¿Cómo encontrar el trabajo ideal?

 En esta época de exámenes finales, EVAUs, etc., es una pregunta muy frecuente entre la juventud (o también entre los que no somos tan jóvenes...). Arthur Brooks la contesta de una buena forma, en mi opinión, aunque quizá para algunos algo sorprendente (y curiosamente coherente con la de Cal Newport).

Por cierto, que en esa charla de Tyler Cowen que mencioné el otro día hay un par de buenas perlas sobre este tema justo al final:

Tyler Cowen: One of my predictions is that GPT models will raise the relative--and indeed--absolute wages of carpenters. So, if you're a very young person or if you have kids, and they're thinking, 'Well, what should I do for a career now?' You face some very serious decisions. Now it might be that you're a wonderful general/manager of GPT models, and you do incredibly well managing your thousand research assistants. If so, great. But, if you're just producing fairly routine, word-based content in whatever form, you probably need to give a fairly serious rethink to your career plans.

And, I think there'll be a lot more science, a lot more ideas, a lot more projects. And, like, very good gardeners, very good carpenters, people with synthetic abilities who can make things happen. The kind of person who in a lab actually helps build the fusion reactor, say, rather than just writing about it, is already becoming much more valuable.

And it's going to disrupt many things. So, you and I are broadly of the same generation. It won't change my life that much. Even for me, I'm not sure I'll write another book. My plan is to go around and actually give more talks. I think that will be more rewarding. It's not that I think GPT can write as good books right now, but I think people will be playing with their GPT models, rather than reading my book at some point. So--

Russ Roberts: And they'd love to look into your eyes and shake your hand after a talk, and chitchat for a minute and a half and have a human experience than read another paragraph of you. Possibly.

Tyler Cowen: We all need to rethink what it is we're doing, reevaluate our professional lives. It's a very serious matter. It will disrupt many of us, often in good ways, sometimes in bad ways. But I would just here urge against complacency. Please take this seriously, give it a rethink. Look for things you can do now to make this a better future rather than a worse one.

Russ Roberts: But, I think it definitely puts a premium on human interaction, and that's going to be in people who are good at that--whatever form that takes--I think, will remain incredibly important.

Or, we're all going to retreat into our bedrooms and play on our phones all day. Which a lot of people are. But, there's also a backlash against it, even among young people. So, I think that part is going to be extremely interesting.

But, it is going to force us to think about what it is to be human. Which is not a bad thing. And, that's what I find myself thinking about when I think about that condolence note or interacting with an avatar of Tyler Cowen rather than the real thing. And, of course, I'm doing this over Zoom with you, Tyler. It's an inferior form of interaction, but it's extraordinary that we can do it at all across 6,000 miles or seven, whatever it is. So, I think that's pretty cool.

Tyler Cowen: It will be a fascinating future. Very weird in many ways. It may not feel weird to the people born into it, but we should all be ready for it. And, I'm very glad you're doing these episodes on AI to help get us ready.