how you prepare to survive during the 4th Industrial Revolution (AI)?

It's worth pointing out that if AI can be an engineer, it could definitely be a manager of other AIs. Why wouldn't the operators be replaced as well? Or even the lawyers who set up and enforce the corporate charters? Meatspace jobs seem to be safer, but "foundation models that can do physical jobs are just around the corner" is something you definitely hear. And of course at the other end Lemmy thinks AI is totally useless.

I suppose in the scenario you've defined, yes, being a blue collar worker is the main option, short of owning a bunch of stuff. And like any other technological revolution, eventually the upheaval will end, there will be fairly high employment, and a lot of things will be cheaper than before.

Was that the first one? That was the 1700's with, like, the first mechanical looms, so it's doubtful people even realised everything was changing. The whole "all manual labour will be replaced" idea seems most prominent in the mid 20th century, like with The Jetsons, which is between the second and third, if you're using this system.

We're barely past the Wright brothers' plane stage of AI right now, so predicting when the technology will level off is very difficult and just extrapolating forward from the limitations that the technology has today is unlikely to be reliable. I think you're right regarding what we'll see in the next few years but I have about thirty years until retirement. By then things will probably be very different and that's something to keep in mind when choosing a career (or deciding to have a child).

Getting licensed as an electrician.

AI will not be able to replace intellectual workers, not as it is now anyways. The only people who think that either don't understand the intellectual work or the LLMs.

For an AI to be able to do that it would need to be an AGI, which we're not even close to. And if it gets created it's not just intellectual workers that are at risk, in fact intellectual workers would be the last one to be replaced.

LLMs are a neat trick, they provide some usefulness and can be used to improve productivity. But the moment you give them any autonomy they will destroy everything. And that's a core issue with the technology, LLMs don't understand what they're replying to, they're just a word predicting machine. Expecting LLMs to do any form of intellectual work is akin to saying accountants will lose their jobs because calculators exist.

Well, you're right that the future might contain unexpected developments, and extrapolating forward is not going to be "accurate", but my comment describes the trajectory that we've seen in other technologies.

With the greatest respect, the reference to the wright brothers is a hyperbolic metaphor. I suspect that the wright brothers could see that they had achieved a breakthrough moment and they didn't know what the limitations of this new technology might be at that time. With gen AI I think we have already encountered the steep curve of diminishing returns.

The improvements in the last several years have been modest and incremental, but the infrastructure required to achieve them has been gargantuan. My point being that we have already reached that point of diminishing returns.