Make Yourself Valuable in a World Where You Wont Be Needed Soon!

We are on the precipice of something amazing.

Unless you’ve been under a rock for the last year then you will at least have heard of ChatGPT and how it’s changed the way we interact over the web. Let’s get this clear though, this is only a basic model and far more upgrades and use cases will come regularly and faster and faster.

What IS Chat GPT? Well, let’s give you a clear and concise example of what it does. Here is a screenshot of what I asked it only a moment ago and what it did for me:

Basically, it could have written this whole article for me had I felt lazy enough to let it do that. It churned this out in less than one minute flat.

It doesn’t stop there though. It can do all sorts of things as just a text writer, including (but not limited to) write code for web developers, make poems based on what’s out there already, and give us ideas and prompts for anything we want to do. Currently it can do anything as if you had another pair of hands working beside you bar get you a cup of coffee and other physical things.

More worryingly was the end of this article, which is what I was trying to conclude my own article with, but how excellent would it be (albeit ironic) if I let the AI tell you itself.

Did you see that?

“Profound Impact”

Profound is an intense word. I think a lot of people underestimate the seriousness the effect AI will have not only on the job market, but on the economy and society as a whole.

• If your profession is a Chef and think you’re safe then think again. This was just last month as McDonalds opens up its first fully automated restaurant!

• If you’re a tree surgeon, like half my friend base is – then this one is for you. It wont be long until tree services are fully automated too. This was a sample extraction from someone requesting an AI tree pruning service, and way before we knew about Chat GPT and the huge amount of data it’s trained on.

• I’m a writer and it’s already possible to fully automate me if people so wish. Language models can also be trained on emotion to which makes me completely obsolete. Why ask me when it takes me around 1-2 hours to do what Chat can do in literally 2 mins. Also I’m rusty too!

• Imagine what is going to happen to human relationships when fully AI sex robots are a thing?

• Truck driver? Man they’ve been speaking about that for years

I could go on and on but I think you get the idea – no-one is safe from the upcoming integration of AI technology.

This reminds me to a conversation I was having with my friend Ben back in 1999 when I was telling him that eventually the internet would take over and we wouldn’t need to hop into our car and drive thirty miles to go and see a friend anymore. He laughed because he didn’t think anyone would do that because, “what the hell is the point in that?” – yet here we are, 23 years later facing a whole new set of problems that will be even more destructive than the Internet ever was.

For the first time my mind is blank. I don’t have any solutions this time. If you ever wondered why the west have trialled out Universal basic income in some prominent cities in the past, it wasn’t because the governments were being nice and kind, because let’s be real, that’s never the case — no, it’s because they knew of the emergency of this tech and how badly it will impact the job sector and regular joe’s ability to buy himself a pizza at the shop if he wants to.

The upside of this is that although governments are only self interested and look to make decisions where the money is directing them, at base they are still people too — and even although it doesn’t seem that they make decisions in our best interests, I think there will have to be some for of meet-in-the-middle between AI and humanity. I’m not some doom and gloom person that thinks the world will end, and I “do” believe that people want to do good at base, including governments.

So how will you be useful?

Well for one thing learn to code. I know it was a joke touted at writers on twitter that were losing their jobs en-masse because of the economy, but seriously. Learn to code.

LEARN TO CODE!

We laugh that ai will replace coders, but who will we need to design new code? In a truly dystopian future then ai would learn to code its own hardware but then that would need a series of mishaps from humanity which I’m willing to bet that would never happen. There will always be guidelines and safety protocols to safeguard a doomsday scenario. I’m hopeful anyway.

So learn to code ai. That will mean learning a healthy dose of psychology too. Not just interacting with other machines but you’ll need to learn how technology interacts with humans. We call these user interfaces.

This is what I’m teaching my son to do. I’m not sitting by and letting him be churned up by the masses, I want him at the forefront of change!

But, as I say coding is a very specific thing and only people that are persistent, good at maths and have a temperament for monotony excel in this so there are many other things you can still turn your hand to.

• Engineering of any sort will be a good one. We will still need engineers by the plenty, if not to do the donkey work, but at least create and lead.

• Sciences too. Whilst I can see robots being used to mix chemicals and do the dangerous work that scientists occasionally do in specific fields I expect a lot of the thinking and creating will be done by humans to a certain extent for the foreseeable future!

• Any fuel related trades. We gonna need that fuel!!

• Anything STEM related would be a good start.

That being said you don’t have to discipline yourself or your children in these crafts through lengthy and expensive college and university degrees, you can learn yourself online. Currently, I am getting ChatGPT to teach me to learn javascript by asking it to give me a series of problems to solve whenever I’ve learned something new. A lot of the coders I employ are self taught and they are really good at what they do.

So to conclude this lengthy article I will say that whilst there is massive disruption coming down the line in the next 10-20 years on jobs, employment and social interaction, it will also make our lives significantly easier. If you think life is easier than 100 years ago you have seen nothing yet. Think of a world in twenty years where almost every need and want is secured for you by an assistant, or a personal entity.

Crazy, huh?

Posted on my blog here: https://learnisart.com/make-yourself-valuable-in-a-world-where-you-wont-be-needed-soon