Hey ChatGPT, how do I survive until the next AI winter?
As someone who finished a 2 year AAS in Linux network administration in 2008 just as the economy was taking a dive and companies were rushing to replace their expensive and needy IT departments with Google's growing suite of cloud products, I empathize. At least a scholarship paid for most of it and I'm completely debt free.
These students aren’t in tech yet. They’re still in the zeitgeist of tech.
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I didn't even expect much. Just a little better than what I could get working a help desk or bagging groceries. Respectable work, but I knew a lot of people who worked it and knew how abusive management could get. I thought tech was better at the time. One of the first phases of naivety I went through.
Zero jobs. I tried volunteering with the library's IT guy to maybe support a barren resume, and it seemed to go great, but I never got a call back. I think I may have made the dude feel threatened by how current my knowledge was and how natural I was with the tech, while he was somewhat older and likely struggling to keep up.
"I don't know why it crashes when the screensaver comes on." He was trying this hip new operating system called Linux. One of the early Ubuntus.
"You need the right driver for the 3D stuff. Most auto-installed drivers choke on software rendering."
"Ah."
He learned about 3D acceleration. I learned about CMOS batteries. It was a good day. Or so I thought.
I doubted my feeling that he saw me as a threat until I talked to a comrade in library IT who would be in that guy's cohort if they were in the same building, and that was the consensus we reached: he was afraid of me taking his job when all I wanted to do was learn from him, and he kept the gate to library IT all over the region.
So I never got into IT, or tech generally. I got good at writing and music and art and learned to blend creative and technical skills into something coherent. You are looking at the result.
The AI winter always comes. I make a point of understanding these tools so I don't get roped into the popular fear, and so I don't miss the real threat: capitalist assholes who want to replace labor with machines who don't care what happens to the people they displace because they're machines with no actual intelligence.