> Anything that can replace a deeply experienced s/ware engineer can replace anyone in the employment stack

Nope, just knowledge workers. We’re decades away from automating many manual labor professions, even “unskilled” ones.

Turns out brains just aren’t as special as we thought.

> Nope, just knowledge workers. We’re decades away from automating many manual labor professions, even “unskilled” ones.

How do you figure? We’ve already automated away way more manual labor jobs than we currently have.

> Nope, just knowledge workers.

Nope, just a specific kind. Those who developed and cultivated only a very specific skill set at the expense of all others.

I used to think being a generalist, and having persued technical roles with a people facing element was to my detriment, but it’s turned out to be the best decision I ever made.

I had the opposite thought.

Being a generalist was very useful to me 5 years ago. Now AI models have made everyone a generalist. That wide but not terribly deep skillset was immediately devalued by the AI models.

You can argue that the models fuck up 20 percent of the time, or that they make poor code but there is a massive part for the industry that is totally fine with that and I think people ignore it to their detriment.

The major blocker for manual labor automation in that fashion is cheap energy. China is ahead of the pack with the States' weight behind aggressive expansion of solar tech, and still can't do that.