Job Apocalypse? Not Yet. AI is Creating Brand New Occupations (economist.com)
- Reference: 0180474489
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/12/29/162224/job-apocalypse-not-yet-ai-is-creating-brand-new-occupations
- Source link: https://www.economist.com/business/2025/12/14/job-apocalypse-not-yet-ai-is-creating-brand-new-occupations
Forward-deployed engineers, a role pioneered by Palantir, customize AI tools on-site for clients; YCombinator's portfolio companies now have 63 job postings for such roles, up from four last year. The AI Workforce Consortium, a research group led by Cisco that examined 50 IT jobs across wealthy countries, found AI risk-and-governance specialists to be the fastest-growing category -- outpacing even AI programmers.
[1] https://www.economist.com/business/2025/12/14/job-apocalypse-not-yet-ai-is-creating-brand-new-occupations
Forward-deployed engineers what? (Score:2)
> Forward-deployed engineers, a role pioneered by Palantir,
What? Forward-deployed engineers have existed since long before Palantir. Does the OP truly think the idea of embedding engineers into the sales department only began in 2003?
Re: (Score:2)
So professionals have gone from $250 an hour to $90 an hour. The summary proves the point it is trying to disprove.
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Sorry did not mean to respond to you.
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> Forward-deployed engineers
AKA [1]sappers [wikipedia.org].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapper
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Youngbies rename everything and claim they invented it. I give my ancestors credit for inventing kicking them off the lawn for that trick, not my generation.
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I have no idea how old the concept actually is(almost certainly older than software); but it may be 'novel' in the weak cyclical sense that there's some periodic drift(I'm not sure how much is buyer side, how much is seller side, and how much is mostly fashion) in terms of how people get engineering support for complex products. Sometimes the sales engineers provide fairly substantial support, sometimes implementation using internal people is part of the purchase, sometimes there's a gold preferred implemen
Circus jobs (Score:2)
Help Wanted
Talk to the robot for information about available jobs
Robot Feeder
Robot Trainer
Robot Poop Polisher
First Responders for Robot-related Injuries
PR Crisis Response for Robot-related suicides
Government Affairs Liason for Robot-related Policy Suppression
Programmer/Minder for Social Media Robot Armies
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> Programmer/Minder for Social Media Robot Armies
I was looking for Youtube videos on "dark matter halos" to better understand them, or even see if there are halos around galaxies*. About 50 videos popped up that turned out to be variations on the same video. They were clearly composed by AI.
Is there a name for this? "reconstituted content flooding (RCF)?", "Topic squatting"?
> Circus jobs
Mar-a-Lago hiring?
* Probably not, they just seem halo-ish relative to ordinary matter because dark matter doesn't "c
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Is there a name for this?
I call it robot poop. And there's "slop". But I don't think we've converged on language for specific variants (like flooding Youtube or drowning out competing voices on Xitter) yet.
The economist has gone completely worthless (Score:2)
Well, it isn't like the Economist was ever the deep and nuanced journal of analytical economics - quite the opposite, it has always been the rather blatant and in-your-face cheap peddler of the most simplistic "deregulation and low taxes will fix everything" crap (just read the article on Argentine and Syria from last week), but this one is actually way below its usual lack of intellectual standard and outright insulting.
Perhaps the AI had a hand in, err, generating it?
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It has always been that way. Actually, I'm surprised to hear you say "de-regulation": the economist has always been about free-trade, no-tariffs, even if other countries are imposing them. Essentially, they're closer to the Bush school of free trade than the Trump school of fair trade
So what you're saying is... (Score:2)
LLMs not only don't do what they say on the tin, they require even more workers. A trillion dollar promise to convert businesses into pure profit-generating vehicles without the liabilities of products, customers, or employees, requires even more employees. It's a net loss in business efficiency.
Karen will go out of fashion (Score:1)
Eventually the models will be trained and those jobs will dry up. AI will not have to be babysat forever. Plus, it's not like any Indian call center really ever offered empathy, judgment, and the ability to calm down some marching moron that broke a nail. Maybe professionally trained LLM results will be more palantirable palatable.
So the entire list (Score:2)
Of new jobs is people training the automation that's going to replace them...
I mean that's great if you're a 70 year old baby boomer getting ready to retire. Good on you you won capitalism.
Everyone else still has the sword of Damocles hanging over them and it's going to hit in a few years.
I mean not you of course. You're special. You're irreplaceable. It's those other guys. And you got to watch out for those other guys because they're going to take your money.
Not the *entire* list! (Score:2)
No no, developers can also become support desk employees dealing with entitled angry customers! What a glorious future! And such an incredibly futureproof career move!
> Himanshu Palsule, chief executive of Cornerstone OnDemand, a skills-development company, uses Waymo, a fast-growing robotaxi firm, as an example of how the job of a developer is evolving. Waymo’s cars drive themselves from start to finish. But what if they break down, locking their passengers inside? Then comes the need for what he calls “the guy—or gal—in the sky”, a remote human troubleshooter who needs to understand not just the technology, but also how to handle frazzled passengers. Software engineers, Mr Palsule says, used to be sought after for their coding abilities, not their bedside manner. No longer. Writing code can now be done by an algorithm. “Your personality is where your premium is.”