It's been a while. I haven't advertised this, and it doesn't really come up in search, and there's no robotstxt so don't think anyone's too worried. There was an entry from when I visited Colin N. and Cynthia M. at Boston college that I never posted, but I read it back today and figured it was more of a journal entry. TLDR was all the people I met and saw there are wonderful, and I loved the idea of having a campus (NYU doesn't)

I came here today to talk a little more about how scary AI is for jobs. The one thought that brought me here is - if you're a contributor to some kind of open source project, say you're one of the brilliant people that I've met so far at CW, and people are training models and creating startups that actively harvest the projects you worked on to replace you, shouldn't you be mad? I'm not sure, maybe this'll come later on and more as jobs are replaced. Just a general thought.

The other insight that I've come across is that experts in their fields, no matter what the field is, are really well poised to do cool things. There's a lot of domain specific things that aren't directly indexed by these LLMs - take mechanics. Mechanics - they see parts on cars, hear noises, and identify problems that don't necessarily have info online. Creating "the" E2E solution will require some of their expertise and integration. Very similar to the traditional entrepreneurial skills, interviewing customers, speaking to people in the field. I guess that's why these huge companies are hiring AI trainers. Shoutout Mercor @$2.1Bn.

this is why it sucks that programmers, mathematicians, fields like that are going to be one of the firsts to go: the people in those fields made the fields perfect, that's why it's been such a wonderful thing and been such a great equalizer: everything is out there. Documentation, open source, online tutorials/lessons. I'll concede part of the reason why this is so easy to automate is the input and output is already p normalized, it's all uniform text, but overall the dots are connected because of the great work that so many of my peers have put out there.

I'm struggling to work through where the long-term opportunities will be - I'm guessing they'll be in making agents that replace these imperfect industries.

I asked perplexity what the jobs with the most amount of workers are, and their average salaries. As a mental exercise, go through these and thank about the opportunities that exist in these markets. Or don't. I'm a teenager, what do I know.

Rank	Occupation	Number Employed	Average Salary (USD)
1	Home Health and Personal Care Aides	3,988,140	$29,000
2	Retail Salespersons	3,810,100	$28,000
3	Fast Food and Counter Workers	3,734,100	$25,000
4	General and Operations Managers	3,630,100	$103,000
5	Cashiers	3,338,800	$25,000
6	Registered Nurses	3,172,500	$77,000
7	Laborers and Freight, Stock, and Material Movers	2,988,500	$35,000
8	Customer Service Representatives	2,982,900	$35,000
9	Stockers and Order Fillers	2,851,600	$30,000
10	Cooks	2,729,300	$28,000
11	Office Clerks, General	2,668,200	$35,000
12	Janitors and Cleaners (except maids/housekeeping)	2,375,300	$30,000
13	Laborers and Freight, Stock, and Material Movers, Hand	2,317,300	$35,000
14	Waiters and Waitresses	2,194,100	$25,000
15	Bookkeeping, Accounting, and Auditing Clerks	2,063,800	$45,000
16	Elementary and Middle School Teachers	2,061,600	$62,000
17	Secretaries and Administrative Assistants (except legal/medical)	2,030,200	$40,000
18	Secretaries (except legal, medical, and executive)	2,020,000	$40,000
19	Stock Clerks and Order Fillers	1,858,800	$30,000
20	Truck Drivers, Heavy and Tractor-Trailer	1,798,400	$48,000
21	Bookkeeping, Accounting, and Auditing Clerks	1,735,800	$45,000
22	Postsecondary Teachers	1,699,200	$80,000
23	First-Line Supervisors/Managers of Retail Sales Workers	1,685,500	$52,000
24	Miscellaneous Healthcare Support Occupations	1,661,700	$32,000
25	Maintenance and Repair Workers, General	1,607,200	$40,000
26	General Maintenance and Repair Workers	1,607,200	$40,000
27	Executive Secretaries and Administrative Assistants	1,594,400	$45,000
28	First-Line Supervisors of Office/Admin Support Workers	1,567,200	$52,000
29	Elementary School Teachers (except special education)	1,549,500	$62,000
30	Sales Representatives, Wholesale/Manufacturing (non-technical)	1,540,300	$60,000
31	Accountants and Auditors	1,538,400	$70,000
32	Miscellaneous Assemblers and Fabricators	1,500,400	$32,000
33	Nursing Assistants	1,389,900	$35,000
34	Teacher Assistants	1,308,100	$30,000
35	Construction Laborers	1,231,900	$40,000
36	Security Guards	1,053,600	$32,000
37	Childcare Workers	1,045,000	$28,000
38	Receptionists and Information Clerks	1,037,600	$32,000
39	Landscaping and Groundskeeping Workers	1,032,300	$32,000
40	Farmers and Ranchers	985,900	$35,000
41	Truck Drivers, Light or Delivery Services	984,500	$40,000
42	Light Truck or Delivery Service Drivers	984,500	$40,000
43	Home Health Aides	921,700	$29,000
44	Restaurant Cooks	914,200	$28,000
45	Food Preparation Workers	891,900	$25,000
46	First-Line Supervisors of Food Preparation and Serving Workers	833,300	$35,000
47	First-Line Supervisors/Managers of Food Prep and Serving Workers	833,300	$35,000
48	Personal and Home Care Aides	817,200	$29,000
49	Medical Assistants	764,400	$35,000
50	Industrial Truck and Tractor Operators	715,000	$35,000

There's a lot of opportunities there. I definitely should've done it by TAM here, but you get the point. For a lot of the innovations, though, you need an inside connection, it's not like you can just make a website, app, get some VC to give you an advertising budget, and be done. On the integration side there's a whole bunch of hands on work, and some domain specific knowledge that needs to be gathered. Also, some of them you have to ask why they haven't been replaced yet (people want humans), and move on.

This all amounts to something that I've begun to understand from learnings in class from Prof. ish|Ash ia.Bhat (don't really want this indexed with his name atp) and in conversations with Vincent C., that the real strength of entrepreneurs in this new age and before is just speaking with potential customers. Over and over again.

An addendum, still written on 5/10/25 so I'm allowed to add it - I have a positive outlook about the impact of AI. There's going to be insane wealth disparity, but overall price of food & price of everything will go down, and hopefully we'll reliably be able to reach a level of safety net where everyone's happy healthy etc. Food'll be so easy to make, it has to. The idea is that opportunity will be incredibly more scarce, which I am afraid of. It reminds me of Rick and Morty S4E9, where everyone's just chilling, the dinosaurs are running the planet, everything's fine. But it's not. Rick still wants to conquer. Beth is lost because she doesn't have her purpose as an animal doctor anymore, Summer's freaking out for some reason and so is Morty I think. Jerry's chilling because he's used to not having a purpose. And the only solution they can find is to destroy the dinosaurs, in this case AI.

It's compelling, and I think it gives a lot of perspective. But it only goes into what the/a family experiences. There are many other experiences and emotions that aren't and can't be shown by the episode that are dependent on power, status, etc.

The idea of respect is centered around the processes that someone takes to better themselves, and, from that, what they achieve. Very similar to "power, status, etc.". Respect and admiration are central components of love, hate, friendship, envy..... anything interpersonal. Everything I've said on this blog I am certain of, so I'm not going to speculate, but I wonder how relationships will adapt to this, and how/if personal achievement will be changed/understood.