Aibu for being increasingly worried about the job market?

[gymboe]

another threat of redundancy here. Business not going well and to be honest we are full steam ahead with AI.

a quick search in my large town in south of England:

• 5 x nhs jobs (4 of which I am not qualified for and one is really terrible pay as just three days per week)
• school jobs: just three and very low pay
• our high street is mostly made of charity shops and vape stores. Retail doesn’t offer what I want.
• a big employer now hardly owns any office space. There are just a few jobs. I’m not qualified.

I do have a degree but found myself in a specialised account/client mgmt type role. Pays around £50k.

10 years ago there were loads of these type of jobs, decent salary even if you had to start low, good career progression, hundreds of them and tonnes of temp agencies. And the nhs had loads of admin jobs. Not to mention school jobs being plentiful.

where the hell have they all gone?

this is a huge issue. Massive. I’m really worried.

My son graduated in the summer. Cannot even get to interview stage for a graduate job. No entry level jobs to be had that don’t all require a ton of experience. Luckily he managed to port his supermarket job to our home town so he has that. He’s considering moving abroad to Australia (my daughter lives there) and travelling. I don’t know what’s best.

We British people are being far too catastrophic.

Some of the comments on here read like the opening scene of a very low-budget sci-fi film where a blender becomes sentient and destroys Guildford.

AI isn’t about to steal your toddler, read your mind, or decide the fate of humanity based on the last thing you Googled (“why is my dishwasher screaming”). It’s software. Impressive, yes. Wildly overhyped in the press, absolutely. Dark overlord of civilisation? Not so much.

A few things to keep us all tethered to Earth:
AI can’t do anything without humans telling it what to do. It has the independence of a Labrador with a squeaky toy.
It makes mistakes — gloriously stupid ones — daily. If the robot apocalypse comes down to an algorithm that thinks the moon is a type of fruit, we’re safe.
The scariest thing in tech has never been AI… it’s still autocorrect.
Politicians and companies love hyping it up because it sounds futuristic and distracts from the fact they still can’t fix potholes.

Does AI need regulation? Yes. Should we think critically about how it’s used? Obviously. But the idea that civilisation is going to collapse because ChatGPT once wrote someone a haiku about beans… that’s giving it slightly too much credit.

It’s fine to be cautious, curious, even sceptical. Fear? That’s optional.

And for the posters predicting the end times — if we do end up in a Terminator situation, I for one am looking forward to seeing who tries to argue with the killer robot about parking restrictions and gets it to apologise. It’ll be a Mumsnetter. Always is.

People need to learn, adapt, grow, and make a living.

The mental health of young people is at an all-time low, partly due to a lack of motivation to research and figure out what they need to do to achieve their goals. Another factor is that their parents often fail to provide hope at home, relying on unverified stories instead of investigating the truth or learning how to support their children in reaching their aspirations. Young people see their parents scared and paralyzed, and they shouldn’t have to feel the same way.

I suggest people here chat with others from different countries. Talk to folks in richer and more developed nations if they’re concerned about AI. Honestly, it doesn’t even have to be a wealthy, highly developed country—you could connect with people from relatively richer third-world countries like Brazil and China, where I’m sure those earning money will keep doing what they’ve been doing to make more.

We dont all have one. Maybe OP doesnt and buck stops with them

I moved to UK in 2004 because in my country was %25 unemployment among young people. I have degree. I'm dreading to think how my kids will manage in the future I know what I went through and is really unpleasant.

If we don't have the jobs on offer .

Why do we need all these unskilled immigrants.

Plus the country is vastly overcrowded and overpopulated.

I. remember bringing AI , machine learning and driverless cars up in a conversation. topic 5 to10 years ago and warning people

I was just put down or ignored.

Be afraid, Be very afraid

Well this is the plan. The government will pay everyone an amount just to survive on and we will be told to be happy with that. When people don’t own anything ot have any power they will simply just exsist this is the eventual bigger plan.

You should be worried, even large companies can’t keep up with the rises in NMW and NI and are looking to streamline and cut costs where possible. We are not in a growth economy, the job market is already suffering. They can’t keep putting up the costs to employ people and expect companies to keep on being able to recruit. I own a business in a sector where what we do hasn’t seen a pay increase for our services in over 10 years yet our overheads keep growing and growing but we aren’t making any more money to cover the increased running costs so the only solution for SME’s like mine is to downsize. The first step in that is a recruitment freeze.

Thing is, the town centre in my area has never offered shops worth using! Unless I need foriegn mini marts, vape shops, pawn brokers or endless bargain shops, there is nowhere to support or spend money. I wish town planners would bring it decent shops and eateries but they don't. I've lived in this town for 22.5 years and the high street has always been crap. Plus if you go into places like sports direct etc, you see the price of something in there, you find online a lot cheaper.
Most of what I've bought people for Christmas had to from online.

Because the job market issues are around skilled and professional work, we have a recruitment crisis when it comes to things like care work because there's no one willing to come off benefits to do it and that's why we need foreign labour! For things like land work, care work, cleaning etc!

They're nowhere near as low as they can be they can be. Check out what the Japanese are doing.

As for expense, you need more than 4 people to cover one position for a week. You only need one robot. That kind of saving will give the motivation to huge investment in care robots.

It really isn't! What money or benefit does it bring the government to keep up us with no money to spend! It doesn't does it! It's not going to happen is it because there's no point! Do you think all.of us professionals would sit here and accept a small salary? We'd sell up and piss off overseas! You need to think about the lack of logic in these childish fairy stories! There's no logical point to these silly claims!

Sadly we haven’t got, nor likely to have soon, a government to stop it☹️

If more than half of 18 year olds are told by their parents that university is the only option and most of them are coached through to a first or 2:1 because they're paying customers, and they refuse to do anything other than a "graduate job" related to their interests, with home office and high pay, but what the country actually needs is care workers and electricians, hospital porters and cleaners... unskilled migrants aren't the problem.

Obviously what the country needs is highly skilled blue collar workers and people willing to do hands on jobs - including both unskilled, semi skilled and very highly skilled.

Nobody wants a job they can't do sitting down though.

You don’t say where in the S, but your role sounds like you have plenty of quite diverse experience so I would imagine media would take you on. There are certainly plenty of their jobs around, if you can take the pressure, which I’m assuming you could.

I was made redundant last September and took til early Feb for me to start a new job and yes it's grim and I'm a health and safety professional! The job I started in Feb was very missold which makes me mad and makes me feel like my skills are being under utilised. It's hell trying to find a better role though, aside from all the ghosting, the job ads that never seem to close and the walls of silence, it's also the fact that certainly in my area, I feel like the large amount of industrial redundancies have driven due salaries, some jobs offer poor benefits packages with really minimal leave entitlement. I'm 46 now and have been in my profession 16 years! I don't want to feel like I've gone backwards.

Also too many jobs want you to cover the whole country for them! If you've got a lot of sites around the UK then employ more people to look after them, don't put all that pressure avd travel on one person and tell them they can't have a home life and need to live in hotels! Ive been in a similar situation before and it wasn't for me, I didn't get into health and safety to spend most of the weekend on a motorway and then having precious little time to do the evergrowing backlog of work!

I'm glad my partner and I never wanted kids because we couldn't have advised them, I love health and safety as a profession but it's hell to get into because no one wants to train anyone or give opportunities to develop.

Would he do teacher training?
What’s his degree? A GCSE subject he could train and work up the education ranks in secondary in his subject or do primary school and male primary school teachers are like gold dust he would never be out of work. Could work anywhere but n the country.

Even if teaching isn’t for you the PGCE training can help.

Trades are great, but if AI wipes out most other jobs, who’s going to have the income left to pay the tradespeople?

I'm in the same field as you @FlyingCatGirl and totally agree with everything you've said. I'm not able to progress career wise anymore as the only step is to cover the whole country for an employer. Which as a single parent I can't do, and honestly don't want to if I could. It sounds like hell.

AI is coming for our jobs too. I'm starting to get wise to the amount of AI written risk assessments dropping on my desk. None of them are any good, but people think it's enough.

Even the HSE has been cut so hard for so long they don't have enough inspectors anymore. So far less fatalities and law breaking are being punished in court. That's not good either.

That is proper doomsday thinking!
I think there's enough people making money to support some trades. Particularly 'foundational' ones like electric and plumbing, particularly as electrics will be needed for things like wind farms and solar to power AI. My son's degree is in robotics and AI - but he thinks a rapid next step is that these things will standardise and will 'self learn', so needing very few jobs in it...(That's what he learned on his degree). However, supplying power and physically fixing stuff, that's not going to be taken away yet.
He can wield a laptop, programme, and understands AI/semi smart programming, so plans on using that with electrician on commercial work...

I'm always appalled at the HSE bulletins because there's still so many falls from height, so many people getting dragged into machinery that hasn't been isolated, it just isn't getting any better. There needs to be regional inspectors around the country keeping a much better eye on companies and I'd love to do it!!

I got my L3 award in Education and Training and used to do safety training in my last job at a steel plant before I was made redundant and I'm trying to save a float of savings as I've found a training company that will let me restrict my travel radious if I join them as a freelance safety trainer. I've had enough of office politics, unrealistic expectations and dishonesty, I'd rather give self employment a try.

Of course very dexterous tasks like lifting someone out of bed or drawing blood will be done by a human, but all the other simple tasks will eventually be done by a robot. A robot can deliver food and drink to rooms, fold the washing, dispense medication, empty the rubbish bin, and mop the floor. I'm a flight attendant and I've seen some of this technology in Asia - they have a lot of cleaning robots in many of their airports that I'm sure replaced actual human cleaners.

Building robots who could do personal and nursing care tasks would be incredibly expensive.

But it would be lovely. I would much rather this, not at the mercy of a human that doesn't want to work in care

Not very nice for the person needing care though. If they need reassuring about the personal care being carried out, how will a robot help? Treating the residents like robots sounds awful to me.

I would far rather have a robot looking after me in my old age- I feel it would give a lot more freedom and automony

I am concerned about AI and future jons. If we don't adopt it quickly we'll miss out on potential big gains to productivity that are badly needed and our economy could lag behind others even more than now.

But there's big risks; and i cannot see how in practice universal basic income will work unless all (private) housing is nationalised and then allocated according to space need.

I also think thy UBI will lead to big inflationary pressures; and taxation will need to be linked to consumption or a 'cost of doing business ' charge within the UK

It is a time of significant change. I really don't think we are prepared at all

I think one of the issues around care work is the low pay and shift work. Plus they still want you to have some relevant qualifications.

If you can get a similar income on benefits, why would you even consider it?