Good news is, I have found new career opportunities. See attached.
I have always wanted a job that requires a long stick.
Are you implying VFX artists are the new horse and buggy drivers? Because of AI? Choose wisely what though?
what is the clever acronym for ‘my experience’?
oh that’s right - ME:
dishwasher → plate cleaner → dishwasher
Yes. Exactly. The choices that affect the rest of your life.
But I mean, with this possible AI specter looming about, what does one choose? I see a lot of people saying, “go into the trades!” I guess it’s the new “learn to code!” except with lower salaries (and I wonder what happens to a market when it gets over saturated?) and more potential to blow out your back and knees by the time you’re 45. If the fear is AI (which to me is an overblown fear to gin up more investor money, but I digress) then you’re kinda damned from every angle
yes…. the operating theory that I am working from now is that in additional to the devaluing of, and increased chaos in “Hollywood”, AI is going to destroy nearly all “knowledge worker” jobs globally.
So when someone in their late 20s is wondering whether VFX is a good career, which would be for the next 30 years, well, that is a big FUCK NO!!!
One way to look at it: The skills we all learn in life and career fall into three categories
- Trade specific skills (green screen keying, blend modes, video formats)
- General work skills (problem solving techniques, completing something in a specific time frame, finding and sorting information efficiently)
- People skills (communicating, building rapport and trust, dealing with difficult people, your reputation)
When you think of AI, or any of the other changes that have happened, and will keep happening ever faster, they mainly impact the first category. The rest is transferable.
No career these days will ever last 30 years without massive change. So if you expect a ‘fuck no’ free career path, you will be disappointed. That ship has sailed.
And so the solution is not to replace one ‘no longer 30 year safe’ career with another ‘no longer 30 year safe’ career. The better way of framing this, double down on general work skills and people skills. Then acquire a decent amount of trade specific skills to get paid well. If the ground shifts, be ready to replace the trade specific skills with a new set, and keep going.
What we do loose is the super deep not 10,000 but 50,000 hr trade specific experts. But in return, you remain profitably employed for your working years without undue stress. Pick door 1 or 2.
As a side bar: There is a good analogy in corporate career paths that illustrate the shift between these categories and why separating them is important.
Early corporate jobs are ‘do-ers’. You focus on job specific skills to produce things, you get along with other people, and you finish work on time.
The first gate in the corporate ladder is when someone becomes a people manager. Suddenly you do less, you shift to general work and people skills, to get others to do work. You generally still know how to do everything yourself, but you need to let go and trust others to do it.
The second gate comes at the director level. There are more and more people and layers of people. You no longer have the experience about all the details, you can no longer do everyone one of these jobs yourself, but you still have solid domain knowledge of the function. You can tell a good result from a bad result.
The last gate comes at the executive level. At this point you don’t even have domain knowledge anymore. Now it all comes down to people skills and managing by indirect data, as the work of others is reflected in business metrics and finance data.
The ability to remain relevant even without trade specific knowledge isn’t new. It’s just that in traditional Flame artist roles it never was important or relevant.
And at each of these gates a lot of people stall in their career path and drop out, because they cannot make the transition to the next level. They’re unable to shift between these categories for a variety of reasons.
There are also people that stall and drop out, because they’re unable to tolerate change. They will follow the yellow line all the way over the cliff. People have different personality traits and some are more conducive to change than others. You don’t pick your personality trait, it forms early on and you have to work with what you got.
This is nice insight, but it’s not really what I’m questioning here. It’s all well and good to talk soft skills, but when someone is claiming that “all knowledge worker” jobs globally will be wiped out by AI, none of this applies. If that happens there are way way WAY bigger worries than whether you know comfyUI or not or whether you can wheel and deal at a networking event.
(I also want to make abundantly clear that I do not believe AI is on the verge of wiping out knowledge work. As a matter of fact, if we’re throwing down predictions, it seems very much like a bubble that is being propped up by lollipop and gumdrop dreams (we need more compute!!! That’s all!!!) and investors that have sunk too much in to admit it’s not the product they were sold on. When that pops, we’ll definitely see some pain.)
Hi Jan,
This is a great explanation of the ladder.
Now if the 1st rung is replaced by machines, you need much less of the 2nd run (people to manage the people).
Then that leaves just the 3rd rung, which then become vibe managers.
Absolutely. The all knowledge workers being wiped out is a wet dream by Atlman and Co that they’re shopping to CEOs who are not good at economics 101. It’s not going to happen, because everything would collapse. Doesn’t mean a few will try, but it will fix itself.
And it absolutely is a bubble at this time that will likely burst before too much damage will be done to the knowledge worker base. There will be significant damage in the economy and the stock market, and as result some pain for knowledge workers just because of an economy in recovery mode.
There have been a few memes circulating on the fact that OpenAI is now leaning into adult content and has internal memos hinting at selling ads on chatbots. Both of those are hail Mary revenue moves because the math is already broken. To sustain their spending revenue from AI products would have to grow at unnatural rates on a sustained business, and the realities on the ground look very different from that.
And it’s not the CEOs or the workers that will judge this story. It’s the investors. And investors do know math. Remember what happened when the investor class came calling for the profits at the streamers? It got fixed quickly, albeit painfully for a lot of folks in our industry which had over scaled on content production beyond what economics 101 considered sound.
I do think some flexibility in your career path is worth planning for, so you don’t get caught off guard when the sand shifts. But I’m pretty sure some type of work, including some type of knowledge worker jobs are here to stay. You can’t cut 1/3rd of the economic fly wheel out without it getting out of balance and disintegrating.
If you need an illustration - consider or watch what happens when a jet engine turbine blade breaks or falls out of the hub. It’s a rather violent situation.
This is how an unplanned disassembly of a fan blade ends:
(Pratt & Whitney PW4000 engine loosing a hollow-core blade over Denver, CO a few years ago on a United 777, known problem of a marginal design)
This may be our economy if Altman and his friends have their way for too long and the bubble doesn’t go poof before then.
The good news, this plane landed safely and nobody was injured. The same will be the case for our economy in the long run.
being mechanical watchmaker is still a viable career today, so you never know..
Ai white-collar related Layoffs announced today, UPS 48,000, Amazon 30,000.
This is on top of Amazon’s announcement last week of almost fully replacing its blue-collar workforce with robots. Amazon is starting now to replace hundreds of thousands of jobs.
I think I read that Amazon are also laying off 13,000 middle management so that clearly wasn’t worth the html page it was written on.
Ironically for anyone here that has children of a school age, chegg are reducing their workforce by 45% - clearly the robots are better at personalized learning or something.
free
dumb
Yes, the more interesting part of the cumulative Amazon stories, is that it will turn them into a net job destroyer. Meaning they’re replacing more exisitng jobs at other companies that go out of business due to Amazon taking over market share, than Amazon will create while taking that market share. So over time Amazon, even though it’s a massive company, will result in fewer total jobs in in the economy. Still not paying any corporate taxes, and using up all our grid capacity.
Makes for a real feel good story.
“Meanwhile, what are you stuck with? A resume and reel that says you do one thing.
And that thing doesn’t exist anymore.”
Agree.
I don’t think we have even seen the beginning of the mass unemployment that will occur with any employment position that can be reduced or eliminated by the use of “AI.”
“Stock Price Uber Alles.”
with an unlimited, unregulated budget, endless opportunities for personal growth, a sizeable sign-on bonus and clemency for your student loans:
actively recruiting in los angeles.
I have less than three years left on my career itinerary. I’ve been planning for this for 30 years. For me it’s kind of like, AI please put me out of my misery already. This is what I sent to a friend this morning as we were discussing the state of things.
“it’s already over, everything now is bonus”.
There is an irony here that if corporations replace a whole bunch of employees with AI, and the unemployment rate rises significantly, then who is going to be able to afford to buy any of their products?