If you are white collar then it’s going to “disrupt” your field.
I work in tech. I got laid off last year. I wasn’t at Alphabet or Amazon or anything. Much smaller company. But AI “optimization” has ravaged the tech industry and not just programmers. Admins, database specialists, network specialists, developers, you name it. Our job market is absolutely fucked.
In my county, a major metro area in the US (like, top 10) craigslist used to be the place to get real job postings. If it wasn’t a recruiter then your odds of getting a callback from a job posting there is pretty high. There are plenty of postings for other fields like mechanics and tradesmen and so on. For the few tech categories: nothing in the last month. Zero postings. Not even recruiter ads. Literally nothing. It’s a wasteland.
I’ve been told to “go back to school.” I’ll be 41 soon. I’m still paying off my computer science degree. It’s worthless. What else should I go for? Accounting? HR? These are going to be taken by AI, too. Will it be a mistake? Sure. They don’t care. They’ll do it anyways.
When I got my degree my wife and I were homeless. We just got back out of the hole in the last 10 years. I was finally building savings. It’ll be gone in 60 days. She was laid off on Friday. Her industry is in property finance. Another gutted industry. She has to change industries, too.
What is to be done?
Yeah right now by the time you learn to code effectively and efficiently AI will be doing it better than most people who have been in the field for years. It still sucks today but this will change rapidly. 1 developer who can use AI well will be able to do the job of 5 coders in two years. I have no doubt about that.
I’ve done professional coding, and I also doubt. AI will be very helpful, but people still fail to recognise that there are necessary human elements in a coding chain, because feedback loops, understanding the full context of requirements, going back for clarification on certain elements where we recognise there’ll be ambiguity, anticipating shortfalls, factoring in wider societal conditions etc. will always be necessary to do a good job of it, and AI is a very long way from being able to do those things because it requires a much fuller and continuously updated understanding of human existence.
I don’t doubt AI will (and does) improve the amount coders can output, or let people code up small projects themselves. But this is also true of the continuous development of modern coding languages and tools, Python is almost natural english, and we don’t have to do stuff like write trash collectors in assembly anymore.
That’s the key here. You’ll never be able to get the smart human who knows what’s going on out of the loop, at least not with LLM-based ‘AI’, but it will be a very useful tool. Rather than a senior developer reading and fixing the code of half a dozen juniors, he’ll write half a dozen AI prompts and then fix the code they inevitably screw up. This won’t work for low-level or performant code, but for most of what people are working on it will work well enough. All the people learning to code now are fucked, but senior people with experience should be ok. The problem will come when they all retire in 20-30 years and software has been a dead-end job no one wants to get into for a generation.
