* I made the classic mistake of assuming the present was permanent. It never is anyway, small changes always ruined the present. The accumulation of small changes over my career has changed the way I work probably as much/more than AI has changed it this year, if you can believe that.
* I discussed the family budget with my wife, and made a plan to halve our income requirements. It will require a race in the short term, but allows a coast later on. This is key for me - almost all my tension regarding this phase is about the future earning potential of our household. If that goes away, who cares how work changes?
* I made the other classic mistake of not remembering how much I have changed and adapted over time. The breadth of things I have worked on is pretty remarkable, and the things I have learned to do are crazy. While things are changing fast now, they aren't changing quite as negatively or immediately as some claimed they would. There's room to adapt.
* I stopped assuming I had to work the way people said I should. Aside from CEO mandates, there's a ton of wiggle room in how you produce code. I read changesets and make manual adjustments to the pattern, etc. I write my own parts when I want to. I specify a design that I want rather than asking for whatever the AI wants. I get to own everything but the typing that way, and my RSI is improving dramatically b/c of it.
* I use AI to set up programming challenges when I feel disconnected. It sets up a tangible problem, and acts like a coach only when I need it. I use this to preserve the feeling of sharpness. Earlier this year I challenged myself to write, in C, from man pages only, a "ping" and "traceroute" clone. I did so on a flight back from a work trip.
* And I started reaching out to friends to hang out more. It's hard to doom about AI when your friends and you are having a beer and playing Container or Captain Sonar. Life has always been what's "out there" not what radiates from your monitor.
I stopped assuming I had to work the way people
said I should. [...] I get to own everything but
the typing that way
Typing the actual lines of code was fun, sometimes, but it was never the goal. I feel like I'm still solving the same problems.
Derek Thompson, in "I Know Why the Mathematicians Weep": "If intelligence becomes less uniquely human, we may come to value more highly what remains uniquely human: our capacity to relate and to care for one another".
Funnily my bot was called Cladius van der Bot, nice name ;)
People could learn things on their own but still pay teachers
Trainers, coaches, therapists… yes.
I doubt most people will be developing a rapport with an AI agent trying to sell you that contract at work, or helping you when you're irate and have escalated a problem a few times.
All of those except for therapy are awful career fields. Musicians, actors, artists (outside the tip top of the field) are all the butt of jokes about how broke they are. Social work chases people out once they realize how powerless they are for such poor pay.
Therapist might make out well for a bit, but it seems like a loaded term these days .
If you're aiming for the top, sure. There are plenty of people who make a living doing stuff like that and are happy because they enjoy it. You're unlikely to be one of those people if you move to an area where there's an extreme over-supply and try to "make it big", or try to be "pure" to the art and eschew commercial options. e.g. An actor in LA, the starving artist in a loft in NY.
> Therapist might make out well for a bit, but it seems like a loaded term these days .
Loaded how? I was thinking of psychologists, licensed mental health professionals, physical, occupational, and speech therapists.
even the job of freelance engineer is customer relation. how good are you at extracting product requirements? understanding a clients workflows? these take relational skills and are often what freelancers are paid for, beyond the ability to produce code.
Maybe we just sit around campfires and tell stories as the billionaires warm their hands on their burning data centers.
Don't forget that everything anybody owns is just a system we invented, my house, my garden, only a piece of paper that we all accept keep others from it.
We can reinvent ourselves. Idk, to me this is a comforting thought. But I agree it's still lacking. It's not simple, discussing things online helps develop language and vision around it.