With the lastest news of AI layoffs, I’m struggling to understand how the idea of a career still holds. If careers themselves effectively become gambles like lottery tickets, how do we maintain drive and hopes in the longterm endgame of our struggles?
I know AI as an honest utility is itself a lie to some extent, but this only aids my argument further. People’s career struggles are panning out to be valueless because of a nothing-fad that no one could have predicted.
The thing is; now it doesn’t matter if your job has been done properly by AI or not, what matters is that it’s just cheaper. And when all companies jump on this bandwagon of enshittification for profit it becomes the standard. This already happened with customer support. It’s nearly impossible to get a human when you call for support. All customers hate it, make their life harder. But still all companies do it and with no alternative you just have to accept it. From what I see, the adoption to AI happens in two ways: either you want to make your human driven processes better by utilizing AI or for cheaper with AI but with ‘passable’ quality. And it looks like companies are mostly in the second camp. So I don’t think besides some exceptional cases and industries the quality of work will be a determining factor.