🤖 AI Won't Replace All Jobs, But . . .
AI Won't Replace All Jobs, But Workers Wielding AI Will Replace Those Without AI
Around January 2023, as ChatGPT was blowing up, I was experiencing some existential dread: At this rate, will software engineer roles even exist in a few years? 🤔😳
Since then, after voraciously learning and exploring these tools, and reading and listening to great minds discuss this topic, my prediction is:
For a lot of fields, including software engineering, AI will not replace jobs wholesale. But human workers who can learn to wield these powerful new tools will replace those who don't.
I say this while acknowledging that AI is aboslutely causing seismic shifts for many, many fields, including replacing jobs, and that I'm coming from a place of privilege that maybe, if I continue to learn to wield these tools, I'll be partially insulated. Also, I make this prediction with a healthy dose of humility: the rate of technological change is rapid and exponential, and who the heck knows what five years from now might look like.
On the Hard Fork podcast, one of the hosts described the trend of newsrooms having fewer writers and more editors, and suggested that other industries, like SWE, might go in that direction: more devs acting like Engineering managers, supervising AI devs, assigning them tasks, reviewing their code.
Here are a few concurring opinions that are worth a read:
Wired.com: ChatGPT Isn't Coming for Your Coding Job
AI Will Not Replace You, But You Will Have More Squeezed Out Of You
AI Won’t Replace Humans — But Humans With AI Will Replace Humans Without AI