u/Key_Length7680

The CEO of Microsoft AI told the Financial Times that he predicted “human-level performance on most, if not all professional tasks” being done by AI and thinks that most tasks that involve “sitting down at a computer” will be fully automated by AI within the next year or 18 months, with accounting, legal, marketing, and even project management all being vulnerable.

Part of me thinks it’s a bit bullshit - because it’s obviously good for shares in a tech company that’s focusing on AI if they do scare tactics. But part of me wonders.

The part that makes me optimistic is - how the hell will any of these companies turn a profit if nobody has money to SPEND on their products because we’re all unemployed. Surely you can’t rely on the 1% of the population (or whatever it is) who are millionaires/billionaires as your only customer base.

The CEO of Ford, Jim Farley, argued recently on the podcast Office Hours: Business Edition that the problem with the economy is NOT that there are insufficient desk jobs, but that there are “thousands” of hands-on roles sitting there unfilled, many paying far more than most office jobs ever will. “The catch however is patience. These jobs often demand years of training and no small amount of physical effort. And it may be these two factors putting a lot of US workers off.”

He says Ford alone has around 5,000 open mechanic roles, with top earners able to pull in up to a cool $120,000 a year. That's close to double the average US salary. Yet Farley says that those jobs are proving stubbornly hard to fill.

‘We are in trouble in our country,’ Farley warned. ‘We are not talking about this enough. We have over a million openings in critical jobs, emergency services, trucking, factory workers, plumbers, electricians and tradesmen. It’s a very serious thing.’ Across the United States, he says, there's often ‘a bay with a lift and tools and no one to work in it.’

Was reading a piece about the white-collar bloodbath - this part made me wince:

Tobi Lutke, founder of Shopify, the $145 billion ecommerce giant, told his 8,100 employees last month that to hire anyone new, managers must clear a new hurdle: prove that a bot can’t do it. And for those already at the company, he ordered them to get good with AI - or else.

“I don’t think it is feasible to opt out of learning the skill of applying AI in your craft. You are welcome to try, but I want to be honest I cannot see this working out today, and definitely not tomorrow,” he added. “Stagnation is almost certain, and stagnation is slow-motion failure. If you’re not climbing, you’re sliding.”
This seems pretty nuts to me given where we’re up to with AI. Can AI really do, say, project management or run a marketing plan or spearhead difficult conversations in HR?

Full disclosure: last time I applied for jobs it drove me pretty crazy. Stopped showering or seeing friends and just holed myself up in my apartment applying for jobs for about 20 days until a friend staged an intervention haha.  

This time is going to be different! My plan is to attack this from a few different angles.

As per my boyfriend: “Don’t bother applying, try and meet as many new people as possible”
Essentially network! This is how he scored his last job. I’ve sent out emails to professional contacts and I’ve lined up a few different coffees. My plan is to at the end of this ask “Who else do you think might be interesting for me to speak to?”, generating a forever-loop of meeting new people in my field.

Deploying tech this time round: filling out the same forms over and over drives me low-level insane, so going to use the job application assistant on Zippia to speed things up in terms of form filling and generating first drafts of cover letters (which I’d then tweak based on researching each company). 

Find bridge employment: I used to freelance so I’m planning on getting in touch with old clients and seeing if anyone needs support. Doesn’t need to be a forever job, just something to keep me going. Also planning on doing low-wage work for a bit just so I’m not going crazy just applying ie dog walking, babysitting.

Besides this, I'm probably going to download a few different TV shows I’ve been meaning to get round to for forever…