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?

AI-based devices with arms and legs - not quite robots but a rudimentary version of it.

DD is doing a Masters of mathematics in mathematical physics in an RG University. She couldn't get to where she wants to be without going to university. She has a lot of options so hopefully she'll be ok.
It does amuse me when PP say get a trade, or get an apprenticeship like they're applying for a college course. It's not easy to get a good one. Places are very sought after. DS1 beat 400 other applicants for his.
DS2 did a two wèek unpaid (they later paid him) internship with 15 other students from his engineering course. He was the only one taken on.

We need to be really careful. AI is great at some things. It is not however (yet) human. At the point at which is becomes human, we are all fucked.

AI recruitment is a classic case. So many companies deploying AI recruitment. The problem is, "it" collects candidates like itself. Robotic, automated, fixed in time. Recruiters are finding although it saves time and money, and personnel, the shortlists it produces are flawed and not presenting the best possible candidates. People are still needed, for now.

It's not an easy answer, but what you have to do is prepare your kids to be adaptable, and keep the conversation going.

My parents led me blithely down the "you're a straight A student, go to an RG and work it out later" route. I graduated shortly after the financial crash in 08.

It turned out showing up with a 2:1 from a red brick complacently wasn't shit hot advice. You need to talk to them about what they want, what they're good at, and find work within that.

Can you chat me through why you think tax advice is AI proof?

(I’m a Big4 tax adviser)

Most of the AI companies aren't making profits yet. The costs of the energy required to deliver through AI exceed the value its creating/the demand for it.

The demand for it will only come when it delivers what humans do at reduced cost but the energy consumption is huge at the moment.

It was shit hot advice for me who graduated a red brick in 2011 with a generic non sector specific degree… albeit my parents had no idea and I figured out that was the best route by myself.

A.I is going to change the world as we know it.

Imagine growing up in communism and suddenly the regime collapses. Thats the level of change coming.

Governments have no idea how to manage. Business and computing are moving faster than society can adopt.

Everything we know, school, work, the economy, it's all about to come crashing down.

Worked for me too graduating in 2007!

I'd just think about it for a few moments. AI is your helper, don't make it more than that.

Re recruitment, it's a bit dumb if there's no human input but AI can be a helpful sorting tool

I would say they need to be out working in low paid jobs -waiting tables, mcDs, people facing skills which can go on their CVs so they’re are used to working not sitting at home though I know these aren’t so easy to find. volunteering if nothing else, Tradesmen round here can’t get young men to turn up regularly and on time. Women could work at this too but don’t usually do trades.

@WheretheFishesareFrightening

Ai isn't in the room when you meet the tax authorities. Your settlement details aren't online. It doesn't know you agreed that MAP settlement in 2023. It doesn't know that other companies in your sector are under audit for their employment tax issues.

Your lawyer or big 4 advisor does.

Its all the information, relationships, advice, connections, that are not online, that AI has not learned from. That legislation that is still being consulted on with an industry lobbying group who operate strictly Chatham house rules on their meetings.

AI can actually give really quite misleading information because of how much it is missing in terms of information not in the public domain.

AI learns from people. If the input disappears it quickly gets outdated and inaccurate.

And I hark back to my earlier post that we are not lamenting the loss of the man who used to light the gas street lamps.

The problem for the current generation is that the AI tool is so powerful it will change how we work and what we do - it’s unlikely to be a tool that just supports existing jobs.

If you’d have asked the person shovelling horse manure behind the horse and cart what tools he needed to improve his job and efficiently, he would have talked about better shovels and protective equipment. He wouldn’t have foreseen the revolution of the motor car that removed horse manure from the streets entirely.

And that’s the problem with asking today’s world about how AI will change the landscape, as we tend towards thinking about how it can make our existing lives easier - not how it can revolutionise the way the world operates. I have no doubt there will still be jobs (the motor car needed a driver and a mechanic and a petrol station after all), but most people aren’t visionaries who understand how AI is evolving and so it’s really difficult to guess where the jobs will be, as they are likely jobs that don’t even exist yet.

It is good advice to find what you’re good at and what you enjoy, specialise in that and then when it’s your turn to enter the job market work out how you leverage that as best possible in the landscape at that time.

The thing with AI is i see it as a bit like facebook.

When facebook started, everybody was sharing everything. Accept any body as a friend, post loads of your private information online, post about anything. Loads of content facebook could monetise, it was interesting so it drew more and more people in. We thought facebook was the product but the user was, we gave over so much for free and we were sold for marketing.

Until... people stopped. No one shares anything, no one posts on walls or feeds, your holiday snaps stay offline.

And facebook has become something else. A platform for shite videos so that you scroll endlessly and more advertising can be put in front of you. Does any of that advertising really drive sales? Debatable. But it makes money for Meta.

AI will morph & become something else because at some point they need to monetise it and right now, it has not happened. It has "learned" loads from everything that was online for free but what happens when people stop letting it access/use their content.

I think you're assuming that all AI is like the public face of ChatGPT or Grok. Firms already have their own systems which have access to all their data. Accountancy and tax advisory are massively affected by AI and cutting their grad schemes as a result.

Once HMRC become tech enabled, you might not be in a room with the tax authorities. And it absolutely does know what companies are under audit and what settlements you’ve made. The AI knows that about my clients already, it has visibility of the correspondence from HMRC so it knows all about any ongoing and historic enquiries.

I agree the AI isn’t even close to replacing advisers yet for the reasons you explain. I disagree that 30 years from now (and maybe 5/10/20 years from now) that all you’ve just articulated won’t be done by AI.

The main reason I’m not worried about my career is that I deal with busy people who don’t trust the AI gives the full answer and instead prefer human interaction and the trust and reliance that human interaction brings.

But speak to teenagers - if they have an issue with a product they’ve bought, would they resolve it with a chat bot or would they prefer to go into a shop and deal with a human to get a resolution? We are raising a generation who is growing up alongside AI, which I think will area significant shift in that attitude. They won’t care about the human element as it hasn’t been part of their life in the way it was for every adult alive today. If they’ve always had the convenience of tech and working with AI is essentially their mother tongue as they’ve done it their whole life, then why would they want the inconvenience of having to meet a person, wait until they’re available, build a relationship and accept the element of human error when the AI is capable of cutting across all of that?

Perhaps more people will join religious groups in the future ?
A communal way of life ?
Monks
Nuns

There will be jobs in It still
Or we will all be able to do 3 day werks.
Or hands on jobs
Critical thinking jobs
Relax
Enjoy life

The best advice is to control the narrative. Jobs may change or disappear but we control the rollout - we as in humans

Your settlement details might not be online but I’d assume they’re on the company sharepoint platform. My organisation has embedded a paid for secure AI and it has access to all closed documents but won’t scrape the information back into the web, that’s part of the package. So if I go on and ask it a question, it knows who I am, it knows my role and has access to spreadsheets, policies, etc. The AI will often suggest things like “do you want me to run this idea past document X to ensure everything is fully mapped”. I don’t even need to tell it to do that.

I do agree with a pp that we are currently struggling to envisage what changes will happen because of AI. I think the best advice is to take all the training opportunities around AI you can get. Try and keep up/be one step ahead of others around you. Get seen as the “AI expert” in your organisation.

I spend time every day thinking about this, and working in developing the AI. I think it’s extremely naive to think that it will just be a tool that sits alongside my existing job. It’s already changing my job, and has radially changed it in the last 3 years. It’s not going to stagnate there - that rate of change will just accelerate over the next 30 years.

We are already replacing jobs in accounting and tax with AI. We are creating new jobs too, but I don’t think it’s fair to say tax and accountancy are AI proof without backing that up with reasoning.

My organisation has embedded a paid for secure AI and it has access to all closed documents but won’t scrape the information back into the web, that’s part of the package
Sounds good... Until it gets hacked @JulietteHasAGun

I work with many people who are AI experts and doing stuff at the cutting edge of this technology. Even they are very divided on what the future looks like. Some are optimistic, some pessimistic. Right now, paradigms are shifting so quickly that the ground is like quicksand and it's hard to make confident predictions or position yourself "safely" with regard to anything, when it comes to how AI will affect it. Nobody really knows what the picture will look like in 10 years when your six year old will start thinking about careers. You honestly just have to try not to worry about it and see how things pan out.

In regards to the entry level jobs worry specifically right now, I'd say one thing teens could be encouraged to do is to do any extra curricular / voluntary / self started / freelance projects that involve taking on leadership roles and showing/acting on initiative. These are the kind of qualities that are still sought after in white collar roles.

I don't think aiming to control the narrative and make wise human choices is naive. Things will change but it's not out of our hands.

Somehow I trust that Americans will ensure it works for them, but will they change things to accommodate the Brits?

I think they are having a quiet brain drain and the H-1B visa system that imported talent into silicon valley is not working under Trump as well.

So not so sure it will be US will be an issue but other countries will.

Best analysis I saw of what AI currently doing is not taking jobs - jobs are a series of tasks and it's taking those and some jobs it's leaving last 20% of job as can't do and in some case never will be able to do - so it what happens to that % left p/t work or pushed into an entire job reducing number needed or not pushed higher up chain of employment.

I don't think anyone can say how it will fall out in job market - but as PP says apprenticeships and getting into trade isn't as easy as MN often makes out. My DC are at uni and about to graduate - two of their DGP saw entire areas dominate industry they went into not last out their working lives - and they trained in own time to try and keep up but car manufacturing and garment industry pretty it left these shores - you get as good as you can to get remining jobs and when that no longer an option adapt to what jobs there are.