This is probably the biggest question in everybody’s mind right now. “Will AI take my job?”. I am probably late to the party to answer this question but I can still add yet another perspective to it. These are like those exciting times. Even more so for Tech professionals.
I remember those amazing days of early web applications. When web masters were just feeling comfortable using tools to build cool HTML websites, someone built a PHP based website which didn’t need every page manually designed. It sprung up applications. Forums, Groups, Blogs so many different types of websites started to show up. Everybody was like “Oh, webmasters are going to lose a lot of jobs”. And they probably did as well. But they skilled up, and became application developers. Some opened companies and hired developers. But what’s important here is it gave people more functionality and use of the internet.
Mini revolutions followed as mobile applications did similar sort of thing. Then cam frameworks that let you build both web and mobile applications with one codebase. Server administration became Cloud administrations. Sys admins became container orchestrators. All incrementals steps.
But AI (honestly, I know it’s not technically AI yet) is one giant leap forward. Sort of like introduction of Internet. Or probably even bigger? Some don’t hesitate to compare it’s advent to invention of wheel or fire and what not. But I’d go as far internet, thanks.
It’s a big leap for sure. But it’s not unexpected. Everybody was experiencing some level of automation invasion everywhere. And tools like ChatGPT only show automation has started to take over more things. But let’s be honest, is it that ready? Even the guided text prompts need a start. But to truly take over everything, we will need it to know when to start, when to end. It has to know when it’s contribution will be better than our manual work. That unfortunately needs way more time. What really is happening is that process and progress has begun. AI didn’t have any entry point in our daily lives but now it does. It can now copy some of our actions and learn to perfect itself from feedback. More people will use it in places they never did. So it will learn more.
And at some point, it will take over. But by then, we will find new industries for it.
When internet showed up, we had email with 2 megabytes of space. Now, we don’t know how much will be enough. We rented VHS and DVD, now we watch online. We produce more video content today. We write more, read more. We read things faster. We spread news faster. Media has changed completely through internet. With the medium, we found new things to do.
What AI is giving us is productivity we never thought could exist. So we don’t know how to use it now. But we will. It will make us lose our current jobs but it will give us more things to look forward to. We can finally hope to not do things we don’t like. Every aspect of work will be impacted. Starting from proofreading to digging for oil. With so much productivity plugged in, we will solve problems we never thought existed. Just like the internet.
These are extraordinary times and uncertain certainly. But it was coming all along. Because we always look to improve productivity. We just found a treasure of it.