Layoffs SURVIVAL GUIDE - 10 million coders LOSE JOBS.
And so my point is that programming has changed in the way that is probably less valuable. On the other hand, I will tell you this. Because of artificial intelligence, we have closed the technology divide of humanity. Today, about 10 million people are gainfully employed
because they know how to program computers. Which leaves the other 8 billion behind. That s not true in the future. We all can program computers. Does that make sense? Yes, I m afraid, it does. For those few who are not yet familiar with this face, this is Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of NVIDIA, the company has invented the revolutionary chips, that currently drives more or less all modern AI models on the surface of this planet. His company, NVIDIA, has grown from a tiny startup to more than 2 trillion dollars in market capitalisation. I have never
seen anything like it. And this is why you see NVIDIA s market cap being so gigantic. Because they currently have the best neural chips. I mean Did NVIDIA s market cap exceed Canadian GDP, or something It s quite high Yes, you heard it right. Worth more than Canada. Jensen Huang is one of the deepest AI visionaries of our time. And as we all have just heard, according to him, more than 10 million coders soon will have to find not just a new job, but a new profession. But It's
not just Jensen Huang. Listen to what AWS's VP of Technology has to say. The programming language of the next decade is not going to be traditional way we ve been writing code. It just going to be a natural language. It just going to be describe what you want the system to do, and it will interpret it automatically. And that is incredibly democratising And exciting opportunity to reinvent every product and the process. In the meantime, BigTech keep laying off people. Well, they try not to say that openly, in public. We can understand them who wants to be called a public
enemy responsible for mass layoffs. Nobody wants to be grilled by the politicians on the Hill. So, they have to encrypt their messages. In particularly with this moment in AI, the opportunities we have ahead of us are immense. But it need a real focus on our mission. There have been multiple rounds of layoffs. Why take this approach? Why not cut once and cut deep? We
are reallocating people to our highest priorities. This is where you are simplifying teams. Removing focus on new areas. Removing layers, so you can improve velocity.That s why we are taking the time to do it correctly. You know, we coders, are not best people-readers. This is definitely not our strength. But you don t have to be a people reader to see facial expressions, the emotions
on these faces. You don t even have to listen to what the Google CEO says. But if you want to know what is my translation of this politically correct mambo-jumbo jargon into plain English? That would be a simple message: More layoffs are coming. At first, BigTech explained layoffs by changes in tax regulations. Then - by overhiring during the COVID pandemic. Then - they said that
only sales and hr were affected. Then - that just junior coders were let go. For more than a year, they kept us in the dark, keeping laying off people while inventing new excuses. Now, they don t bother explaining layoffs anymore. They just do them. Here are just some most notable mass
layoff in tech that were publicly announced. All this time, since the layoffs started in 2023, they acted as if they knew something. Something big. Something that we didn't know. What was that? What was that big thing they knew but we didn't? What is going on? I am going to say something that is going to sound completely opposite of what people feel. You probably recall over the course of the last ten, fifteen years, almost everybody who sit on the stage like this tell you: This is vital your children learn computer science. Everybody should learn how to program. Give me a break. Anybody who can through coal into a furnace can learn how to program, for
God s sake. And in fact, it is almost exactly the opposite. It is our job to create computer technology, such that nobody has to program. And now the programming language is human. Everybody in the world is now a programmer. And so we imagined that this is a completely new way of writing software. The short answer is back then, in 2023, they have learned that very soon they won
t need human coders to write software anymore. In our previous video we have shown how this works in practice on a hypothetical example of a snake game that is generated not by a programmable code, but by AI directly, as a video stream. That video got more than 1500 comments. And one of the most common comments was: What are we supposed to do now? This survival guide is a result of work of half a dozen volunteers with expertise ranging from webdev, AI/ML and to database management and distributed programming. We ve been working on it almost two months, and I would like to thank the
experts, who contributed time and knowledge to help our common cause. For those of you who are first time here, on the Scripter channel. I will spend a minute explaining who I am. My personal path to AI was non-linear. With a background in mathematics and economics, I started as a behavioural economist, running research on how our brains, our organic neural networks, make decisions. That was research on how to predict and influence human behaviour. Especially in groups. After graduating from Columbia university in New York, I went to China as a Forbes columnist where I authored 25+ articles for Forbes and also ran research on behavioural patterns of ultra-concentrated groups. There, in China, I met Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba
and another leading tech visionary, who told me one simple thing - AI is future. This is how then, 9 years ago, I got a head start and started creating AI systems that predict, influence people behaviour. And since then I ve designed and developed those AI behavioural systems for some of the largest and best known companies in the world. I also led an AI research team and launched a startup that invented a computer vision technology that monitored and managed nurses in hospitals. That technology has received an Australian National Award for solving the problem of pressure ulcers, one of the biggest problems in healthcare. When we were building this survival guide, our objective was to navigate the huge uncertainty we re all facing today. To find a path through the AI jihad to survival, safety,
and, hopefully, success. While working on the guide, we used a few key principles. First, we wanted to identify and diagnose the problem. It is like getting a diagnosis before starting a treatment. This is why the first half of the guide is about how we got to where we are. Here s out little map. First, we will talk about how the value, the pizza, is distributed between
providers of labour and capital. And this is important, because we, coders and tech people, we are labour providers. We will dive into the beginnings of Internet web development and the web gold rush. This should give us an understanding of why we are being paid so much. Then, we will take a look at what triggered the AI jihad and the great consolidation, and how that led to the invention of transformers that very AI architecture that is behind ChatGPT and that exactly what Jensen Huang is referring to when he says that coding is no longer a human profession. Then we will talk about a few things we want to do if we want to vanish in the AI jihad. Like being in the about-to-go-extinct industries, like finance,
for example. Or violating the 10% rule. Then we will take a look at the business of selling shovels a well-tested, bullet proof strategy of surving in any gold-rush type of environments. Like AI jihad. Then, we will explore the new frontiers. We will see if these challenging and demanding areas can offer us a path to AI greatness. And, as a desert, we will get a glimpse of three general survival principles, more like mindsets, that remain relevant in the times of AI jihad. This is our survival map. And this is where the second principle comes into play. We tried to avoid the temptation of giving instructions, like quit front-end and
instead learn CUDA. Each one of us, of coders, is different. We have different backgrounds, different skills, and personalities. What works for one, doesn t necessarily work for another. This is why instead of instructions, we tried to share with you our current understanding of the situation, of which way it is evolving. We give not instructions, but knowledge so each one of us can make an informed decision. And finally, third, it took us two months to make this guide,
and we understand that this is a lot of information to process. So, we split the guide in five parts. They will be released one by one, each Friday starting from May 24 And right before we start a spoiler - we have bad news and good news. Bad news - NVIDIA's Jensen Huang, it seems like he is right - 90% of us, of coders and tech people will have to go, soon. The good news, though - the remaining 10% will survive. And even thrive. But the good news is that the remaining
10% will survive and thrive. Our objective is to be in those 10%. All right, let s start. As always, we start in unusual place. As you can see, this is an ancient gold mine. And these gentlemen, they are gold miners. They dig dirt searching for nuggets. For centuries,
our civilisation was organised in a very simple, even primitive, way. If you wanted to do more, to work more, to have more gold, you needed more people. More labour providers. More people meant more work is done. And that was going on like this for centuries. The way people worked in the first civilisations in Mesopotamia was not fundamentally different from how people worked just a few hundred years ago. Same tools, same organisation. And the same fundamental principle
if you needed to do more work, you needed more people. Life of our ancestors was simple. They produced just enough to survive. What you produce - that's what you eat. That's it. The same story for thousands of years. Until some bright mind, decided that instead of spending everything, decided to pay some portion of that little product they made to create some mechanism, some tool, some machine Here came the machine. At first, just a shovel. Then, gradually it evolved into
an excavator And it turned out that now, with the use of the machine, there was no need for so many people anymore. Hundred people could do same amount of work as thousand people before. And that's all because somebody invested capital to make a machine. That s how capitalism was born. Of course, that capital was not free. The owner of the machine, the provider of that capital, received a small fee for his machine. This is actually quite an interesting question. How small was that fee? Let s take a look. The easiest way of thinking about it is imagining a pizza. The whole pizza is what was produced by the operator and the machine together. Here, we
have providers of labour. The workers. And here, the fellows that some time ago were smart enough to save, and now they have become providers of capital. And now, after the pizza was produced, baked, that tasty pizza had to be shared. There are a few ways to see in what proportion this pizza is being split. For example, here. Let s assume that we are in 1984, forty years
ago. And let s assume that back then, the workers and capitalists were sharing pizza 50/50. Now, here is how much average labour income changed since then. Since 1984. You see? Roughly by 30% higher than in 1984. This is inflation adjusted number. And now, let s take a look at the
providers of capital. This is S&P500 for the same period. For 40 years. We can think of S&P500 as a rough equivalent of that fee that the capital providers received for their machine. So, in 1984, we assumed they were equal. Pizza was split equal. And here s what happened then If in 1984 half of the pizza went to workers, now this is less than 1/3. Another way to
look at the pizza split is house affordability. How long did it take a median worker to buy a median house. 40 years ago you needed just above 3 annual salaries to buy a house. Now, you need almost 6. The reality is that our society is designed to benefit capital providers, not labour providers. It is done in many ways. For example, by inflation - here, we have a video about it (you will find a link in the description). Inflation is effectively a stealth tax on labour. Another way to extract value from labour providers and get a larger slice of pizza is by directly taxing it. Here is the current tax rate on capital gains -and capital gains is the main source of income
for the capital providers. So, the tax rate for them in the US is 20%. If we look at the tax rate for labour, the tax rate for labour providers - it is 37% And you know what the funny part is? Capital providers they often don t even have to pay that 20%... Because the hire armies of lawyers and accountants. Who are looking for eway to minimise tax. To optimise it.
The message here is simple - the whole system is designed to transfer wealth from providers of labour to the providers of capital. It is not a bug, it s a feature. This is a part of the system design. Let's remember that fact later - This is our lesson 1 - in our little gold mine game labour providers are paid less than capital providers. And now, let s take a look at how much coders are
being paid We almost got to the end of Part 1. The part 2 will be here next Friday. We will talk about Internet. About web development boom Because we can t understand AI jihad without understanding the nature and essence of wed development boom and bust. This is what we will be talking about in the Part two. You will see it on your screen automatically, if you are subscribed. If you are not subscribed, go there, find that button. Click it. One favour I want to ask. You can actually
help us. Because Scripter channel is young, and the Youtube algorithm hasn t figure out yet, who is the right audience. This is why the algorithm is recommending it to very strange people. My favourite one Because I can see it from the inside My favorite one is Mexian soap opera lovers club. Obviously not our target audience. So, we need to find our people, our crowd, our herd. And this is where you can help us. Just go to those forums, chats, IT, tech, coder-related,
gaming-related chat that you are frequent at Just post a link to this video. So our crowd, our herd finds us sooner. Alright, that s it, and now the most important part happy birthday, mom!
2024-05-31 11:13
