Recent AI discussions makes it almost certain that jobs would be affected. It makes me wonder what happened when suddenly humans were replaced by machines. Assuming a lot of jobs were lost was it that lots of people suddenly found it difficult to afford meals or was it not disastrous at all and was a smoot h transition? Can we compare it to today’s AI revolution in terms of adjustment with jobs?
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In the mid-1990s my high school journalism class visited the local newspaper. They had their own skyscraper (only like 12 stories tall, but that’s still pretty tall for around here) and a huge two story printing facility that was bigger than our school.
Then the internet happened, and today that newspaper rents out part of a two story building downtown. They lost like 95% of their workforce. What happened to those people? Some retired. Some took other jobs. Some kept their same jobs but took on extra responsibilities. They had several rounds of layoffs, and usually whenever somebody quit, they just never hired anyone to replace them.
For those employees, either they were old enough that they could just retire and not work anymore, or they trained to do different jobs after the newspaper industry got its butt kicked. But eventually all those people found something else to do (in other words, they aren’t homeless now).
If you are under 30 and do a job that AI can do, then you are going to have to find a different career at some point. If you are over 50, the AI changes will probably not happen fast enough to get rid of your job. Implementing that stuff takes time, and it’s easier for a company to just kind of wait you out. But once you quit, they won’t hire anybody to replace you. If you are between 30 and 50 (like me), then it’s a coin flip. You should probably look at learning how to use AI to do your job faster, easier, and better. But you might have to get a different career anyway.
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