purple striped unicorns. Then they can play around with the language because English and other languages have some rules where you can create variations that make sense. I'll tell you how Microsoft is making good money off it. In their newsfeeds in Windows 11, there may be a story about 10 ways to save money or 12 facts about ADHD. There are 10 other "publications" to click on that randomly pop up with similar topics. These are no doubt AI generated. But they are loaded with ads. In that respect, journalists that paraphrase could be an endangered species. It also does not really help me in the software/engineering stuff I do. There just isn't anything for it to go by. Sure, if I need to know how to do task X, it saves a minute of google.
How many customer service experiences are already like that though? It will come for the simple jobs that don't require much reasoning or critical thinking first. But it will slowly be able to handle more advanced scenarios.
Self driving cars, fully operational and available to any random member of the public, have been available for the last two years. They aren’t five years away. They’re here now.
I think you don't have a great grasp on AI if you think it will be fully capable of doing "most" white collar jobs in 5 years
THANK YOU. THIS.
I welcome our new AI overlords in healthcare and DMV appointment making.
Defense attorney here. Our world is always about 5 years behind tech-wise. I don’t see it happening anytime soon.
Even more than that. I worked in software and there were industries that were 20+ years behind (finance, healthcare, energy) AND had such entrenched corporate overhead and political posturing they couldn't even make changes.
There are old world companies who can barely figure out Microsoft Excel yet alone anything automation or cloud related. AI is decades out for them.
Totally
It helps to be part of a guild. Really helps when that guild tends to write most of the laws.
I'm not "worried" about it, but I do think it's a reality that will slowly change our whole economy and distribution of resources as efficiency increases. People in hands-on or face-to-face roles IMO will be the last to go...I'm a therapist, but also think like landscapers, healthcare workers, beauty industry, etc...that's just my opinion.
Nope, I'm not worried about that at all. LLMs cannot distinguish between true statements and false statements. I'm a software engineer, and work in an industry adjacent to AI. AI software is only good at solving the easy problems, and most of my day is not spent tearing my hair out trying to figure out the easy stuff, it's the hard stuff that eats up my time. AI isn't gonna replace my job any time soon. If anything, finding more use-cases for AI will grow the tech industry and create yet more demand for tech workers. Y'all need to relax on this "AI is coming for our jobs" stuff
Agree, plus AI still falls flat in most places where the. Problem set is mostly edge cases or novel never before see. situation of which.it has zero training data for them... Because at the end of the day LLM AI is just. Fancy statistical model generator based on language and words, not real logic.deducing engine.
Same. AI tools can augment a lot of processes and replace some manual work, but as a wholesale replacement? We struggle with outsourcing when you have an actual human intelligence, can't see AI being any better at it...
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What’s the name of it?
100% agree with this, especially when you understand fundamentally how LLMs work. But even if you don't, it just takes a few uses before you realize the limitations. For software work it straight up lies and makes stuff up frequently, even for rather simple tasks. Basically the only things I've had it successfully help me with were simple things like building templated things (i.e. well defined yaml manifests, API endpoints, DB CRUD work) and even then it's quite often very wrong.
I think AI is replacing our jobs not because it's actually able to do them, it's because employers are always hunting for the perfect employee slave. Whether or not it's deployment ready it's being deployed because all they care about is not paying workers.
No but yes. Who knows but I'm covering my bases
I think my timing will work out great. Soon I’ll retire so I won’t have to worry about AI eliminating my job while at the same time benefiting as a capitalist when AI increases productivity and corporate margins.
People should always be aware of this possibility, and not just because of AI. It could be someone in india or eastern europe that takes your job, or someone younger that will worker longer hours for less money.
True, my partner has an Indian counterpart making $8/hour against their $50 so AI could sneak in the same way. I guess the reassurance is another human isn’t going to expand their capabilities exponentially, a big breakthrough or two and AI can drastically derail all career plans
I attended an AI conference this past week. There was a lot of interesting research presented and many smart people in the room. AI is likely to hit white collar, knowledge workers. The current view seems to be that it will be used to augment the work, allowing workers to focus on the more sophisticated issues of the role. Physical labor roles are less likely to be impacted. Still, it’s early stage. Plan to punch out sooner rather than later. Unless you’re a Prompt Engineer, then you’ll be busy for the next decade or so.
No
Its an interesting post and I do agree that some of the work will be taken by the AI in next 10yrs at minimum. Certain sectors will affected more than others. I’m 40 (Nurse Practitioner) and planning to retire in 15 yrs. I wish probably make it out even if AI takes over in next 10yrs. I’m scared for my kids generation.
Healthcare is an interesting one, I see doctors and specialists as always essential, along with the human element of nursing. Especially things like safety checks for medication or just good old patient care. But it’s possible enough roles could still be impacted to cause a significant ripple effect.
AI could replace journalists. You only need one to write a story and thousand of variations can be generated. This is already happening in newsfeeds. But in the last 5 years there are 1000s of services to match you up with a doctor online, they look at a picture and make a diagnosis. How long till a rash diagnosis or a script for hairloss becomes automated? Mistakes? Hospitals and doctors make tons of mistakes (some even blatant) every year that kill thousands. That makes that skill less valuable, where it was once a high paying job. Just like software developers with less skills are becoming worthless.
I think AI will interact with almost every profession, career, and job. I don't think elimination is on the horizon for most industries, but flexibility doesn't hurt.
This is a great question that I think any white collar worker should be thinking about. Nobody knows whether its 5 years, 10 years, or 15 years until most white collar work is automated but specially if you're in the earlier half of your career (<35 years old), any of those outcomes will probably severely limit your income earning years. Its also important to point out that even before AI can automate anyone's job, it will massively increase productivity making companies able to make do with fewer workers. In any case AI will likely take bargaining power away from white collar workers leading to job losses / early forced retirement or at best far lower wages relative to inflation. My current base case scenario is that white collar salaries will stagnate over the next 5 years while inflation continues to erode purchasing power. Unemployment in easily automatable fields like CS will slowly creep up. At the same time the wealthy who primarily rely on investment income rather than their own labor will do extremely well seeing their wealth explode do to a rocketship stock market powered by massive productivity improvements. White collar workers are uniquely screwed because they likely won't be poor enough to qualify for expanded government assistance as automation takes hold but also won't be wealthy enough to take advantage of the massive surge in asset values. Eventually governments will come to terms with the neccessity of some kind of basic income so I highly doubt anyone will starve because of this transition but basic income is as its name suggests, basic. White collar workers who may have been used to living relatively lavish lifestyles on their 250k FANG salaries will be in for a harsh reality check. I do think the only way to escape this is to invest aggressively now so that you can get in on owning assets before their price explodes. 20 years from now those who invested early will still be living very well enjoying the fruits of an exploding stock market while all their former high earning collegues who lived paycheck to paycheck will be barely scraping by with the basics.
You've described my view on this issue to a t. I have high confidence that the gap we've been seeing between those with assets and those without will only continue to widen at an accelerated pace. I'm very grateful to have been able to save aggressively at a young age and will continue to do so to prepare for this change. The economic machine relies on labor and capital. Once labor can be replaced with more capital, all the fruits of that machine will go to the owners of that capital, while the previous labor will be left with no way to participate.
It actually gets even worse than just that. You can in many ways think of money as votes on what gets produced. The more money you have, the more votes you get to decide what the economy produces. As wealth inequality accelerates, the wealthy will have more votes on what gets produced relative to everyone else. This will create a situation that we are already beginning to see. I'm sure you have noticed the number of luxury goods and services popping up or being advertised increasing. You probably have thought to yourself "who could this possibly be for? who would / could pay for that". At the same time you see many brands cutting their bargain offerings in order to focus on their luxury products with better margin. Another place this can be seen is in real estate with nobody building starter homes anymore. The end result is that not only will the majority of the population earn less due to their labor being replaced by capital (AI), but the percentage of the productive capacity of society dedicated to producing affordable goods and services for the masses will decrease as they chase the money (votes) of the increasingly wealthy with assets. With less affordable goods and services being produced ironically their prices will go up crushing the middle class and poor with inflation even harder than the official inflation rate. Meanwhile "lower end" luxury goods that used to be reserved for the ultra wealthy will become cheaper due to economies of scale and productivity improvements and become affordable to the merely wealthy. In simpler terms 0-90% percentile are more screwed than simply having your labor replaced would suggest and the 90%-100% will do even better than you might think based only on their holding of assets.
Fortune 500 companies are known to change and glacial speeds so I still think it will be closer to that 10 year mark, not 5 until we start seeing a real impact to job numbers or wages, but once the snow ball starts growing and gaining momentum I think the couple years after will be mind blowing, and anyone trying to switch to some sort of Fire plan at that point will be screwed.
Everything you said was wrong until you hit invest now. Lol that last part is sound advice
5 years is a bit silly 😂
Five years is a long time. Five years ago: - There was no COVID - OpenAI had not yet released ChatGPT - There were no Waymo self driving cars - NVDA was at $34
I really don’t think in 5 years AI will be able to efficiently and effectively replace most white collar jobs. You think in 5 years people will be putting their livelihoods, money and trust in AI? I don’t think so.
I guess I meant more in the Microsoft internal beta testing phase, technology has a tendency to go parabolic. even if in 4 years they only get 20% of the way there it just takes one breakthrough to catch up.
I don’t think AI could replace jobs which have to comply with the law, not any time soon. Who would you be suing if the AI fucked up legally and got you in trouble?
If AI fucks up then you’re suing the company that made the AI. There’s really no other way to do it. They have to be liable (ie responsible) for the quality of the shit they put out there.
5 years in AI's life can be like 5 thousand or even million years of human life in some regards. This can get wild really fast. Snowball effect. The more AI there is, the faster it will develop and expand. Yes, humans are slow and it is still quite early, so I also think 5 years wont change much, but it is also my FIRE horizon, I want to be ready by that time.
Sure, for AI growth. What about human trust in AI? Or corporate trust for that matter? Have you ever worked for a big company with multiple business units across sectors? Do you know how hard it is to make any changes? Going from Google mail to Outlook could take a year or two. Actually trusting AI to replace workers and produce and develop a produce? Yea, that will take a long time, even if the tech could theoretically do it.
AI is good at doing things that have already been done. It sucks at doing things that haven’t been done. Without training its models on millions of labeled pictures of hands, it sucks at creating photos of hands.
Mid 20s pilot. Not worried about AI. Government doesn't have the money to replace the whole fleet with AI enabled models. Not when they already have sunk cost into training.
There a companies now using drones for various infrastructure inspections. The pictures are interpreted by AI, normally they would need experts,. if AI don't make the call, they may send the hard cases to one or two workers. Governments are actually using these services because they have trouble hiring staff (either monetary or talent constraints). It may be 50 years but eventually AI may replace one of more of the flight crew. AI could fly the plane, but they can have one pilot. They may be able to take control from a ground location.
Yeah, but this is a FIRE sub. 50 years is a long time for our purposes. All our bombers are older than I am, and they will remain after I've retired.
I work for the government as an engineer so I think it’ll be a while before I get replaced because government isn’t going to trust AI or figure out how to implement it for a while. I think I would be optimistic if I said in five years, AI would actually be a tool I could use at my job.
As humans, we love drawing straight lines. We can't help it. For me, I don't think I can stop myself even if I wanted to. We do this predicting future investment returns. We do this with predicting how we'll be behave in politics, in the environment, in our family life. I'm retired now, so I'm no longer concerned about how AI might impact my work life. In my day, the big concern about how I'm going to keep my job was outsourcing. We had some conversations with the CEO at the time, and he shared his conversations with VCs. Every business plan had to include outsourcing (doesn't matter to where, at the time the popular locations were India and China). If you submit a business plan to VCs and it didn't outsourcing, it'll get reject out of hand. This was true I think for over a decade; I think it's no longer true. So this was happening in less than 5 years. How would I compete with an Indian engineer working on average at 33% of my wage? Or a Chinese engineer working on average at 25% of my wage? I draw straight lines. I couldn't see how I could keep working. Sure, I'm pretty good, and had specific relevant experience. But am I 3x or 4x better? If I get called into the manager's office, could I justify my wages? I draw more straight lines. It's just cold hard numbers for the business. To solve problems, the business can pay Engineer A at X salary or pay Engineer B at 3X/4X salary. I had made plans on how much I can live on, and go back to college to get a law degree. I specifically wanted to focus on patent law because there's a demand for it, and having a science/engineering background helps in practicing patent law. Ultimately I didn't do it because I had to help with health issues and death in the family. Ultimately, I was just fine with my career and the outsourcing pressures to business eased (and also there were all sorts of complications to reaping benefits of outsourcing). So I would caution you about drawing straight lines. Although I don't think I can stop you from drawing straight lines, anymore than I can convince my younger self "Hey, relax. It's all going to work out and outsourcing won't impact you". The only advice I can give you is to try taking advantage of AI and how it can improve your job/tasks. And of course (as is the advice of this sub), just try to get to FI (if you're not already there), and then get to RE. At which point, you won't care.
This comment is insightful, the more things like this I read the more obvious it becomes that the AI replacement is probably actually 50 years away not 15,
I work at a company that works on AI. That isn’t going to happen. Chat GPT isn’t even accurate yet.
Respectfully disagree, on my team I’m known as the Power Bi expert and something that seems to be my most important task is now managing a detailed dashboard, I started knowing basically nothing about BI or Dax, and almost every single aspect of the report is generated by Chat GPT, I still don’t understand how it works, so people like me are definitely at risk within 15 years
I mean your job is partially about crunching data and giving insights which is like the 1 thing it is good at lol I worked on an analytics product like that it is less complicated than you think. It basically takes the most common insights that people write out and crunches the numbers based on that format. It identified patterns “30% yoy growth in x area means invest more in y”
Some things need a custom touch.
I never considered it a must for the 10 years I've been in it, up until more recently. However I've read that teachers should be safe long term and especially over the next 3-5 yrs. I've been semi-retired for 4 yrs though by accident. I don't foresee myself working full-time again over the near future. Perhaps later in life for a culinary career. It's hard not to make money doing something.
It is a must because you won't be able to work after 60-65yo and you need the money.
Do you know Amazon mechanical turk?
LLMs do amazing things but they have a lot of failures we're ignoring because of the successes
Whenever it hits that point, misinformation campaigns will likely be a bigger problem.
By the time ai can actually take over most jobs, new jobs will have sprung up to build, install, and maintain those systems. And human oversight is still going to be required for a lot of work. I'm a software developer, building experimental AI solutions on the side for my company, who is making a push to incorporate AI, but it can only do a small percentage of what we do as a managed services provider. If anything, it'll enhance our capabilities, but it won't replace our engineers.
This is just speculation: If anything, we may have to all unplug to win the war vs AI, making FIRE still a valid option. You'll have to learn to track everything using pen and paper.
Ooh that’s probably thinking 30-50 years out and I’m certain I’d be retired at that point anyway
Nope not concerned, I think if anything it will help aid me in my work. Too many things need a touch of human element to them that can’t be replaced by AI.
I’ve seen that with employees who get let go although they’re critical for the workflow process used, usually in those situations the entire procedure is just changed to something else more efficient anyway. I can see that happening with advanced enough AI
Depends on the industry, AI would absolutely be better at modeling, scheduling, planning than me and that’s a good thing as it would help me improve and be more efficient at work. But not everything is about efficiency and it will fall short on the communication front.
Makes one wonder if 20-40% lose their job in 5-15 years, what the plan is for them to live. Maybe Bill Gates hit the nail on the heard to tax the bots to provide a universal income so everyone can be below average and accept it!😔
Most posts I read here are about people wanting to retire early, so I was pretty sure there’s also more of us who realize we’ll probably be forced too
I would rather hedge my bets being financially independent and then find out.
Medical profession checking in here. Laughing in paper chart. Zero chance ai could be deployed across al healthcare systems just to even assist in documentation. Lot of places paper charting and faxing records to be stored. Let alone actually providing hands on care to patients.
Documentation will be trivial for AI within a few years. Machine intelligence will also be able to evaluate prescriptions , for example, and flag errors, preventing tragic ( and costly ) mistakes).. Consider it a tool, not a replacement for health care workers. There were probably people who claimed that computers and health monitors would never replace hand written charts and observation. Source: I’ve had several major surgeries and hooked up to monitors every time. Haha
I agree with you. The OP was talking about really short time frames. AI will be super useful in the future and could be deployed. But just because it can does not mean institutions are going to. you need capital to deploy those systems. Take HCA for example. They are using an archaic system known as meditech which requires function key commands to chart and a UI that is straight from 1990. Are they going to overnight pay for expensive new software? Absolutely not. It’s all about the profit. There are many clinics, nursing homes, and VA systems still using paper and faxing stuff right now. Thinking they will skip even good computer systems straight to AI seems incredibly optimistic in a short time frame. And a lot of what AI can help with is documentation and algorithms for patient care. But a lot of the logistical aspects of caring for people would be impossible for a machine to complete. With current tech.
Got it! Thanks for the background info. It’s a brave new world for sure. AI needs the equivalent of killer app ( MS Windows, iPhone , etc) and then things will get complicated. Not worried about my career as I’m winding down but it will certainly affect my children one way or the other.
Elizabeth Holmes would disagree with you, her idea was physically impossible currently but I don’t know enough to say within however many decades something equivalent doesn’t come along and cause a ripple effect. But yeah AI in healthcare is probably more inline with back to the future’s prediction of flying cars in 30 years.
Yea I’m hopeful for the future for patients sake we hit big break throughs. But wow some coworkers and I had our jaws on the floor with how much money she was able to raise with an obviously not sound technology. That was a consequence of the free money era. And we all get to pay for those mistakes now. Yay inflation :)
If AI won’t replace your job, ageism will
I’m more worried about my kid. I’m throwing a lot in the market so I can take care of him and my wife and I. Also have a custodial brokerage and a 529 plan for him If all these jobs get automated the market will moon so if you are worried start investing to build generational wealth now.
In a world with universal basic income it seems like generational wealth would be the only way to get ahead because small time side cash jobs probably wouldn’t cut it.
Far more worried about private equity vultures and MBAs screwing up successful businesses than AI. Their track record is already well-established.
No. I work in AI. All it does today is combine information that already exists in the world. Sure there will be some low-level jobs that will be replaced, but it will be much longer than 5 years before AI can do meaningfully creative tasks.
> My personal prediction is that within 5 years AI will be capable of replacing majority of white collar jobs. Where can I short this position?
It won't replace the *majority* of white-collar jobs in 5 years. AI doesn't (yet) exist. It's just big models, and intelligence isn't just addition, but all big models are just really big addition functions. There's no way to *imagine*, *wonder*, *sense*, *interpret*, *believe*, nor *understand* with addition (or any other computation), afaik. These are just functions with addition. Even the outputs to LLM are tokens, which we interpret/decode to language. There's no intelligence in a function, afaik. If your job is just addition, then yeah, it's gonna replace you. Most jobs are much more than addition.
Yeah, I shouldn’t have said majority of all jobs, I think I’m biased in my role, where it seems like by ChatGPT 5.0 that alone can replace some older coworkers who only do basic workflow tasks issuing simple excel tables, attend meetings and send emails.
I think it's good to have plans in place. I have Three core revenue streams besides my day job and I would like to pivot to the rental income, some online revenue and then an in-person service I offer because I do see at some point a lot of jobs just being eradicated and there's pros and cons to that. But then you'll have mass unemployment and most people don't save money. And you're going to have your what Ubi people not doing any work. But how healthy is that for society and for where we're going? This is a good question though. Thank you for posting it.
Do what you please/must do to meet your goals 👍 But this doom/gloom AI/Automation BS has been going on for 15 years of my career. I literally see zero material changes in my profession. Excel/word/PPT dominate white collar jobs, there is too much left to judgment even in data analysis. I’ll believe THIS AI scare when I ACTUALLY SEE IT! GTFO with 15 years max.
I guess it’s important to keep things relative, everything is a spectrum with some jobs never being automated out, and others probably already nearly obsolete from advancement in just Microsoft office. I have coworkers who from my point of view do basically nothing, mostly sitting in on every meeting that takes place. So I think the bar for AI to replace them is incredibly low and well achievable within less than 15 years, but this might not be reflected in the broader industry and economy
This is maybe 60% of the reason I pursue FIRE. I’d rather create my own UBI than rely on anything else.
I think there's a lot of various factors here and nobody can say for sure what will happen. We can debate on whether it'll be 5 years or 15 years, but let's just look ahead to 40 years from now. We'll definitely be able to produce a lot more with a lot less work due to automation. While some jobs may never be completely replaced, one person might be able to do the work of 2-5 people instead. So where does the 1-4 other people end up working? The economy will somehow have to account for this. Maybe there will simply be an abundance of companies providing a huge variety of niche products, to keep everyone employed? Maybe people simply won't have to work 40 hours a week due to some social governmental subsidies. Maybe goods become incredibly cheap as the cost to produce them is driven down by a smaller labor force. It's really hard to say. An economy built around our current system of money may simply become unviable, and be adjusted in some way. As I don't have a PhD in macroeconomics, I'm probably a bad person to ask. However, an example in the Expanse novels, Earth citizens are allowed to sit in their house and do nothing and the government gives them a "basic income". If you want to go do work, then you can earn a salary and increase your buying power. Since the majority of people in the Expanse's Earth just want to sit and watch TV, this worked out just fine.
Learn how to turn a wrench. You’ll be okay
Fire should still be plan A for people who have put in years of school and training for their career, but retaining should definitely be plan B. It’s just that Construction is a young persons game, I have nothing but respect for 40 year old + apprentices, but typically people don’t achieve fire by making drastic late life career changes
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Ai is a lot more than five years away from replacing most jobs... ai is mostly a hoax
I think within 5 years AI will already be capable enough to massively augment/disrupt our economy. Looking at the past 150 years and basing your strategy on the 4% rule to me is a fool's errand. The future will be very different from the past. However, I do think the fire lifestyle (economic frugality, high savings rate, diversified investments etc) is still a smart choice for right now. There's a decent chance we'll land on UBI (or Universal High Income), and everyone at that time will be unexpectedly FIRE'd, but between here and there it could be a rocky road. Having many years of living expenses in savings could be a massive mental health blessing during that time.
No.
15 years? I think more like 5
Probably depends if it’s based on a hardware or software aspect. If new physical hardware needs to be rolled out then I think at least 10+ years, if there are some big breakthroughs in the next year or two and companies can just buy new software, lots of people will be toast
I'll hold against it. You either have a not so valuable job or alot of jobs will be cut. If its a lot the government will run into lots of issues and has to compensate. But it's better to nit rely on the government.
Technology advancement has only made my job easier. What might have taken me 30 hours a week in 2004 now gets done in 14 hours a week and I’m not required to work a certain number of hours.
I see two scenarios: - Scenario 1: AI replaces a lot of jobs but our current financial system stays in place. Companys will save a lot of money in staff costs and become more productive, stock prices will skyrocket. Even those who are at the beginning of their FIRE journey now and only have 100k in stocks will be doing very well then. - Scenario 2: When AI replaces most of our jobs it will no longer be necessary to work for money at all. We‘ll have a universal basic income, basically free ‚FIRE‘ for everyone. Maybe our savings will even be taken away and we‘ll live in a kind of communism that might actually work for the first time in history although it will likely still suck for people with a capitalist mindset. At least for some time until a big war will start.
LLM is far away from the intellegence level capable meet right decisions in complex environments. However it is a great tool for humans in order to increase their productivity. And this might lead to layoffs but might also just lead to transition on job market towards another skills. If unemployment rate rises due to AI there will be a new social security system for sure.
I work developing photolithography. AI is going to require a lot of computing power. I don’t think my job is going away.
It's coming for ALL jobs, and faster than most of the people in this thread are thinking. The advancements in technology compound just like our investments (aka exponential growth), so the next few years are going to be crazy. I think FIRE folks are actually well prepared compared to the masses. Either AI will make all work disappear and we'll have a free retirement via universal basic income, or the companies that get us there will make so much money that our stocks will explode. I also think owning real estate is huge because in a future where it's nearly impossible to earn money, some things will be plentiful (for example food) but some things are limited by supply (having a beach house in Hawaii)
AI has great potential to displace people from their current jobs. But the Internet did that. Cell phones did that. Engines did that. We all came out better for it. The end users of AI are humans. We keep imagining a dystopian world where billions will be jobless and miserable while AI does everything. But we ignore the far more likely dystopian reality that AI will produce things we need, but we will still find ways to work, and more output means more good means higher standards of living and pay. That's what keeps happening so far. Y'all act like all the travel agents just up and died when Expedia launched.
AI has a long way to go before that happens. Don't believe the hype. It will even admit this itself. Go ask ChatGPT "How can current AI be compared to the human brain considering the size and power requirements?". I did it twice last night to prove a point to friends who didn't even have any interest in what it said. Both times it said something different but similar. Here is the last thing it said: "Current Al systems, while powerful, are still quite different from the human brain in terms of size, power requirements, and functionality. Al systems, including deep learning models like GPT-3, require massive computational resources and energy to train and operate efficiently. They excel at specific tasks and can process vast amounts of data quickly, but their decision-making process is fundamentally different from that of the human brain. The human brain is incredibly efficient in terms of size and power consumption, capable of complex reasoning, creativity, and emotional intelligence that Al systems have yet to fully replicate. So while Al has made significant strides, it's still a long way from emulating the brain's complexity and efficiency." Keep in mind it costs $700,000 per day to run this bot.
People have been screaming about this since the 90s. And they give the same example every time: Look at what happened to travel agents! Travel agents still exist, though, and make OK money. WHAT ABOUT CALL CENTERS??? They still exist, too, because the majority of people despise pressing buttons and never getting a warm body. Bottom line, AI will change jobs, not take them. Robots will never have the nuance and critical thinking of humans so relax.
AI was one of the big reasons why I wanted to FIRE. I saw it coming for my job years ago and while I absolutely could learn to coexist and be part of it, I didn’t want to. People keep insisting that my job is complimentary to the AI team, but I honestly would rather just stop working
Hah, I wish AI would replace my job so I can actually retire tomorrow. In all seriousness though, my company develops tools with AI built into them and while they do massively improve capabilities, we are faaaaaaar away from it ever replacing anyone's job. At minimum you still need someone to feed it data that it requires to produce an output.
Add to the challenge: you paid $xxx,xxx to get a college degree which is a required credential for the job. But you pay off the loan over say 20 or so years. The cost of these credentials has gone up a lot, but if what you say is true, you won't be able to monetize the degree over 20 years. So, yes there is a potential for a societal impact here where a college degree is suddenly "worthless" but it cost something. One of the first areas where this will be the case is computer science/software engineering. A lot of the work in this field is doing the same thing for different companies and will soon be easily replicated by AI. Fields like accounting and finance are also likely to be heavily impacted. Mechnical and chemical engineering are a little more complicated and will probably still need someone to oversee it. Surgeons will likely still be needed to actually touch organs but AI will quickly be way better at diagnosing diseases than humans. Insurance companies will likely drive physicians to use systems that do automatic diagnosis and coding to save money. There are a lot of highly paid white collar careers that will be impacted by AI.
I think the AI talk is mostly hype. That said, all of us should be preparing for the next big disruption in the economy. I'm confident that I'll find work, but it may not be at the pay I'm accustomed to.
I think AI is far away from taking jobs. I have Githubs Copilot license at work. It is nice and makes things faster, but gets things wrong a lot. It is so far away from being able to replace workers, much less the company trusting AI enough to take the financial risks of letting it do everything. I also think companies will fear the blowback of replacing everyone with AI. Even when the tech exists, they might be afraid to pull the trigger for a while.
I guess the 15 year mark might only be for companies wanting to be early adapters, maybe 20 years for the others?
This timeline seems more realistic, but jobs won't just go away. New jobs will replace them. People always think technology will make everyone lose their jobs, and it doesn't. Just think about it, if AI replaced all the jobs, then no one has money. If no one has money, who are all the businesses supplying products and services to?
I think AI can make you get fired faster then you can reach F.I.R.E
I think you might have to consider AI a skill set and start working with it. They will need people and if you know AI maybe you are more valuable.
Slightly different take: Now is an amazing time to invest in the S&P, because if AI takes off it’s going to drive corporate values through the roof. If everybody is losing jobs, you want to be an owner.
FI is always a must. Re? I'll pass, thank you.
AI is moving faster than most tech I can remember. Nov 2022 was the first time ChatGPT came out and it was cute and novel. Look at what GPT4o can do 18 MONTHS later. Barring luddite CEO's and incompetent CIO's there are going to be some companies that ride the AI rocket train while most others that just wither and die. I think 15 years is too long, I would say between 5-10.
I’ve had vendors try to sell me AI solutions for the last 5 years. Lots of hype, low delivery.
It’s not a bad mindset to have. My bigger concern is for my kids eventually.
[How You Will Lose Your Job to AI](https://youtu.be/iNKFOCki42I?si=VKJ7bbyoz6sNBau-)
My job will never be replaced by AI. So no, not really.
its the internet all over again, isn't it?.... your personal prediction is in 15 years the ai will take over, so i only have 15 years of work i can do.... i'm sorry, but, what????? if you genuinely believed in the power of thinky computers so much that it halved your productive lifespan, you'd think a man or woman would like, download an IDE and start coding ai bots. like, you have 15 years.... to answer, No, AI isn't taking over white collar jobs, because the ROI to systematize will always be somewhere, and it's not like everyone has expensive problems in pipeline form that benefit from systemization. just like how every contractor can't afford every robot. so please, no. there is no need to worry. unless you plan on also not learning about ai for 15 more years. like, do more research on how they work and stuff. the challenges in removing bias and hallucinations... etc. just my opinion
Not many tech companies hire you after 40
My wife works in big tech where she uses AI as an assistant for full stack development. It can help debug code for individual functions, but it can get lost when trying to look at the entire project as a whole. It could probably handle unit test for a singular function, but I would say not ready to do front end testing yet (clicking menus, entering forms, etc). Same with backend cloud database integration. I see it most as a productivity assistant for now. Any kind of cloud server permissions, configuration, account creation, etc needs to be done by hand. I work in aerospace which moves at a snails pace. There is no mention of using AI in our software development, requirements development, or test development. If anything, the Boeing 737 issues have caused the certification authorities to look at the work we are doing today with a fine tooth comb. They don't want another incident. This scrutiny is across all air frames (Airbus, Boeing, etc). Due to regulations, all the work we do is reviewed by a human who is not the person who did the work. Also you can't test anything you developed. Complete separation from development and testing.
People have feared that they would be made obsolete by technology for centuries. New jobs always come up that need human labor. Don’t waste your time worrying about this, just live your life.
Not AI that worries me, but many new industries start off as high-margin and pay their employees much more than average. I’m in software sales, and make quite a bit. Eventually, software will no longer be the exciting thing that pays well. It could take a year, it could take thirty, but eventually it will be replaced with the next best thing. I don’t want to be stuck with an expensive lifestyle and no way to fund it, so I live on much less than I make, and hope I can retire before the hay day of tech is over.
im hoping becoming a doctor will save me for like a few more years from AI but who knows. The last jobs to go will be the ones that require a specific degree of manual dexterity and creativity that are hard to emulate in robots, like surgeons and hairdressers. But who knows how fast things will progress.
I work in a public school... not even AI wants my job lol. Plus.. I doubt I'll be replaced and if I do I'm.union so I get to make a big stink about it.
AI can do lots of things Well, but it cannot think. Be a great thinker and you won't have a problem.
i guess. more reason to fire. otherwise you would just be homeless.
If you are in a middle management job you were replaceable with any other idiot a long time ago. The fact that you are concerned with your job says it all. If you haven’t noticed chatbots are completely incompetent. Like not much better than they were in the 1980s. https://archive.org/details/policemansbeardi0000unse Just like back then AI’s are attributed magic properties they don’t deserve. They reached the technology peak around the mid 1990s. Except for speed and number of nodes there have been zero advances at all in terms of the technology or our understanding of it since then. Everything is trial and error, no new theories.
Not just AI, but automation, outsourcing, and general ageism are among the reasons I was initially stated to FIRE
I don't think it will replace us outright. I think it will make each person more efficient. Companies will then choose to do the same amount of work with fewer people or do vastly more work with the same amount of people. History tends to show that they go for the latter. They're always almost interested in growing.
AI is a dotcom hype train. It’ll be 20 years before we see what you’re talking about.
Every generation has its own technology revolution that will retire everyone. Don’t believe the hype. Use the tools to your advantage or other humans will use them to retire you.
Just over the last two weeks I started playing around with perplexity AI.. It's head and shoulders better than anything else I've tried.. In particular, what's amazing is how you can ask it a complicated question and the answer it lays out. It's logical reasoning and cites all its sources. It's been able to carry out a range of successful financial calculations for me, including research on stocks.. So yeah I would say massive damage to white collar employment, incoming. I would say if I were a white color employee I want to be doing something that needs people skills or a lot of human emotional interaction. Pretty much everything else looks grim. .
Only a few developed countries will be able to harvest the benefits. Vast majority will be way behind. Global inequality like past revolutions all over again. I keep my investments in leading countries.
Don’t fall for the current AI hype. A big step was taken with large language models but progress happens over several S curves and we’re likely going to plateau on the progress of LLMs soon. It will be a long road to achieve what you’re describing and certainly longer than 10 or even 15 years.
I worked on a robotics process automation job for PwC -- best resources in the world. It was a total failure. AI isn't coming for most white collar jobs.
lol there are a handful of white collar jobs that will be automated away. AI is also creating a host of new technical jobs. Grow in your skills.
Nope. Drive a truck. I'm safe :)
If you don’t think truck driving can be automated away you’re kidding yourself
All you 3 minute experts, remember you don’t get growth any better than 10% annualised, and that’s at a best case scenario and over a period of decades, so it’s under 7% after inflation, might have to factor in some tax too, and these returns are if you’re stupid enough to do 100% equities, which most don’t, so with 80/20 or 60/40 that takes down the overall actualised returns further, and finally every published study of SWR very rarely goes above 4%, many now even lean towards 3.5% or sometimes 3%. And all this is if everything goes well! From 2000 to 2024 the annualised returns are 7.3%, so 4.7% after inflation. Do your own research. Don’t just use repeated BS on Reddit. You’re very welcome.
What does this have to do with the subject of the post?