For those who know me or tracked stuff in my prior articles, you'll remember that I became another professional statistic in the death march AI has caused over multiple industries. That was about a year and two months ago when I finally threw in the towel and accepted defeat as a professional writer. 20 years wiped out in six months by a digital tool that couldn't even write well but was free, so it was cheaper. Even the writing services that made thousands of dollars on our writer backs as brokers sold us out to AI as well.

AI is Like Death, It Doesn't Discriminate

Since that time, AI has claimed multiple other industries as well. Both the photography and graphic artist sectors have taken a pummeling as well. While well-known experts have still held their own on name strength, thousands found themselves out of work because companies immediately opted for cheaper crap than paying fair price for human-created work. In addition, artists then suffered salt in the wound when their own past work was being farmed by the very AI that was putting them out of business, rehashing their public work as new images without royalties paid.

Now, in the last few months, the latest sector to feel the poison of AI has been programmers and coders. At first, many thought that AI was too simplistic and couldn't produce quality code, only starting framework at best. Instead, what coders didn't expect, was that companies and those that hired them would find ways to make inadequate shit work for their needs, thereby eliminating the cost of the professional coder. This became obvious as major companies completed their AI push and eliminated the programmers in charge of building their AI tools, like Google for example. Now, we're hearing stories of well-experienced coders unable to find work; the story continues, humans are no being made obsolete or too expensive by cheap automated shit.

AI Will Just Shift and Replace, Right?

The counter-argument has been a resound repeat of the early 1990s Recession that people just need to be retrained and everything will be alright again. AI has needs to, and supposedly that new technology will create new jobs while old ones that become obsolete are phased out. What few bother to note is that what is provided as a replacement usually pays far less than the family-supporting income that was eliminated. 

In a rosy view, the BBC News parroted a report from PricewaterhouseCoopers that the world was just in flux, and only some fields would suffer big loss. In reality, the only area in their chart that probably won't see big losses for the next five years in health, mainly because so much of it still requires manual service for Boomers aging into their late years and needing assisted living. For the rest of us, the shift even in medicine is already happening as we are guided to online bots, databases and automated pharmaceutical delivery. Even doctors are seeing their skills becoming less valuable due to AI, as this doctor realized in how fast AI diagnosed a case that would have taken his team hours.

Time to Eat Dirt

So here we all are now in the desert, experts by our own rights in different disciplines, and we're scrapping at dust to find a new path out of burnt hell. It's not fun. The fortunate among us held onto our day jobs and freelanced at night. The unfortunate have been those whose primary work was caught up in the direct path of the AI march, and now they can't find a replacement job at all. There's no need for them. I feel for my brothers and sisters everyday I hear some idiot at my day job praise the benefits of implementing AI there too.

Personally, I haven't sat around moping. I used the downtime to just about finish my training in programming to build my own software and tools. I have no illusions at my age of working for someone in a company; agism was blistering and rampant in the tech field well before AI started, and I'm definitely 30 years north of my youthful 20s now. No, instead my focus is to build my own business and sell my own stuff; believe it or not, market pricing and business contracts have far more equity and fairness than anything in the employee-employer workworld now.

Getting Old Means Having Useless Clarity

I saw this future coming back in the 1990s when computers started to be commonplace. At some point, like the horse-drawn buggy, people doing the same work repetitively was going to be replaced. It was just a matter of time. We are very much shifting back to a trades and skills economy where you sell what you build for a living; the age of the employee may be almost gone by the next generation. The real question is, what can people do now to train for that likely future? We opted so hard to be a service society, most don't have any fabrication skills or know-how at all. The proof is evident in how service heavy the current economy is right now. Niccolo Conte created a really good visual below and available from Veronoi based on the Bureau of Labor statistics:

It's going to mean a lot of displacement and unemployment if AI continues to keep wiping out jobs over the next few years. If you thought the 2000s Bush jobless recovery was bad, get ready for the main show by 2030.

The one saving grace will be the passing of the Boomers and their wealth transfer. If families can hold onto that, then they can have a chance to stabilize losses while trying to find a new path. However, the medical and elder care industry are doing their darndest to grab that money before it get inherited, charging sky-high rates for care, medicine and elder services. Families will be lucky to inherit anything at all except estate debt if they're not careful.

Does this all seem like a depression-rant? I would like to say it's just that. Unfortunately, I make a practice of watching economic patterns. And AI is definitely a game-changer that will be felt socially for decades to come. What matters now is how adapt again.