Do people who develop AI / robots make more money?

[JetFalcon]

Does it make sense that people who are engineers and are good at developing automation have the chance to make more money than someone who does a job that needs 1 human to do that job? I'm just wondering what are the pros / cons / struggles / benefits if you go this route of developing AI / autonomy as your career.

I know someone who loves playing at the arcade and is insists to make most of his income from it reselling prizes. Even though he is good, it's not sustainable, and I do not know of an advantage player who can truly survive financially playing arcade games. Maybe it was once possible but now it's mainly just a fun hobby that has a good return but not something you should rely on to pay $1200 month rent in CA. The return is good, but the income if you tried hard enough could exceed a fast food job but not a premium lawyer or doctor. but the downside is that a human must be present at the arcade and there isn't enough money to go hire people or have robots to win us tickets.

Because at the end of the day, we can't use robots to win tickets and the human has to be present all the time to play those games. I know Mark Rober made arcade winning robots and I think that's super cool and he could hire people to bring his backpacks to arcades to autonomously win a bunch of tickets and resell prizes. But I'm pretty sure he will be stopped immediately because arcades don't have robots accounted for to win from them, only humans. But some arcades already hate it if an honest human player can win jackpots non stop. I heard Mark Rober got banned at the arcade he took his robot winning backpack, but there is no evidence if he redeemed prizes, which I think he didn't to avoid conflicts and just wanted to prove a point.

Which is why I like the idea of robots and paying for them, they can do stuff for you indefinitely in exchange that you put in the work to have it work perfectly. Which is what I do with my spreadsheets for the arcade. I do the work once, and I enter a starting & ending balance and it does several calculations all at once in less than a second. I wish it was more automated like maybe my spreadsheet could tap into the D&B servers and get me more data but I have to do everything manually. Which then, is there a way to potentially sell my data because Samsung TVs been doing this for a while, they sell TVs cheap then make up the money later with selling data.

 

[RTPEV]

There are a lot of different aspects to the job of "developing AI / autonomy", each having a very different pay grade and educational requirements. It's not like there is one guy that develops an entire AI system. Similarly, there are many different tasks that could/are being replaced by autonomous systems, each with different pay grades and educational requirements.

On the one hand, you have academic researchers doing research into new ways of doing AI, from a hardware and software perspective. Some of these are grad students who don't get paid squat, but the hope is that they are building up a resume that will get them that high paying job in the corporate world. Then you have a small army of engineers in corporate that are actually creating AI/autonomous systems. Pay scales will vary from entry to senior level of course, but in general, but in general these people are well compensated, although if they are working for a startup, their compensation may be in the form of an equity arrangement, which may either make them fabulously rich, or the startup goes bust and they just put in 3 years of 80 hour weeks for nothing. If some of these people move up the ranks and become leaders in the company, they can become very highly compensated. There are only a select few that make it to that level though. So better to set your sights on the average engineer. Right now AI/ML/autonomy is a hot field, so compensation is very good. You can go to a site like Glassdoor and look at compensation ranges by field. A lot of these types of jobs are going to be in Silicon Valley (which commands a price premium due to the high cost of living), so I entered that into Glassdoor and here is what popped out:

But again, these have very specific educational requirements, and it's probably fairly intense work.

At the lower end of this field are people that are "labelers" or are essentially feeding training data into these systems. And while auto-labeling is all the rage now, there is still a need for manual labeling. There are still probably educational requirements, but location is not quite as important. Here is what Glassdoor says about this kind of job:

So now consider what kind of jobs are being "automated". In the context of Tesla, consider an Uber driver, taxi driver, or maybe bus driver. Some of these gig oriented jobs don't pay well (their attraction is the flexibility), but if you do work hard I suppose you can make a living at it. But I don't think they are going to approach even the low end of the engineering jobs related to creating those autonomous systems.

How about manufacturing jobs? Depending on the industry and the strength of the union you may be a member of, some of those jobs actually have pretty decent levels of compensation, although they are also physically demanding jobs and/or have high levels of trade skill requirements, albeit possibly with less stress. Again, you can probably get more information from Glassdoor, but in general, I would expect those to pay less on average.

And I'm pretty sure all of those jobs probably pay better than traveling to arcades, winning prizes and then reselling them.

 

[Kimmi]

Where are you renting in California for $1200 a month? The middle of nowhere?

 

[JetFalcon]

Where are you renting in California for $1200 a month? The middle of nowhere?

Well it was my own room in a house. I always looked for shared places but my own room since I was open to meeting new people. The $1200 month is referring to Orange County because 3 times I rented it was all around $1200 and this was in 2016-2018 until my parents bought me my house.

Some landlords I could tell didn't really like me as a roommate because I always wanted to stay in the common area and not my room. I don't know if this is some unspoken rule that I must stay in my room after I'm done cooking. Alot of the other roommates just stayed in their room all day and didn't want to hang out much in the living room. I didn't want to stay in my room all day though. I played my Xbox in the living room and not my own room. I mean he never made any ground rules saying I had to stay in my room but I assume most landlords sharing their place would like that.

The best roommate situation that was the best value was this one guy who would never be home on the weekdays because of work and he only come back on weekends. And the other roommate his brother always went snowboarding and wouldn't be home for weeks. So I paid $1200 month to have the house to myself majority of the time so that was the best deal to have roommates that barely were there. But that didn't last forever and that guy decided he wanted to rent his entire townhouse and moved out of state.