BUT, they said learn programming, learn IT and that didn’t pan out long term. They said get your cDL and now those jobs are right in the crosshairs of AI.

A major wreck caused by just ONE will be huge. No way it doesnt happen.

starting salaries may not be great, but that degree in French literature will result in higher lifetime wages. No, I won't be able to source this until my secomd cup of coffee.

Entry and alot of low level STEM will completely lose out to AI.

Arts, languages and communication will actually likely benefit.

Me learning a trade in the National Guard & then trade school allowed me to work until I was ready to retire early
And I had zero school debt to pay

My step daughter is a nuclear pharmacist. Top of her class in every school she ever went to. Total of 6-7 years I believe. I asked her "how much of your college career was totally unnecessary for your profession?" She said "probably 1-2 full years" And for her, THAt was a LOT of money.

But thanks for the other side.

For me, my college education has paid for itself many times over and not only do I get to do something that I really love, I will be able to do the things I want to do when I retire because of a good salary that has allowed me to save a ton.

I can look around me in my own life and see that the majority of the people doing well are college educated, but I also can just quote the statistics and those show that college degreed workers make 62% more than non college degreed workers. Masters degree is like 90% more.

Intriguing post J2. Depends on the person IMO. My son knew from the time he was in 5th grade he wanted no part of college. He also knew from 9th grade on that he wanted to be a welder. So he enrolled at our local trade school in the Grand Rapids (MI) area called Kent Career Tech Center. He was doing great there when one day during his Sr. year a local HR person from a commercial construction firm came in and asked his Instructor for the 3 best students he had. My son was one of them and got an interview. He got the job and that was 6 months ago. He just turned 19 and is making close to $30 per hour with great benefits and a company truck. He is happy as a clam. They are busy and have approached him about becoming a crew leader: mission accomplished, right?

Not so fast.....

My daughter has had the opposite experience, upon graduating from college last May. She couldn't find anything in her major so she took a waitress job in Petoskey for the summer. Back home now and still has no full time job but is working a series of gig jobs and thinking seriously of starting her own small business. In the meantime her anxiety and mood swings haven't been fun to deal with. She thought a college degree ensured her a full time job with a company, and it sure doesn't these days. Her Mom (my wife) worked at the school paper and was hired by the Grand Rapids Press out of Michigan State U. and has been there the last 33 years. I have job hopped and finally landed in Education but it's been brutal at times. So everyone forges their own path to some degree and who's to say what's best: college or trade school? As I said, it's largely dependent on the individual.

It was actually possible to pay for college and housing by working, especially if you had some useful skills.

Our government -- federal, state, and local -- paid for most of my education from kindergarten through my four year bachelors degree.

In my junior year of college my share of the rent for a crappy student apartment was $85 and my student fees were about $1,200 annually. I knew how to cook my own meals on a budget.

Paying for my textbooks was my greatest concern. When I started college I got grants for that, and later on my grandma helped out.

My major was evolutionary biology, not exactly a lucrative course of study, but it got me jobs as a lab assistant and later as a science teacher.

I made most of my money then as a skilled laborer however -- as a handyman maintaining crappy student housing, and as a furniture mover.

The first time I made a hundred dollars in a day was moving furniture. The first class I flunked in college was organic chemistry because I skipped too many classes to move furniture because the money was so good. I'd get a call at 5:00 AM from the moving company about a job that day, even though they knew I had classes on Thursday, and say "yes," imagining I'd buy the ASB class notes and catch up on what I'd missed. I never did catch up.

That world does not exist any more. Wages for the kind of work I did have not kept up with inflation and college costs have skyrocketed.

My children are college graduates, they worked in college too, but it was still very expensive, more than they could ever hope to pay for by working.

But that has always been true of undergraduate liberal arts degrees. Two of the years are usually spent on rounding out a person in general knowledge of the world. It may not be directly useful to a career, especially if it’s a science field. But I think anyone is better for knowing sociology, literature, psychology, a different language, economics, history and the arts.
So the cost of those courses is much more at a prestigious university- you can always do that stuff at a smaller or junior college.

THEN finish up at the "name" school.
Few listen because they HAVE to go to the big school that mom and/or dad went to. And sometimes the parents are the ones pressuring them

Get the "knowledge of the world" education in high school. Allow dual enrollment to get that out of the way

The grandson is a sophomore in high school and has two dual enrollment classes this year. Trying to work them in!

College a scam? GTFO. College is not a glorified vocational school. Even for those earning professional degrees, it offers a broader perspective on the world and teaches critical thinking and problem solving skills.

That “scam” lifted me from the lower middle class to a solid professional upper middle class life. I was the first in my family to attend college. My sister, who didn’t, continues to struggle in near poverty.

My daughter will graduate college next year. And thanks to my “scam” of an education, she’ll do so without debt.

Calling my comment "RW bullshit" is exactly why they call us elitists & they'd LOVE to see you calling it that. A LOT of "average joes" CHOOSE technical school. We need THOSE votes
My National Guard training taught me "critical thinking & problem solving skills"
Sure, its not for everyone. But it allowed me to retire at 53 with 7 figures in assets & a 6 figure income.
For years College costs have risen faster than MEDICAL costs; yet top schools have billions in endowments.

back in the day, it would be "OJT" (on-the-job training).....companies don't want to do that now, they need that money for the CEO

How modern technology is slowing making their jobs less relevant.

Hell, we were using it some form at late as 2019 - https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/coding-jobs-wont-save-coal-country.html

It's hilarious really. We didn't care much about protecting blue collar jobs back in the day and pushed coding as the solution to those jobs going poof. I really have to wonder just how many of the coders, programmers, ect al, who are behind AI today would have been otherwise happy working the blue collar jobs we sacrificed at the altar of computer programming.

I would not only learn to code in more languages, but I'd learn to do it using AI. And I'd learn to use AI to do all sorts of tasks for me. But I'd probably want a systems engineering background over a software engineering one.

And I appreciate blue collar work, my dad was a die maker and worked every hour he could get for decades. But he worked so he could afford to send his kids to private school so we could get into college, so we wouldn't have to do the type of work he did his whole life, the type of work that broke his body and cost him so much time with his family.

You still want those desk jobs, you still want to sit in an office over standing on a factory floor, it's a better life for the 4 decades or more you'll be working 40-50 hours a week.

Spot.

They are getting rid of those and just keeping the more Sr eng folk and telling them to be managers for AI coding tools.

Not seeing this much yet in my field, but we are starting to use AI for business operations tasks.

One of my colleagues has been teaching a class on AI for 15 years at one of the local colleges, been meaning to have lunch with him to ask him his thoughts.

My whole point is that not going to college is not the answer for most still. I am starting to see people more and more talk about college being a scam and why should their kids go when AI is going to take their jobs anyway. You know who are still making sure their kids get degrees? The wealthy are, that's who. A college education is still going to equip kids to succeed at a much higher rate than those without one, AI or no AI. Your kid will still make a ton more on average with a degree than without one, so why are we seemingly seeing more encouragement to not send kids to college? Seems like less educated people serves the Right.

I'm assuming your industry just doesnt trust AI for code yet. Tech firms with less immediate life or death consequences are moving faster.

I think college is the way to go, but I'd avoid CS. I think the golden age of tech jobs is coming to an end.

I think we are so short on engineers that we still need them and will still need them to run AI and to do the critical thinking tasks along side AI.

The thing about engineering is engineers are already quite adaptive. SW engineers become experts in several domains just naturally, you learn the new work before you. Systems engineers even more so.

The idea of using AI to code and test mission critical software or hardware is pretty far away IMO. It would be treated like a qualified tool and be part of any aircrafts certification means of compliance which gets filed with the FAA and is good for 10 years to develop that airframe. So if you wanted to use AI to code any actual aircraft function, it would have to be in your plans to do so right now if you wanted to fly within 10 years. It's not in anyone's plans right now that I know of. But there's all sorts of artifacts that go along with development that AI could help produce or validate that aren't necessarily part of the cert package. It's complicated, to say the least.

I think the golden age of tech is misinterpreted. There aren't millions of narrow skilled engineers coding the same types of things over and over, there's more jack of all trades type engineers than that who aren't all that afraid of AI, more excited by it actually.

I am. That’s not happening where I am or with other companies I know. We still hire junior engineers (I am doing 2 interviews tomorrow). The main issue with everybody learning to code is that being a coder doesn’t mean being a SWE. I need engineers. Problem solvers. I need people who can analyze the problem, conduct research when necessary, identify required resources and execute. Junior guys can’t do all that themselves, but knowing and executing that process separates the “coders” from the SWEs. AI is pretty bad at it. AI is good for doing tedious stuff like writing libraries or documentation, but it requires pretty close review.

But I have several on my team and many more in my org. Layoffs are hitting them pretty hard and the ones who get let go say they are facing a tough market.

... especially those who can figure out what went wrong when it goes haywire.

Do we really want to live in a world of self driving cars and trucks guided by code that was thrown together by some vibe coding idiot?

Being able to produce more products quickly and bring them to market is going to create all sorts of new jobs in maintaining those products as well as assessing them for engineering changes and improvements. There's always follow up work on anything technical.

I think AI will be a technological accelerant. The time between idea to market is going to be shorted and the time between version 1 and version 20 will be shorter. Consumers are going to get better products more quickly. But there will be a lot of man power still that goes into that.

... have the airplane I'm flying in miss the runway, or have my house lit on fire by a "smart" clothes dryer.

Code written scattershot with AI assistance is much harder to maintain than well structured code written by thoughtful humans using well established libraries.

I'll confess to be a Luddite. New high tech consumer products rarely impress me.

I drive an old pickup truck and it's a tossup between the fuel injection / emission control system and the AM/FM radio as to which has the more complex electronics.

I use the oldest 4GLTE flip phone I could find a replacement battery for. It's small, it's rugged, and it doesn't have to be recharged every day. Mostly I use it as a phone, sometimes for texts, rarely as a camera.

I'm a Linux guy and the way I use Linux is very similar to the way I used BSD in the late 'seventies and early 'eighties.

What sorts of technology have actually made the world a better place?

Just the thought of being tethered to an iPhone horrifies me. This Halloween a young teen came to our door dressed as a KPop Demon Hunter ( my best guess ) and simply held up her trick-or-treat bag without a word, her eyes glued to her cell phone.

Ai is going to revolutionize driving and traveling on our roads for the better. Driverless cars are already safer than human driven ones and the more of them there are, the better that's going to get.

We're obviously not there yet, but that's going to really change the world when most people don't drive anymore. Cars will look different. People will change their traveling habits. Imagine you can take a nap on the way to work in the morning, you might live further away. Imagine going out drinking and then having your car drive you home, no more DUI risk.

I would like to live in a world where I don't interact with automobiles of any kind in my daily life; a world where cars aren't even allowed on the streets I travel daily.

It's a grave imposition on my personal freedoms that automobiles and cell phones are forced upon me, that I can't simply boycott them if I want to be considered a fully functional adult in this society.

Before committing to a five-year architecture program I worked as a carpenter, equipment operator, in a machine shop and other similar work. That helped me to decide what I wanted to do in college.

Those skills also paid my expensive rent while in school-- ceramic tile work and small remodels paid well in Manhattan.

I work with high school kids in career pathways programs. i would never put it to them to pick one or the other, every kid is different and we are all talented.

As for AI, last month a speaker to a high school class said something like this: Anyone who doesn't take the time to learn about AI is in danger of being replaced by AI.

So yes, it's an issue but it can also be a career.

Everyone is a better person for being well rounded in knowledge and skill sets!

his commercial construction job. Yes, they hired him as a welder but he only does that about 30% of the time. Carpentry, Steel fabrication and other skills are emphasized too so he's getting a helluva early education in all. His company also paid for all his certifications at the local community college and he's doing those every week night after an 8-10 hour work day. He's happy, albeit exhausted at times and we are elated for him. Gotta forge your own path as I tell him. Nobody else will do it for you.

When I was young, counselors would say things like "Maybe you're better suited for trade school" only if you weren't doing well in school.
I know a guy who went into HVAC right after high school. Went on to run his own business with 100 employees. He lives on the beach in Florida now & he's not even 60. What did he tell HIS kid to do? Get his HVAC license.

Yes, AI and robotics will replace millions of jobs, and many of these will be jobs that college graduates now hold. But many more will be in semi-skilled and non-skilled areas.
This is why there is a push to deport millions of people. Room has to be made for people who are now in jobs that won't exist in 20 years. The nation has to be programed to have lower expectations as far as what the average person can achieve in the employment market.
Well educated college graduates aren't going to settle for less than what they expected their college degree would get them. And right now we have millions of college graduates with huge debts and jobs that pay a lot less than they expected to get. A college degree was oversold, and the correction toward lower expectations has been initiated.

We're beginning to see the federal government exhibit hostility toward colleges and universities that it expects will re-form higher education into something they control. Less people in college, and only the right kind of people.

So they're saying kids should learn a trade. Those are code words for lowering your expectations. We all know their aren't a lot of open jobs in that sector, so that idea isn't going to work, meaning the next generation of adults will have to shift down even lower to mill work, specialized jobs that require hands on, and manual labor such as farm work.
This is not going to be an easy transition; it will require a strong central government with the ability to force changes the people don't want. That's what is emerging in the republican party right now.

I don't think this will go over well.

Last edited Tue Nov 11, 2025, 12:48 PM - Edit history (1)

And that's the point I was trying to make I guess. It really disheartens me to hear such hopelessness from parents.

I grew up in the 80s, from the time I could read I was told that the path to a better life for people my age was going to be a college degree. That the blue collar life my parents had wasn't going to be a viable path to the middle class anymore for most workers.

You captured the essence of it, "Learn a trade" is code word for "Lower your expectations." And that's not to slight tradespeople in the least, some of the brightest and hardest working people I've ever known work in the trades. But this is what the Right is pushing, that working people are going to have to settle for even less.

Because I had no debt I saved as soon as I worked. I bought small homes 1 by 1 over the years. Kept most of them. And when the layoff blade came for me, I simply didnt look for another job.
In my job as a field tech I had the freedom to do a lot more during he days too.
I did have an "inside track" on what wouldve been a good job but I was required to get a degree. And it wouldve put me inside a bldg all day. I wouldve had a decent retirement but it also wouldn't have been at 53. And I probably wouldnt have started buying homes.
Its still possible today, but a lot harder thanks to all the HGTV shows making people think they can make 400k rehabbing ONE house.

I knew damn well if I went to college I wouldve partied & ended up flunking out.

College is definitely not for everyone.

But this idea that college is useless is creeping in and it's just not true for most people and feels like the Right telling people that good jobs won't be an option in the future.

If one wants (key word) to be a doctor, lawyer, engineer or whatever, then go to college. Find and do the job you want as you're going to spend an awful lot of time doing it most likely. If what you want to do doesn't require college, then don't.

That said, learning a trade isn't for everyone. It shouldn't be looked at as a default "any idiot can do this" career. I watched my buddy (who is a master plumber) put in my new water heater. I know I couldn't do that even after any amount of training.

Degree creep has been the reality now and it has been getting worse over time

For the most part it’s just a way for HR to have an arbitrary weeding out process. We’ve built an economy over the last few decades of a lot of non value added work that just pushes paper or bits in a computer around. Few of those jobs required sitting in a classroom for four years. We’re due for a reckoning.

Now I get the debate between teaching skills vs. a broad liberal arts education. Universities teach few marketable skills (in most degrees), partly because that’s outside the scope of their mission. The latter isn’t for everyone however. I have known people that simply did not thrive in a traditional classroom environment, but led successful careers in skilled trades or other positions that required technical skills, but without a requirement of an actual degree.

It’s not a matter of whether you need more education beyond high school. You almost definitely do for most positions now, whether for the roles you mentioned (law and health care are state sanctioned often requiring a licensing to practice), or any sort of skilled trade.

One thing I’ve noticed is that in Europe there is a greater push for co-ops and apprenticeships giving the opportunity to learn and earn at the same time.

This debate shoudnt be ideological. It’s a matter of practicality and allowing everyone to thrive in a career that best fits their own anbilities and interests. I’m not a fan of all aspects of European education (tracking at a very early age is way too rigid and doesn’t allow second chances for early screws like me), but false promises of additional lifetime earnings and career success aren’t cutting it for many. Subsidizing education debt while propping up bloated university budgets is benefiting only a few at the top. One of my more recent regrets is taking out loans for a graduate degree. Sure, it was a good expiremce learning, but I feel suckered in by the marketing and the average salaries after. I would have been better off just investing that money in an index fund. Instead I’m paying compounding interest, vs gaining from it.

A junior college education helps round-out a person's knowledge and provides them with a perspective for preparing for the future. Not everyone wants or needs a four-year degree and most jobs really don't require more than a two-year degree. If someone is going into a tradition "professional" career like a doctor, lawyer, engineer, etc. then a four-year or more college is required.

High school graduates who have no aspiration to enter the "professional" fields could do well to enter trade schools that will help provide them a career where they'll earn enough to live a comfortable life. The truth of life is we'll always have a need for people in the construction, plumbing, electrical, automotive, etc. trades.

Consider the irony of the professionals who think those in trades jobs are somehow less important. Who build and maintained the facilities and equipment where the professionals work? Yep, those in the trade occupations.

I became a nurse! Yeah, I'm an AD (Associate Degree) nurse, one of those 2-year degree people that the BSN nurses look down their noses at, but you would not believe the number of baby BSNs I've had to teach the basics to.They come out of college with heads full of theory and not a clue about real patient care. I guess the idea is that they can learn that when they're out in the "real world", while we lowly AD nurses start clinicals the first week of school. Of course the thing is that the 2-year program, for a lot of people, ends up taking 4 years, because you have to take all your prerequisites like English, Speech, and the real toughie, Anatomy and Physiology (that one weeds out a lot of people) and get on the waiting list for regular nursing classes. It wouldn't have taken me that long because I had a lot of those from my other college days----I was once a linguistics major!---but I was going to school while married with 3 young kids, so I part-timed it until I got into the nursing classes. I graduated when my daughter, the youngest, finished first grade.

Sometimes I wonder what I would have been doing had I finished my linguistics degree. My main interest was in translation issues, and why you would or wouldn't use a certain word in favor of another. Remember the uproar over W.'s use of the word "infidel"? That kind of thing. I feel that I might have ended up working for the CIA or maybe the State Department or something. Or maybe not. At the time, though, I couldn't see anything for me except teaching, and I knew I didn't want to do that.

Maybe it's been a while, but I thought most 4 year college grads had to do real world work. If they were technical, often more than 1 internship. And for fields of study without an internship requirement, there were a real world type major project to do. College isn't like high school, for the vast majority of degrees, you're working in your field some before they'll let you graduate.

At my work, we get bright students doing internships for 1 or 2 rotations. They make money and work here for 6 months with college credit being given. I've been assigned interns who have really impressed me.

Some of them still focus more on theory than practical application, and some of the students still don't get enough hands on. When I worked in Knoxville, TN, we got students from two BSN programs. The ones from Carson-Newman, a small Baptist university in Jefferson City, had a terrific clinical instructor who saw that they got plenty of hands-on experience. The ones we got from UT didn't seem to get as much. Some of the C-N grads came to work with us after graduation and they didn't require nearly as much orientation training as the ones from other BSN programs. I noticed this in my travel nurse experience too. The AD grads seemed much better prepared to hit the ground running, for the most part.

That's why going to college is a better preparation for life than not going. It's never been to guarantee a job.

must not work on a LOT of people

First, the AI we see now remains far from AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) but it's on the development track. And that progress is encouraged and accelerated by the oligarchs who now dominate society. We don't publicly see the real AI at work yet, but it's getting to the point where it can build, train, refine, and improve itself. As this process continues, we move closer and closer to an event horizon where the AI improves itself at speeds beyond human researchers' ability to comprehend, let alone regulate, it at all. Already the systems are becoming opaque to us, as these software entities increasingly operate well beyond our analytic capabilities, our relationships with these technologies become more personal and less operational, as developers behave increasingly like tutors and nannies. But this is still years away from the real AGI stuff; how many years? Who knows, but a decade seems like a safe upper bound.

When I was in college and trade school in the early 2000s, we were already at the point where the tech one used when starting trade school and college often became obsolete before graduation. That pace has not slowed.

Those who advocate for vocational training with technology to substitute robust college educations which teach underlying principles, as some kind of ultimate response to AI replacement are dispensing dangerous advice. Humanoid robotics are also advancing rapidly, and many of these robots can be operated semi-autonomously by AI. Not that AI needs such bodies to interact and compete when 3D printers and CNC tables are possibilities. Beyond that, rudimentary autonomous self-operating vehicles exist already, are in a continuous process of refinement, and will likely be commonplace within 20 years.

When the humanoid robot who vacuums your floors, cooks your food, does your laundry, and chauffeurs your family around can also play chess at a grandmaster level, paint like Van Gogh, speak all human languages fluently, handle plumbing and electrical wiring jobs around your house, and tutor your kids in calculus, the role of humanity will change of necessity. One way or another, humans and our societies must change to adapt to this new pressure. Simplistic shit like "get a Real Job" just won't cut it. Not anymore.

"Get a real job."

That sums up some of the sentiment I hear about this topic. As if office work isn't a "real job" and most work for degreed people isn't "value added."

The whole narrative plays off jealousy and plays right into the Right Wing playbook and apparently Project 2025 also.

Will things look different? Yes. And we can't know all the ways it will look different and what the best responses to it will be. But don't go to college is an answer I am quite confident is the wrong one for most young people, just as it has been for my entire life.

... where nearly every job has it's own unique challenges, especially in older buildings.

For the foreseeable future the demand for plumbers and electricians, and the security of their employment, will depend upon the overall health of the economy.

We already have the technology and resources to build a comfortable sustainable economy where nobody is homeless, everyone has access to healthy food and good medical care, educational opportunities are open to all, and nobody has to suffer abusive working conditions.

We just have to make it so. Alas there are too many stupid, evil people, some of them billionaires, some of them politicians, some of them religious leaders, standing in the way of human progress.

"We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten." -- Bill Gates

He's not wrong.

For the foreseeable future

We just have to make it so. Alas there are too many stupid, evil people, some of them billionaires, some of them politicians, some of them religious leaders, standing in the way of human progress.

Give the virus some capacity to evolve too...



Computers are pretty simple in comparison to biology.

Yes, I can see the future:

In a few million years nothing will remain of our civilization but a curious layer of trash in the geologic record.

The 21st century future I imagined as a child reading science fiction is not here and never will be. Some of that future was stifled by human avarice but a lot of it was simply not possible in this universe. It turns out that most science fiction is pure fantasy, no different than imaginary worlds of wizards, elves, and unicorns.

I was in a computer lab when the second Berkeley Software Distribution was released and I remember thinking it was one of the most beautiful things I'd seen, almost like the Apollo 11 moon landing. Today I see all sorts of consumer bling built around computers but all things considered space travel hasn't changed much and neither have computers. These technologies are not as simple as they once were, the complexity has increased, but they are not proportionately more sophisticated.

When I peer into the future it looks more like Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home than Star Trek and I'm not disappointed by that.

Published research shows that AIs progress in capability in a stepwise relation to the number of interconnections in their neural networks. The process of each individual node can remain essentially the same but as more and more add in, we see these quanta where capabilities, sometimes in relatively broad areas, make huge leaps. And with the parts getting cheaper, smaller, and faster exponentially we'll be hitting those quanta for higher caps at an accelerating pace as this research goes on.

And this is from the research that gets published. You saw BSD 2 launch, you know that what's not getting published is also extremely interesting, perhaps more so. The billionaires are going all-in on having these god-slaves on order, and for a time that's how it'll be. As you say, they'll bling it up, to secure their investments both monetarily and socially. When we can't live without it, we'll tailor our society around it. Even now, we get to see that process in its infancy; horrifying as it is, I also see a morbid beauty to it. Utterly fascinating, especially if we could look at it from Pandora's perspective.

I think you can see there's something fundamentally wrong with that idea.

... it will kill them practicing law, medicine, and engineering.

It won't be by malice, it will happen because there's no actual intelligence in AI.

In college during the 1980s we discussed this. It's here and absolutely no planning was done. Trump's last Administration jobs bill was really robots bill. They won't need tech people either.

It can not replace highly skilled workers, and I don’t think this generation of AI will ever be able to.

But this type of AI could be used to train robots to replace a lot of what the trades do.

Last edited Wed Nov 12, 2025, 06:31 AM - Edit history (1)

I know how jobs are being “lost to AI” some and it’s not because of super competent AI or anything. It’s a hijacking of our rights and space by people who are selling out their colleagues and employees to those creeps in tech..

This is a false narrative about merit etc. I evaluate myself as a very mediocre scientist and pass at least the most basic Dunning Kruger metric. The problem is all the people who are gaming the system with bs and think they are awesome.

It is true that in science and medicine there is a real elite and a medium elite. But there are also people doing slipshod, lightweight shit and getting away with it and fucking over other bottom of the barrel types like yours truly. I am mediocre but at least I am not daft enough to represent slipshod and lightweight bs as awesome! They are the douchebags that shill for rubbish that awful and stupid GPT thing.

I feel indignant. The tech press is bs and it’s all such bullshit. Damn sleazy bottom feeders.
My experience so far of hearing about AI implementation is people telling me it’s heavily promoted and largely useless. It’s promoted by people who don’t do research themselves and are not students.

This is fucking Brawndo taking over society. When will be stop gullibly taking those creeps out of Si Valley at face value. The odds are heavily tilted in their favour and they promote emotive narratives that shut off people’s brains re evaluation of their actual credibility.

The problem is the real elite (e.g. Steve Chu) are not “good at business” (ie mostly scamming the public by now) nor at PR. And this moronic crowd - Zuck, Musk, Altman (that guy is such a douchebag and his mouth is open in most of his pictures)-they are not geniuses. They are douchebags. But they do know how to steal, lie and deflect. They are no different from Elizabeth Holmes. She was just worse at it.

I am not saying good AI couldn’t exist etc. There is legitimate stuff in tech. Take quantum computing. But most of this sleazy wealth transfer destroying scientific research or other jobs in the US is driven by GPT like junk I’d bet. Those people are full of shit.

Also, I hope no one ever sees this outside DU. I can’t help venting here sometimes -you guys are all I have ;-/..

But I don’t want to formally be to science what Taylor Lorenz is to journalism…lol..

The worst part about the shithole where I came across the rise of these junk technologies is that they probably cynically figure that many of us affected by their bs will just go on to become whatever the fuck an influencer is or leverage AI politically etc.

That’s why these people are unfit to work in anything related to human behavior or psychology. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the personalities of actual scientists as opposed to those tech creeps of Google, Facebook etc.