Plan B, for if the tech industry gets tired of me but I still need money and insurance, is to rent myself to the medical system. I happen to have appropriate licensure to take entry-level roles on an ambulance or in an emergency room, thanks to my volunteer activities. I suspect that healthcare will continue requiring trained humans for longer than many other fields, due to the depth of bureaucracy it’s mired in. And crucially, healthcare seems likely to continue hurting for trained humans willing to tolerate its mistreatment and burnout.
Plan C, for if SHTF all over the place, is that I’ve got a decent amount of time worth of food and water and other necessities. If the grid, supply chains, cities, etc go down, that’s runway to bootstrap toward some sustainable novel form of survival.
My plans are generic to the impact of many possible changes in the world, because AI is only one of quite a lot of disasters that could plausibly befall us in the near term.
Thanks for your input. I really like that you pointed out that AI is just one of many things that could go wrong, perhaps people like me and others are to caught up in the p(doom) buzz that we don’t see all the other stuff.
But I wounder one thing about your Plan B, which seems rational, that what if a lot of people have entry-level care work as their back-up. How will you stave of that competition? Or do you think its a matter of avoiding loss aversion and get out of your Plan A game early and not linger (if some pre-stated KPI of yours goes above or below a certain threshold) to grab one of those positions?
“entry-level” may have been a misleading term to describe the roles I’m talking about. The licensure I’d be renting to the system takes several months to obtain, and requires ongoing annual investment to maintain once it’s acquired. If my whole team at work was laid off and all my current colleagues decided to use exactly the same plan b as mine, they’d be 1-6 months and several thousand dollars of training away from qualifying for the roles where I’d be applying on day 1.
Training time aside, I am also a better candidate than most because I technically have years of experience already from volunteering. Most of the other volunteers are retirees, because people my age in my area rarely have the flexibility in their current jobs to juggle work and volunteering.
Then again, I’m rural, and I believe most people on this site are urban. If I lived in a more densely populated area, I would have less opportunity to keep up my licensure through volunteering, and also more competition for the plan b roles. These roles also lend themselves well to a longer commute than most jobs, since they’re often shifts of several days on and then several days off.
The final interesting thing about healthcare as a backup plan is its intersection with disability, in that not everyone is physically capable of doing the jobs. There’s the obvious issues of lifting etc, but more subtly, people can be unable to tolerate the required proximity to blood, feces, vomit, and all the other unpleasantness that goes with people having emergencies. (One of my closest friends is all the proof I need that fainting at the sight of blood is functionally a physical rather than mental problem—we do all kinds of animal care tasks together, which sometimes involve blood, and the only difference between our experiences is that they can’t look at the red stuff)
Plan B, for if the tech industry gets tired of me but I still need money and insurance, is to rent myself to the medical system. I happen to have appropriate licensure to take entry-level roles on an ambulance or in an emergency room, thanks to my volunteer activities. I suspect that healthcare will continue requiring trained humans for longer than many other fields, due to the depth of bureaucracy it’s mired in. And crucially, healthcare seems likely to continue hurting for trained humans willing to tolerate its mistreatment and burnout.
Plan C, for if SHTF all over the place, is that I’ve got a decent amount of time worth of food and water and other necessities. If the grid, supply chains, cities, etc go down, that’s runway to bootstrap toward some sustainable novel form of survival.
My plans are generic to the impact of many possible changes in the world, because AI is only one of quite a lot of disasters that could plausibly befall us in the near term.
Thanks for your input. I really like that you pointed out that AI is just one of many things that could go wrong, perhaps people like me and others are to caught up in the p(doom) buzz that we don’t see all the other stuff.
But I wounder one thing about your Plan B, which seems rational, that what if a lot of people have entry-level care work as their back-up. How will you stave of that competition? Or do you think its a matter of avoiding loss aversion and get out of your Plan A game early and not linger (if some pre-stated KPI of yours goes above or below a certain threshold) to grab one of those positions?
“entry-level” may have been a misleading term to describe the roles I’m talking about. The licensure I’d be renting to the system takes several months to obtain, and requires ongoing annual investment to maintain once it’s acquired. If my whole team at work was laid off and all my current colleagues decided to use exactly the same plan b as mine, they’d be 1-6 months and several thousand dollars of training away from qualifying for the roles where I’d be applying on day 1.
Training time aside, I am also a better candidate than most because I technically have years of experience already from volunteering. Most of the other volunteers are retirees, because people my age in my area rarely have the flexibility in their current jobs to juggle work and volunteering.
Then again, I’m rural, and I believe most people on this site are urban. If I lived in a more densely populated area, I would have less opportunity to keep up my licensure through volunteering, and also more competition for the plan b roles. These roles also lend themselves well to a longer commute than most jobs, since they’re often shifts of several days on and then several days off.
The final interesting thing about healthcare as a backup plan is its intersection with disability, in that not everyone is physically capable of doing the jobs. There’s the obvious issues of lifting etc, but more subtly, people can be unable to tolerate the required proximity to blood, feces, vomit, and all the other unpleasantness that goes with people having emergencies. (One of my closest friends is all the proof I need that fainting at the sight of blood is functionally a physical rather than mental problem—we do all kinds of animal care tasks together, which sometimes involve blood, and the only difference between our experiences is that they can’t look at the red stuff)