Anything related to computers/networking/IT. I was big into computers when I was young, and was a founding member of my high school’s tech club. After graduation, I immediately went into tech school and lived/breathed tech until I got my degree. I LOVE the academics surrounding how computers and networks work. It is genuinely amazing that I can type some bullshit on my keyboard, and then that is sent as an electrical pulse, as an electromagnetic wave, as LIGHT, and decisions are being made on the fly as that bullshit flies through any number of autonomous systems on its way to your screen. In milliseconds. And that is a GROSS oversimplification. Just amazing.
Then, I went into the working world and had that love systematically ground out of me. Worked for a small regional MSP, and was the admin for a small, now defunct college. These days I teach digital literacy which is rewarding in its own right, but trying to get grandma to understand what a password manager does is… a lot.
Over the years, I’ve watched everything in tech get polluted by right wing freaks and corporate interests trying to squeeze every bit of profit out of their userbase they possibly can. Google went from a beloved institution to silently removing their “don’t be evil” motto from their headquarters. Microsoft was always evil, but at least they pretended to care about their products. The open source space seemed like a bunch of punks trying to democratize computing, but they’re owned by corporate sponsors and rely heavily on contributors on <corporation’s> payroll. The technology we have is truly amazing and a great achievement. But it’s saddening seeing it all being used for mass surveillance, oppression, being enshitified into oblivion, as the concept of owning anything becomes a fringe ideology. I still keep up with everything because I kinda have to, but there’s no joy in it anymore.
I was recently listening to a Cory Doctorow interview where he was discussing the concept of “reverse centaurs”. Essentially, if a centaur is a human who uses technology to perform a task they cannot alone, a reverse centaur is the opposite. Think amazon warehouse workers. An algorithm tells the worker where to pick up the box, and where to put it down. It does all the thinking, and the human is just a pair of hands.
One path you can take is that you have skilled professionals who have a depth of knowledge in their field, and can skillfully use an AI to enhance their work. The AI can for example, proof-read human made code and look for typos, bugs, or other possible mistakes that we all as humans occasionally make. This is a centaur situation, where the human is in the driver’s seat.
The other path is that corporations can have fewer skilled professionals in fields that were previously difficult to automate. AI allows you to fire 90% of those professionals and the ones that remain are essentially glorified amazon warehouse workers who do the bidding of the AI. They hit enter on the keyboard, they sign off on the code, and they most importantly fall on the sword when the AI fails. This is the reverse centaur situation
So while these jobs may be “safe” from AI, it’s important that we avoid the reverse-centaur path. Though with corpos’ tendency to chase profit over all else, this might be a big ask.