I had the pleasure of being a guest of Vignesh Swaminathan, who lives in Mumbai. It's fun to have a deep conversation with someone on the other side of the world and share it with the entire internet (and AIs).
Link to Apple podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dr-joy-buchanan-on-understanding-economics-through/id1719744197?i=1000652541934
Blog post with links and timestamps: https://www.induktive.in/p/dr-joy-buchanan-on-understanding
The first 10 minutes are about Tyler's GOAT book. Vignesh asked me to name some influential economists who were not on Tyler's list.
At about minute 12 we talk about the methodology of experimental economics.
The middle (minutes 15-42) is a discussion about the path to technology and my essay “Willingness to be Paid”. He adds his perspective on tech jobs in India.
Around the 42nd minute, Vignesh switches to the Barbie film and then to Oppenheimer. He notes that Oppenheimer is a “brand.” I speculate about careers in Barbieland. We recorded this before Christmas '23, right after everyone saw those summer movies. Both films landed at the 2024 Oscars.
I predicted that due to the AI content revolution, people will eventually be able to create a custom movie from a verbal prompt. Here in the spring of '24 that has already come true. Sora shocked everyone and even caused Tyler Perry to stop the expansion of a physical film studio.
Around the 55th minute we turn to Hayek and the competition, which leads to a post-mortem on Google Plus (RIP).
1:05-1:16 covers intellectual property and my IP experiment with Bart Wilson
Ended with quick and personal questions.
Going back through this conversation makes me think about working in tech. The market for IT workers and programmers has evolved since I started the project “Willingness to be Paid: Who Trains for Tech Jobs?”
I like to point people to this report on Jobs from 1958. Learn to Code has long been good advice for people who can stomach the work. That doesn't mean it will be true forever, but I would argue that it is still true today.
The professional peak in Silicon Valley is likely to be reached around 2021. While it won't go away, it may stop growing in terms of the number of talented people it can accommodate. (Could I suggest Huntsville instead?)
The WSJ recently published an article titled “Tech job seekers without AI skills face a new reality: lower salaries and fewer roles.”
The rise of artificial intelligence is impacting job seekers in the tech industry, who are used to high salaries and strong demand for their skills and are facing a new reality: learn AI and don't expect the same salary packages as a few years ago.
According to Janco data, jobs in areas such as telecommunications, enterprise systems management and entry-level IT have declined in recent months, while jobs in cybersecurity, AI and data science continue to increase. The average total compensation for IT workers is about $100,000, making the position a target for further cost reductions.
One reason tech jobs are less attractive than other career paths is because skills are changing. We mentioned this as a disadvantage in our policy paper. Computers are constantly changing. Vignesh and I discuss the topic of risk. I suggested that companies could pay less for talent if they were willing to offer packages that carried less risk of layoff.
However, the tech industry still has good employment prospects. An unemployment rate of about 5% is about normal for work, although the rate was lower at the height of demand in the tech sector. I don't know what the programming profession will look like in ten years, but I would say the same about screenwriting and live sports commentary. The LLMs come for all or nothing or something in between.
I was on tour (regionally) with our ChatGPT article and had the opportunity to survey various target groups about their LLM usage. Last week I spoke with a young man at our business school who uses ChatGPT to write SQL code at his workplace. I said on the podcast that I would still advise young people in Alabama to learn to code even if they don't move to Silicon Valley. I think programming in the LLM era is more fun or at least less miserable.
Comments are closed.