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holmesworcester
titanomachy
That category has a median pay of $105,350, and includes "general and operations managers" as well as "chief executives". I assume it includes executives of very small enterprises.
connorshinn
Good point. To take it one step further, if they are including 'general managers' and 'operations managers' in this bucket, then that should include the GM and Ops Manager at places like retail stores as well (for example, every Best Buy location has both positions, I'm sure it's similar for Walmart and other big box retailers too).
nitwit005
I took one glance at the chart and decided the results were impossible because of that.
Apparently "top executive" median pay is $105,350 per year: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/management/top-executives.htm
next_xibalba
Remember that exec tech salaries are extreme outliers. I worked for an exec in manufacturing. He had full p&l responsibility for a business segment with ~150 employees, $27 million in revenue at 40% gross margins, and a production plant. His total comp was ~$300k.
Now just think of the comp levels in sectors like government, education, etc.
nitwit005
The number of people in the category is simply impossible for any normal person's definition of "top executive".
If you click the link it mentions "general and operations managers". They're tossing a lot of different roles into the category.
Aurornis
> Remember that exec tech salaries are extreme outliers.
It's the combination of tech and big or fast growing companies.
People who operate in FAANG or Silicon Valley bubbles (or who spend too much time on Blind) can lose track of what salaries look like in the rest of the world.
I often share Buffer's open salary page because their compensation is actually pretty normal from all of the data I've seen and hiring I've done: https://buffer.com/salaries
Every time it gets posted there are comments from people aghast that the software engineers "only" make $200K and in disbelief that the CEO's salary is "only" $300K.
SpicyLemonZest
Sounds plausible? Even a company with 100 employees and few growth prospects is likely to have a couple of executives, and most companies are small.
andrewmutz
If you own a painting company with three employees you are a CEO and fall in the top executives category. You may or may not make 100k a year.
sporkland
Don't a lot of CEO's famously pay themselves $1 and make their wealth on equity appreciation / capital gains?
tehaugmenter
Congress people are making about $176k, it's crazy to think top execs "median" make less than a congressman.
zeckalpha
This is also base pay
seneca
These categories are extremely broad. Top Executive includes general managers, legislators, school superintendents, mayors, city administrators, and a lot of other government jobs. The name is misleading, it's basically non-frontline management.
Chief Executives is actually a specific sub-category of it and is, obviously, much smaller.
malfist
The gig economy is ruining government proxy metrics. A good number of ride share drivers are CEOs
MeetingsBrowser
> it runs somewhat contrary to standard ideas of class and inequality.
Can you elaborate?
pc86
When people think "top executives" they think of a very, very small group of people making tens of millions of dollars a year or much more. The reality is that that's not the case.
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visarga
If AI produces surplus where does it go? Not talking about investment backed datacenter buildout and AI labs. Talking about the results of AI work...
I think AI outcomes distribute to contexts where it is used, and produce a change in how we work, what work we take on. Competition takes care of taking those surpluses and investing them in new structure, which becomes load bearing and we can't do without it anymore.
In the end it looks like we are treading water, just like it was when computers got 1M times faster in a couple of decades, but we felt very little improvement in earnings or reduction in work.
Surplus becomes structure and the changed structure is something you can't function without. Like the cell and mitochondrion, after they merged they can't be apart, can't pay their costs individually anymore. Surplus is absorbed into the baseline cost.
skybrian
For my personal projects, any time saved on programming gets used up writing more ambitious programs.
For a business, the question is whether you can make more money by doing more ambitious things.
Breza
For a business, the second question is what your competition is going to do. If you have a monopoly over something, you can reap the rewards. But if you're in a space with lots of competition, you might not end up with any better profit margins if everyone's in a Red Queen's Race.
ripvanwinkle
The surplus goes to the owners of the capital. Labor has been losing to capital for sometime now
RivieraKid
If existing capital starts to generate excessive profits, more capital will be built, which will require human labor and will make the original capital less valuable.
lbreakjai
In theory. In practice, the excessive capital of the incumbent allows them to price out or buy the budding competition, or the legislators, so as to protect their position.
The natural state of a capitalist system is the monopoly.
yifanl
If AI being a million billion zillion times more productive at doing bullshit jobs nets in very little economic gain, then that lays bare the net economic value of all our bullshit jobs.
But given that the stock market hasn't panicked, this must mean at least one of these premises is false:
1. Economic activity is relatively flat.
2. AI makes us a million billion zillion times more productive than we used to be.
3. The stock market is rooted in reality.
thewebguyd
> lays bare the net economic value of all our bullshit jobs.
This was already obvious, the more important question is what are we (collectively, society & our governments) going to do about it?
We (should have) already known most of our jobs were bullshit jobs, especially white collar jobs. The difference is now we might have something coming that will eliminate the bullshit jobs.
But society will always need bullshit jobs or the whole system collapses. Not everyone can go dig ditches, so what do we do?
drivebyhooting
Clean the bed pans of boomer retirees. And pay into a collapsing social security to finish off the wealth transfer.
downrightmike
the market split from reality in 2020 for the last time. This is all just zeroes and ones, which is why they can make the real economy tank.
adolph
> In the end it looks like we are treading water, just like it was when computers got 1M times faster in a couple of decades, but we felt very little improvement in earnings or reduction in work.
I think this is a very important point. The hedonic treadmill means real gains are discounted. The novelty information cycle is like an Osborn Effect for improvements, like the semi-annual Popular Mechanic's flying car covers where there is an enticing future perpetually nearly here and at the same time disappointingly never materialized.
ivanjermakov
It's up to business owners to decide. At the end of the day, in free market economy, goods become more affordable.
Agriculture is a good example of that: http://www.johnhearfield.com/History/Breadt.htm
cucumber3732842
I think it's gonna mirror how the white collar classes, coastal elites, professional managerial class, whatever you want to call them, sold the countries industrial base to the far east. They got a little bit of money out of it but the biggest gains were the material wealth. $1 widgets instead of $2 widgets. All the people who weren't hurt by it got to live with more material plenty. Of course the nominal values of things didn't go down, but that's just inflation which is somewhat separate of an effect.
This time the jobs most in the crosshairs of AI are the jobs that constituted the paper pushing overhead of modern society, all the paper pushing jobs. Instead of $1 widgets from China replacing $2 domestic widgets it's gonna be $1 AI services replacing $2 services that require a real human.
This is hard to reason about because people tend to consume these kinds of services in big multi hundred or multi thousand dollar increments but in practice what it means is that when you have to engage an accountant, engineer, having something planned out in accordance with some standard, that will be substantially cheaper because of the reduced professional labor component.
And of course, as usual, the string pulling and in investor class will get fabulously wealthy along the way.
estimator7292
Remove AI from the statement and ask again.
Does the work you do provide more or less value to the company than your salary? Where does the difference go? If your killer feature closes a $5M deal, who gets that money?
We live as capitalist serfs. Someone else gets all the value you create, and you should be grateful for the peanuts they toss back to you.
lm28469
> If AI produces surplus where does it go? Not talking about investment backed datacenter buildout and AI labs. Talking about the results of AI work...
The 1% pockets, this is where the vast majority of the extra productivity computers/internet/automation brought goes to for the last 50 years: https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
matthest
The study doesn't say it went into the 1%'s pockets. It says it went to 2 places:
1) The salaries of corporate employees 2) Shareholders and capital owners
Regarding number 2: "Shareholders" would include anyone who owns any stock at all, including a lot of middle class people with a simple S&P 500 ETF in their portfolio.
And the increase in productivity allowed more people to become capital owners, AKA entrepreneurs. The explosion in software entrepreneurs, for example.
jliptzin
#2 only works if the public is allowed to invest when the new technology is in its early stages, which is currently not the case. Microsoft went public in 1986 at a valuation of $2.3 billion (in today's dollars). What's OpenAI / Anthropic going to be worth by the time they IPO? $1 trillion? $2 trillion?
munificent
> Regarding number 2: "Shareholders" would include anyone who owns any stock at all, including a lot of middle class people with a simple S&P 500 ETF in their portfolio.
Yes, but shares are not at all uniformly distributed. Tim Cook owns 3.28 million shares of AAPL. For comparison, the 50 million Vanguard customers have to divide 1.3 billion shares amongst them, averaging about 26 shares of AAPL each.
> And the increase in productivity allowed more people to become capital owners, AKA entrepreneurs. The explosion in software entrepreneurs, for example.
The majority of those end up getting bought by larger software companies.
Overall capital ownership is increasingly concentrated among a small number of elites.
lm28469
Then why are wealth inequalities exploding? Why are we just about to witness the first trillionaire?
Because no matter what fairy tales you want to believe in your $20 "invested" in palantir won't make you a "shareholder" lmao
dbgrman
Cool stuff. would be nice to have a color blind mode. I literally can't distinguish the red from green in this visualization.
RomanPushkin
Created a temp hack for you: https://gist.github.com/ro31337/89b24edaec0a5bfbf73bc5abfbfb...
(don't forget to "allow pasting" in [chrome] console first)
conductr
Curious as someone that doesn't experience the issue but assumes that your system Accessibility settings, maybe high-contrast, would be useful instead of expecting individual sites to tailor their color palette... does that not work?
kieranmaine
This comment prompted me to find out about colour filters for mac os. I enabled the red/green filter, which made it easier to see the differences on the site, however the downside is it affects a lot of other colors and images on other sites, so is not a feasible solution, for me at least.
conductr
I toggle it on and off with a keyboard shortcut on a rare occasion colors are hard to read for me. Mostly use it on my phone actually (it's a triple click of the lock button on my iPhone). There are shortcuts on Windows and MacOS too. Doesn't seem like it would be too inconvenient for someone that actually suffers from color blindness or a sight issue, I would expect they'd run into the issue more commonly than me and would then know how to solve it for themselves.
A lot more inconvenient for others to have to pick colors that satisfy all potential sight issues, which is primarily why I think it should be an OS solution rather than an individual creator's responsibility. It's not that I don't care about those with the sight issue, it's purely about who is responsible for creating a reasonable solution. And honestly, there's no way every creator is going to study accessibility and so it's just a never ending uphill battle. If you had a tool in your system already that could help, why wouldn't you use it?
vharuck
People who make data visualizations should try to learn the "rules of thumb" to not confuse or exclude readers:
1) Avoid contrasting red/green and blue/yellow, as these are common colorblind pairs.
2) Pick shades that still look different when shown in grayscale.
3) All bar charts should have 0 at one end.
4) Please no 3-D pie charts.
To find good color palettes, check out https://colorbrewer2.org
conductr
Everyone is creating visuals, not just data scientists or designers that probably should know these rules.
I generally am against people who have expectations of how they want others to communicate. Be it colors, pronouns, whatever- you’re just setting yourself up for disappointment and it’s not out of malice so just move on or find your own way to deal with what people are putting out there.
limbicsystem
Maybe a job for Daltonize:
https://www.vischeck.com/run.html
It twiddles colors in a physiologically-aware manner to improve legibility for colorblind observers:
https://github.com/wadelab/VischeckTinyeyes/blob/main/websit...
cman1444
Insights from a real estate perspective: Most of the jobs that have the highest AI exposure are office jobs. Clerks, assistants, secretaries, software developers, bookkeepers, customer service, lawyers, etc. There has been a narrative the past couple years that office real estate was recovering as companies returned to office. If AI job losses materialize, it looks like there may be a second hit to that sector.
treyfitty
Data is coming from BLS. Their data lags the true state of affairs, and their growth projections are never reliable. Remember when they touted from 2000-2010 that Actuaries are the hottest growing field with the best forward looking outlook?
BLS forward looking guidance means nothing when technology revolutionizes the nature of work.
newhotelowner
Their data may not be the latest but isn't it's more reliable. I used to participate in the BLS, and this numbers are submitted by employer every two weeks.
No one can predict everything perfectly. This is just the guidance based on the data that was reported. AI is advancing faster than anyone can imagine and no one knows the impact - good or bad.
CGMthrowaway
What do you believe is the true state of affairs?
exhumet
lol i always wondered how actuary ever crossed the radar of my partner in college and this must have been it. hey they just finished up their FCAS cert and they are riding quite high and quite comfy. but it is for sure a very small pool of people just due to the immense work needed to get that point.
YCpedohaven
[dead]
the_arun
Are we assuming - the data is of high quality? If quality isn't good, it is as good as synthetic data.
just_once
It wasn't even that long ago that Trump fired the BLS Commissioner and nominated someone that would "restore GREATNESS" to the BLS.
Putting aside the slop facade place atop the data....why would we trust the data?
c0d3rPrimate
[dead]
coldcity_again
>Software Developers +15%
Yay!
>Computer Programmers: -6%
Oh no
Kerrick
Software Developers median pay according to BLS: $131,450 per year
(Source: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...)
Computer Programmers median pay according to BLS: $98,670 per year
(Source: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...)
Software developers typically do the following:
- Analyze users’ needs and then design and develop software to meet those needs Recommend software upgrades for customers’ existing programs and systems Design each piece of an application or system and plan how the pieces will work together
- Create a variety of models and diagrams showing programmers the software code needed for an application
- Ensure that a program continues to function normally through software maintenance and testing
- Document every aspect of an application or system as a reference for future maintenance and upgrades
(Source: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...)
Computer programmers typically do the following:
- Write programs in a variety of computer languages, such as C++ and Java
- Update and expand existing programs
- Test programs for errors and fix the faulty lines of computer code
- Create, modify, and test code or scripts in software that simplifies development
(Source: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...)
marcosdumay
Still look the same to me.
lesuorac
Ignoring the sentence that admits they can be the same ("Programmers work closely with software developers, and in some businesses their duties overlap.").
Programmers is like a translator; somebody else came up with what to do and you're doing the mechanical work of converting words into C++.
Developer involves coming up with what to do.
Hence programmers is a lower paid position.
shimman
May look the same as a worker but if you're a corporation hiring an H1B worker the difference between computer programmer and software developer is a notable difference in the budget bylines.
shagie
In older distinctions, there were Systems Developers and Application Developers and Computer Programmers. The distinction largely was around that "Computer Programmers took the specifications from Developers and implemented them."
It feels like the intent was that "Programmers" were the ones doing the routine / lower skill tasks while the Developers were the ones that did the specification and architecture.
Those got juggled around and largely people getting listed as "Computer Programmer" is going down as the company relists them as Software Developer.
This is also part of the confusion of "Web Developer" which is also in there.
It reflects what government thought management thought title and roles were some years ago.
---
Edit: From days of old: https://web.archive.org/web/20110616142157/https://www.bls.g...
15-1132 Software Developers, Applications
Develop, create, and modify general computer applications software or specialized utility programs. Analyze user needs and develop software solutions. Design software or customize software for client use with the aim of optimizing operational efficiency. May analyze and design databases within an application area, working individually or coordinating database development as part of a team. May supervise computer programmers.
15-1133 Software Developers, Systems Software
Research, design, develop, and test operating systems-level software, compilers, and network distribution software for medical, industrial, military, communications, aerospace, business, scientific, and general computing applications. Set operational specifications and formulate and analyze software requirements. May design embedded systems software. Apply principles and techniques of computer science, engineering, and mathematical analysis.
15-1131 Computer Programmers
Create, modify, and test the code, forms, and script that allow computer applications to run. Work from specifications drawn up by software developers or other individuals. May assist software developers by analyzing user needs and designing software solutions. May develop and write computer programs to store, locate, and retrieve specific documents, data, and information.
... And for completness
https://web.archive.org/web/20130624010204/http://www.bls.go...
15-1134 Web Developers
Design, create, and modify Web sites. Analyze user needs to implement Web site content, graphics, performance, and capacity. May integrate Web sites with other computer applications. May convert written, graphic, audio, and video components to compatible Web formats by using software designed to facilitate the creation of Web and multimedia content. Excludes "Multimedia Artists and Animators" (27-1014).feceseater
Right, I'm a Computer Programmer but any job with that title is likely horrible. But having the title Software Engineer doesn't magically make me an engineer. All word games.
ripvanwinkle
I was wondering about that too. It shows 1.9M Software Developer Jobs and 122K Computer Programmer jobs.
Reason for hope
bilbo0s
I don't know?
They're saying that programmers will be declining. While Developers, and crucially, Testers and QA people will be increasing. That testers and QA become more important in the future sounds plausible to me in a future hypothetical world of ubiquitous AI.
All of that doesn't necessarily imply that the Developer class of employees will grow at the same rate as the Tester and QA classes of employees.
n00bskoolbus
I'd chalk that up to a change in terminology over time, I could be wrong there though
9rx
The BLS classifies them as different roles. In essence: Software developers plan, computer programmers implement. Which in many cases might be the same person, but it has always been true that one person can hold multiple jobs.
valleyer
That's not a distinction that actually exists in the real world. This makes me wonder what other made-up distinctions they are claiming in industries I'm less familiar with.
zkmon
Mouse hover seems to be critical for this visualization. Not much useful in mobile.
kklisura
Rendered via canvas. Ugh.
drnick1
So, become a lawyer? The profession is benefiting from AI (reducing costs), while gatekeeping and regulation limit entry and competition.
butterlesstoast
What struck me as interesting was the bachelors degree jobs on average pay 8k more per year than a masters education job.
spelk
I would speculate that careers that require Master's degrees tend to be more saturated, and the result of that is qualification creep. Examples of this include teaching, social work, library sciences, etc.
Skunkleton
It could also be that masters degrees concentrate in fields with lower compensation. Teachers are in high demand, but yet they still tend to have something beyond an undergrad.
nsvd2
Interestingly, it seems from these statistics the median wage for individuals with a Master's is lower than a Bachelor's. I wonder if that's because of immigrants who pursue higher education for visa reasons skewing the data.
post-it
Anecdotally, many people get a bachelor's degree to check a box for job applications, whereas many people get a master's degree because they love the field and/or are afraid to leave school.
My friends and I who have a bachelor's degree in CS make more money than my friends who have or are working towards master's degrees in CS, because the former are working in the private sector and the latter are in academia making peanuts.
lotsofpulp
Other possible reason could be many or most Masters degrees not conferring additional pricing power, and those people’s Bachelors degrees also confer lower pricing power.
Edit: Another possible reason that Masters degrees were less common in the past, so the Bachelors pay statistics skew towards people with more work experience in their higher earning years, whereas the Masters pay statistics skew towards younger people with less work experience.
mothballed
Masters seems to be a common theme in a few lower paying expansive fields like social work and education. I don't think that someone with a masters is typically making less in the same field all else equal.
ravenstine
Wow, I had no idea the reason my peers and I can't find another position in less than 12 months is because the market for software developers is growing faster than average!
dfadsadsf
Every year US absorbs 120k+ H1B+L1+OPT new visa holders. Considering there are 1.9M software engineers, market has to grow by 5% every year just to stand still. Add US graduates and you are talking about 10% growth required just to maintain employment. It's not realistic long term.
Congress/president should pause H1B visas or hike up fee to 200-500K so that only truly exceptional talent are allowed in. Right now it's just give away to corporations that are laying off people by tens of thousands.
knuppar
you're not factoring in a few specific things:
1) how many of these people leave the country in this analysis.
2) OPTs likely will get h1b/l1s/leave the country and are being counted distinctly.
3) not all h1b/l1/OPTs are for tech. majority for sure, but there's a conversation factor.
specially in the current situation that green cards are much harder to obtain and many OPTs don't find a job, I expect 1 to be much larger than in the past.
as a more general observation, this line of reasoning does fit lump of labor fallacies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy
NikolaNovak
Oh, there's a name for it! I've sometimes been struggling to verbalize in the past the logical issue I perceived with the "immigrants steal are jobs" absolutists, and this is a useful reference.
bequanna
Are new H1Bs a thing anymore?
Since the fee went up to $100k, I’m not aware of any companies still sponsoring hires who need a new H1B
buzer
As far as I understand the $100k fee applies only to consulate issued H1Bs. L1 -> H1B path (via AOS) is possible without fee. (Recent) US university graduates can also use similar path from what I understand.
We will see how much the $100k fee affects things during this H1B lottery round in few weeks.
guywithahat
I think a lot of people have just moved to L1/O1/etc visas to get around it as OP pointed out, although a lot of people are still hiring H1B's. Amazon has applied for over 2000 H1B's so far this year, which puts them on track for ~7000 for the year https://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-and-studies/h-1b-employe...
Dig1t
We have hit the cap for H1B's every year and we will always do so until we get rid of the program. Cheap labor will always be in demand.
A 100k one-time fee is nothing for big employers. That's 25k/year for 4 years, and if you realize that H1B's can't easily leave their job it's obviously worth it.
Compare hiring an H1B that is stuck at their job, to an American who can leave at any time. You can pay the H1B a lower wage to compensate for the fee you paid to get them into the role. 25k/year for 4 years is worth it for not only the reduced churn that comes with training a new person, but also you don't have to pay any of the incentives that come with getting a new employee into the role like sign-on bonuses, wage bumps, benefits etc.
shagie
That makes the assumption that every H1B, L1, and OPT is going into software development.
https://apnews.com/article/teacher-jobs-h1b-j1-visa-online-s...
Like many school systems facing teacher shortages, South Carolina’s Allendale County has looked overseas for help. A quarter of the teachers in the rural, high-poverty district come from other countries.
The superintendent praises the international educators — mostly from Jamaica and the Philippines — for their skill and dedication, but she is preparing to lose some of them as the Trump administration reshapes visa programs.
Facing higher visa sponsorship costs and uncertain immigration policies, Superintendent Vallerie Cave said it feels too risky to extend some international teachers whose contracts are up or bring on others.aantix
South Carolina's beginning teacher salary is $42,500.
That's at 125% above the poverty level.
xjlin0
Education sector should have exceptions
doomslayer999
[flagged]
sgerenser
The current $100K fee doesn’t apply to people changing from a student visa. This was long the path of people in software dev or other high tech careers: get a masters or PhD in the U.S., then get an H1B to start working. For those already on H1B after starting on that path, again the fee does not apply if they want to change jobs and have the new employer sponsor their H1B. So hiking that fee to $200K or more wouldn’t really change things much, at least in tech.
SamuelAdams
200-500k would make a large negative impact in healthcare. Specialty doctors cannot be trained in a snap, and there are limits on how many MDs and DOs are churned out of schools.
So healthcare industries turn to H1Bs to hire specialty positions in underserved / rural areas. The alternative is to shut these facilities down, which has other negative aspects to communities.
oscaracso
I was surprised to hear in this thread that there is a physician shortage in the US, because my understanding was that most Americans go to university and that doctors are paid well. Why aren't more graduates pursuing careers in medicine?
It turns out that they are, but (if I do not misread the situation) there is a regulatory bottleneck:
>The United States is grappling with a physician shortage, but the solution does not lie in simply opening more medical schools. As a physician-scientist and former founding dean of a medical school, I argue that the true bottleneck is not the number of medical school graduates but the insufficient number of residency training positions. Since the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, which froze the number of Medicare-funded residency slots, the United States has seen a steady increase in medical graduates, yet the availability of residency spots has stagnated. This mismatch between undergraduate medical education (UME) expansion and the lack of corresponding growth in graduate medical education (GME) is the key issue.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12256077/
As this has been the arrangement since 1997, by now a graduated American child of an immigrant H1B specialist trained in a foreign country may be unable to secure a 'residency training position' and therefore unable to practice medicine in his or her own country? It sounds absurd.
SilverElfin
Half the Fortune 500 is founded by an immigrant or child of an immigrant. Most of the others rely on immigrants in key positions. Pausing visas or hiking fees up doesn’t protect jobs - it just causes a future decline in the American economy. I think it’s literally cheaper in terms of the country’s future to just pay those who can’t get jobs to take a one-way flight elsewhere, if they’re not able to compete, than to make it harder to get talented people to move here.
doomslayer999
[flagged]
ea550ff70a
this comment has so many bad assumptions is not even worth debating
dijit
"Than average".
There's lies, damned lies, and then: there's statistics.
You have to counter the growth in jobs based on how many new people there are to take them, the location in which they are, and somewhat weirdly other jobs.
Plenty of people feel so dejected at the current state of things that they leave computer work entirely making "openings" where there isn't actually any growth.
Like all things that you try to understand: a single datapoint, when averaged, is like trying to calculate the heat from the sun by looking through a telescope at jupiter. It will give you a far-out tiny facet of data that only makes sense when coalesced with a hundred other ones.
rowls66
Maybe it’s because you are really a computer programmer. Computer programmer employment is expected to decline by 6%.
nerdsniper
Data is from 2024.
babytakes9month
[flagged]
bwhiting2356
Are childcare and kindergarten teachers really exposed to AI? In theory, we could put a class of 30 children in front of chatbots with one supervisor. But I doubt we would chose to do this as a society. If office work becomes more automated, early childhood education is actually one area I'd expect to take up the Slack. I can't imagine a situation where we have millions of unemployed former office workers but we leave them idle and let our children waste away in front of screens.
kevinsync
Childcare and education requires a specific tolerance, mindset and passion to be effective though. I'd be curious how many previously-PMs or HR drones or email jockeys would be adequate (let alone thrive) in an environment where there are next-to-nonexistent budgets, and you're servicing literal babies and tiny children lol
On second thought, client service folks might do extremely well here!
KellyCriterion
>specific tolerance, mindset and passion
What you mention here is the exact thing why my earlier relationship went bust, because I didnt have any of these, then the children arrived :-X
downrightmike
Con: kids
SamuelAdams
As a current parent, I assumed this was due to people having fewer kids, not AI. Additionally, with childcare centers becoming more expensive, many more families are looking to be stay at home parents or using grandparents / relatives to watch their kids during work hours.
wcfrobert
For most working-class Americans, education is a form of job-training.
In the AI maximalist world where humans are obsolete and cannot contribute to the economy in any meaningful way, there is actually no reason for public education to exist beyond being a free day care for non-rich people. Why learn algebra/calculus at all if the AIs can do it? Why should the US invest billions of dollars into public education instead of data centers?
I hope the US and AI leaders are still "speciesist" in that they put humans first. I hope AI will cure all illnesses, unlock space travel, and lead to flourishing of humanity, not just a flourishing of datacenters. It's also possible that AI just cleave societies in half and we are all worse off for it.
amsilprotag
I thought the same as gp, that putting teachers at high risk invalidates the whole visualization. If this is intended to be useful for future career planning, with meaningful gradations between specializations, than it should exist in the probability space where human agency still matters. And in that space, from a Riccardian and political economy perspective, high human-touch jobs with strong public unions should be among the safest.
BlusterG
In which theory? And if you can do anything in theory, then there is no justifiable "but" or any excuse. The only problem is your own ability to realize it or unexpected situation. A theory is a fact, a proven hypothesis, with all its parts such as formulas, laws, or a force as in the THEORY of gravitation. And no, you don't have one, and I assure you that you've never had a theory in your life.
panzagl
There are a lot of education and curriculum companies pitching basically this- replace those 'expensive' teachers with aides making minimum wage as all they need to do is recite curriculum and help them log in to be evaluated.
linhns
I'd say yes. One teacher can use AI and be able to cover for more children. Thus less teachers are required.
rwyinuse
That could work in ideal world where children behave nicely, and are eager to learn. But in reality that's not the case. Especially in high school big part of teacher's job is keeping order and being the authority figure. Good luck replacing that with LLM.
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It's wild that there are as many jobs in the category "Top Executives" as in the category "Retail Sales Worker".
This makes sense given both automation and the US's role in the global economy, but it runs somewhat contrary to standard ideas of class and inequality.