I got lucky and ended up at a job with almost infinite growth. Masters in mechE and I do controls, scada, and inventory management stuff. My wife is a high paid dental assistant.
My job is imposter syndrome defined. I enter a factory and I’m the most important person in the building, but I feel like I barely understand what I’m doing. Wish I could give career advice besides ‘be the expert in the room’. Which I know cant be everyone.
I think its more, roles that didn’t need specialty skills are being removed by a very dumb tool that dumb people think is amazing. It seems amazing if you dont understand the thing you are asking it to do.
Living off the land is a great example. I grow ~10% of my food in a large garden, mostly tomatos, apples, pears, and peppers. Most people dont know how hard and specialized it is to do this. When we lost power for a week 2 years ago, we were totally fine. Provided food to our neighbors, no issues. Because of our time spent learning how to grow and preserve food.
I’d argue allowing the offloading of the simple specializations AI can handle makes an overall more useless person.
I have degrees, make $110k before taxes and overtime. Our household makes over $200k before taxes, with 2 kids. We are upper middle class, i think. $85k, single person household is firmly middle class.
We do 1-2 large vacations with a dozen camp trips yearly. Our vehicles average age is also 20 years old and our house is way below what we could afford, so that may be part of our financial freedom.
We bought a 2024 volvo recently and it comes with LED headlights. They are hilariously accurate with their beam pattern. Bright as fuck everywhere except the oncoming lane, it almost looks like a defect when driving on an empty road.
European cars with LED headlights are fine because they have to actually prove to their government they pass headlight standards. In the US the manufacturer only has to say they did the regulation. European cars mostly chose to only make European approved headlights.
Honestly, navigation is an insanely satisfying skill to work on. Navigation without GPS fills an instinctual bucket that makes no sense to me. Letting it atrophy is a big failure in becoming a functioning adult imo.
It’s one of those things I know is hard to explain. Similar to the covid pandemic, I kept saying “I want to read the papers 10 years in the future”. I want to know what happens after the hype and actual science of the impact something has becomes available.
I’m extremely skeptical that a tool that offloads basic critical thought and brainstorming will be good for society as a whole. I use it sparingly, but it usually wastes my time. Except for summarizing things it is good at that.
I think it will collapse into normalcy in a few years, and it will be moderately useful. The stealing it does is also a major problem.
As a strange example, I asked Gemini a question similar to my published thesis. It stole directly from my these with no attributions.