[agrippanux]

I had a similar conversation with my CEO today - how does the incoming crop of college grads deal with the fact AI can do a lot of entry level jobs? This is especially timely for me as my son is about to enter college.

So I ended up posing the question to Claude and the response was “figure out how to work with me or pick a field I can’t do” which was pretty much a flex.

[achempion]

Do you have an example of at least one entry level job an AI can do? What is the evidence that AI do such job?

[koreth1]

On some level, though this isn't quite what the person you're replying to was saying, it doesn't really matter whether AI actually can do any entry-level jobs. What matters is whether potential employers think it can.

To impact the labor market, they don't have to be correct about AI's performance, just confident enough in their high opinions of it to slow or stop their hiring.

Maybe in the long term, this will correct itself after the AI tools fail to get the job done (assuming they do fail, of course). But that doesn't help someone looking for a job today.

[mattlutze]

Customer service, entry sales, jr data/business specialist

- Ada's LLM chatbot does a good enough job to meet service expectations.

- AgentVoice lets you build voice/sms/email agents and run cold sales and follow ups (probably others better it was just the first one I found)

- Dot (getdot.ai) gives you an agent in Slack that can query and analyze internal databases, answering many entry level kinds of data questions.

Does that mean these jobs at the entry level go away? Honestly probably not. A few fewer will get hired in any company, but more companies will be able to create hybrid junior roles that look like an office manager or general operations specialist with superpowers, and entry level folks are going to step quickly up a level of abstraction.

[ornornor]

Paradoxically, the hardest jobs to automate are physical jobs it seems. A white collar worker is threatened by AI, blue collar not as much. I can totally envision AI software engineers (they’re already okay if you check their work), but as of yet there are no AI plumbers or mechanics. Maybe there won’t be, given the costs associated why producing physical machines vs software ones.

[metek]

Your average white collar worker is certainly challenged, but I think the talent of neurodiverse people is going to become even more vital as average-ability people are more and more challenged. Of course, there's the saying: "A man is his own easiest dupe, because what he wishes to be true, he will generally believe to be true." and I'm neurodivergent, so it makes sense that my assumption that shit'll probably turn out okay for me is a foregone conclusion.

[parentheses]

It's just a matter of time. Your statement assumes AI won't help to develop robotics.

Robotics is the big unlock of AI since the world is continuous and messy; not discrete. Training a massively complex equation to handle this is actually a really good approach.

[metek]

There's more options than those two; there's a reason that "spanner in the works" is a colloquialism. Humans become disagreeable when our status is challenged, and many people are very attached to the status of "employed".

[cruffle_duffle]

Ask your CEO why the AI can’t replace their job. Because most of their job is just regurgitating what an LLM might spit out.

[throw234234234]

That's easy. The CEO has authority and social connections, has done mutual beneficial deals, has the soft skills/position to command authority over others, has leverage over others, etc which is an economic asset. In an AI world this skill comparatively is MORE scarce than intelligence based skills (e.g. coding, math, physics, etc) and so will attract a greater premium. Nepotism and other economic advantages will play a bigger world in a AI world.

AI rewards the skills it does not disrupt. Trades, sales people, deal makers, hustlers, etc will do well in the future at least relatively to knowledge workers and academics. There will be the disruptors that get rich for sure (e.g. AI developers) for a period of time until they too make themselves redundant, but on average their wealth gain is more than dwarfed by the whole industry's decline.

Another case of tech workers equating worth to effort and output; when really in our capitalistic system worth is correlated to scarcity. How hard you work/produce has little to do with who gets the wealth.

[matwood]

Claude isn't wrong. The baseline for entry level has just risen. The problem isn't that it's risen (this happens continuously even before LLMs), but the speed at which it has increased.