What happens to kids if AI takes entry level jobs? What you advising them?

[Tffjyvkbh]

On back of the worming class boys thread. If AI takes over white collar jobs, what happens to all the m.c. communities. Education and aspiration became a feature post industrialisation once blue collar jobs disappeared and you needed education to get ahead in office jobs. What happens now? My kid is only 6 but already thinking about this.

If AI takes jobs, does education become pointless. How are parents guiding their kids? Looking at parts that lost industries, will parts of South east become like that once office jobs go?

If even Oxbridge and STEM is no longer enough to guarantee a comfortable life, then what for the young people?

They will be fine.

Stop worrying and enjoy your child being 6.

We have two teens (one a’level one gcse)
They will be fine.

Your child might hate maths with a passion - they will still be fine.

Teach them to enjoy learning, work hard, have a pride in what they do and to respect those trying to teach them.

They will be fine.

Honestly @Tffjyvkbh there is no silver bullet to leapfrog a direct course to the top future career, because no one knows.

Put it out of your mind, enjoy their childhood and they will make the decisions that are right for them when the time comes.

My RG graduate who can’t find a job is considering retraining as a plumber or hairdresser as these can’t be done by A.I.

Get a trade. Plumbers, electricians etc will fare better against AI long term and there’s decent money to be made and no uni debts.

Everyone says get a trade but if everyone does that, who will pay them? I guess that I do worry that I won't be able to guide them properly. It feels like it used to be much easier before, study well, go to uni, get a gras job. That's what me and all my friends did.

Interesting times are ahead.

Trades are great and less vulnerable to AI but i think salaries will go down from increased competition if everyone goes into trades instead of what they were going to do and not everyone is suited to doing a trade.

I also wonder who is going to employ a lot of the trades if there arent any other jobs out there.

It doesn't help that all my middle aged friends keep saying that their jobs are safe but young people are in trouble. Those young people are our kids.

There are jobs now that did not exist when I left school, even more so since when my dad did. Things will change, other opportunities will open up.
They need to work hard and be adaptable, same as it ever was.

Depending on how clever they are/if they like medical things, dentistry? That won’t be taken over by AI anytime soon. Ridiculously stressful though.

It's not that simple because what is really in the pipeline is a combination of robotics automation and AI. Humans will still be required to operate systems but ultimately let's face it, far less human positions will be required, even in the trades. Ultimately it will also end up being an issue for the owners of such tech as they will run out of consumers if we don't radically change our definition of growth and prosperity. AI, automation across the board and 20th century style capitalism are on a collision course. I agree it's pointless to worry about careers right now but at the same time we all need to acknowledge that a paradigm shift is on the horizon. Not a matter of if but when.

Honestly no one knows. I do not know if my young adult DC will have jobs in 3 years time.
I predict multi generational households and the bank of Mum and Dad being more important than ever.

At 6, your DC will have time to swerve and make different choices than those currently entering the system.

I worry about this too with 3 teens. All academic types who are more suited to desk type jobs than trades. I honestly don't know what to advise other than you just don't know. When I was finishing school everyone said we needed to learn German because it was going to be the new language of European business, that didn't happen.

Those are all the questions people asked when computers were first invented, and for that matter probably electricity, the steam engine and the printing press too.
Yet here we all are, still at our desks from 9-5, M-F for the best part of our lives.

Mine are academic too. They would make shit plumbers.

Typewriters and typists took the jobs of copyists.

computers before AI took a lot of jobs - people used to do spreadsheets by hand, and type memos and letters. The typing pool is a thing of the past.

times change.

AI is reducing the number of entry level jobs but people are still needed because AI makes a fuckton of mistakes.

I think this is different, tbh.

Nobody can possibly know. Don’t aim them at specific careers unless you’re sure they will survive, because once they get automated it’s game over immediately. Acquire knowledge and nimbleness of thinking – they’ll have to find niches when they get there, and certainly be able to do that better than any of us can now.

It’s fascinating how it’s impossible to predict I must say. I’m pretty sure office work will be destroyed, but there won’t be mass unemployment because there’ll be too much human talent around not to use. But that might be in completely unexpected ways. Who in the 70s or 80s would have imagined that we’d have so many baristas? We might end up with a future full of soldiers and priests.

That’s what people said when all those instances in mentioned happened 😁

I would love to be as nonchalant. But yeah, no point worrying about what I can't control. My own profession has been decimated by AI but I can afford to retire so count myself lucky.

My grad is working retail - nice retail (artisan), but still. I think their career will be down the toilet due to AI. Four ago it wasn’t really a ‘thing’.
Other one is graduating this year in STEM - he should be ok in his field but I’m not 100% optimistic. He’s very clever and personable, he wouldn’t be interested in a trade.

I heard on the radio that entry level graduate type roles are going due to AI. I’ll be keeping an eye on jobs markets over the next few years (dd14) and encouraging her as best I can to chose a career that has longevity. I’ve read that the ones most likely to survive AI are trades, nursing, teaching, accounting and law.

It’s not the hilarious gotcha you think it is. Lots of jobs disappeared to computers. Know any typists, for example? Records clerks? It made it much harder to get a foot in the door for young people as fewer data analysts are needed than the old jobs they replaced (for example) and that is now getting worse. And women in spinning and weaving had a good work life balance and control of their earnings before the manufacturing industry wiped out cottage industries and drew so many people into appalling conditions in cities. It’s possible to appreciate technology while simultaneously understanding the effects of its development. But keep laughing as it’s clearly so funny that people are training and studying for nothing.

This.

When the gas street lamp lighter, horse carriage riders and typists lost their jobs they probably felt the same but we’re not lamenting over those careers today.

That said, I have no idea what the world of work looks like in even ten years, and that has factored into my decision not to have kids.

Infrastructure, think utilities such as gas, water telecommunications, power etc, rather than normal trades like electrician and plumber. We will always need that physical infrastructure to be maintained and people to manage it.

Health care, we are only getting mentally and physically sicker.

Also encourage diversity of skills and potential side gigs like photography.

Short term manual trades will fare better, but long term they will face increasing competition (from all the people told to "get a trade") and a decreasing number customers who can afford to pay for their services.

Additionally, robots and automation are to manual jobs what AI is to desk jobs. And robots and automation are advancing at a very rapid pace.

An experienced tradesman, say a bricklayer, supervising a robot assistant will be able to do the jobs of multiple journeymen.

We see exactly the same in tech, where a senior developer with Claude Code can do the same job as a team of 4-5 junior developers. So we simply stopped hiring new graduates.