AI will (probably) take your job (eventually)

I am a fan of AI and machine learning, well before it was trending on CNBC or spamming your Facebook feed.

The exponential progress in the past few years means everyone can find cues to complex questions in a few seconds, where you would previously need to ask experts or pay a professional to do it for you.

Note that I wrote “cues” above, not “answers”. In its current state, the best of AI bots will NOT give you an answer that fully fits your case. You need judgement to assess if it makes sense, and also have a process or methodology on how to have a satisfying and precise answer through follow-up questions.

In my case, I like to use chatGPT/Claude/llama3/mistral to write unit tests, or when I need to work on a new project. I do not have time to read half-finished documentation or cryptic artifacts and chatGPT will give me a rough implementation that I can finish.

In other cases, it gave me insights in child psychology, and also generated legal letters that would have otherwise cost hundreds from a lawyer.

So here is a politically incorrect albeit true fact: coders who rely solely on rote tasks will be replaced in a few years by AI. I am not sure precisely if it will be one single engineer who will do the work of 10 engineers, or an AI that will write software by itself, but I can guarantee that coders who only do mundane tasks will be laid off, compared to those who focus on create problem-solving, architecture or who have interpersonal skills.

Similarly, knowledge workers who follow a rigid process repeatedly will also be replaced by AI, in the same manner that robots replaced factory workers doing the same tasks over and over. If your creative input, initiative and judgement is not appreciated and discouraged in your daily work, then it is time to seriously think about your long-term prospects.

Will knowledge companies exist without workers? Unlikely. A factory still needs workers to operate and program robots, it needs a maintenance team to repair robots, and there are still tasks in the production process that cannot be automated. I am sure there will be similar jobs to work with AI bots.

How would one prevent their job from taking their job? Here are a few cues:

• From time to time, make sure to also work on difficult projects, where dates, constraints, resources, architectures have unknowns and require interpersonal skills to solve.
• Use AI bots in your daily work, and make sure to know exactly their strengths and weaknesses. Volunteer to trial them with Engineering Managers.
• Review what your company is doing. Can the work by outsourced easily to a firm in India or Eastern Europe? Is work repetitive? If the answer is “Yes” to those questions, then the value added by your company is low and so is your job. Change the company.
• Invest in skills and abilities that only humans can do. ChatGPT cannot give answers about brand new technologies that were released after its training cutoff time, nor can it work with technologies that are not public. So being an expert on a private library will be an asset. Additionally, chatGPT cannot intuitively understand team dynamics or physically implement solutions in the real world.

If all these fail, you still have the option to become an electrician or a plumber. No chance that an AI will install an electric panel or unblock a pipe. And hey, those jobs are recession-proof and pay well!