To be replaced by AI is a choice#
When I hear how people are afraid of being replaced by the AI, I picture this:
Scene setup: a person sits at their desk, doing routine office work.
Suddenly, a robot walks up and asks this person to move aside. The robot takes over the workplace and immediately picks up the routine.
The human is standing a few feet away with despair all over their face. They realize that they’ve been replaced.
A few weeks later, their fridge is empty and their stomach is gurgling. Another week later, they’re standing on the street, looking at their old apartment building and contemplating how to be homeless.
The audience laughs and applauds.
This little sketch might not be so funny to some people. For example, a caricature unambitious person who learned one job, not demanding, but stable and safe. They do their nine-to-five, make weekend plans, and wait for retirement.
When I look back at my career path, I remember how I actively steered myself to be in the most in-demand role within the boundaries of my interests. Each job change, voluntary or not, was a step up. From part-time junior software engineer, to startup, to enterprise, followed by an increased level of seniority. When REST APIs were all the rage, I was doing that. When chats took over, I was building a chatbot. When machine learning became the king, I moved into AI/ML. This is the time of opportunity, and opportunities are endless. AI revolution, if it ever comes, is not an overnight event that puts everything upside down. It’s a gradual process with high visibility. As the new trends emerge, I’ll be sure to ride the wave.
Update#
I felt that this might be a hot take, so I submitted it to Hacker News. It didn’t blow up in comments, but I definitely triggered a few people. Aside from calling me names and wishing me ill, I got few interesting replies:
johanvts: …thousands [devs] will be out of a job, they cant all will themselves into a senior management position. Besides, it would probably be easier to replace the managers with AI.
This indicates a possible trend, where separation between development and managerial roles makes less sense. We can have more product engineers, that combine software expertise with domain knowledge to deliver complete solutions independently. Similar to how people operate in startups, wearing many hats and making progress quickly and autonomously.
pjmlp: I bet he his in US, from all countries, it seems to be the one with more people that see work for live as some kind of sin, to be looked down upon, one has to work every second of their lives, when not they are being lazy. Especially around SV culture, this goes over the top. The fallacy of the argument is that someone has to live on a region where these kind of transitions are available on the existing job pool.
Spot on, even though I’m not from the US originally. I changed three countries, chasing the job pool availabilities. Although, I can’t say I’m looking down on people who figured out how to live fullfilling lives without a job. I find this extremely fortunate. As for myself, when I’m not building software products at work, I do it at home in my spare time. And one thing I noticed, is that job is a great amplifier of my efforts. I don’t think I can have the same success or even impact through my pet projects. So, in a way, not being proactive and fully engaged at work is wasting time. Not being lazy per se, even though, that might be related.
laughing_man: Yes, but here’s the problem: Those steps behind you are being destroyed. It’s not the senior engineers who are getting replaced; it’s the people fresh out of college looking for their first job. And as AI gets better each step above that first job will disappear. You’ll be fine. Your job won’t get replaced until after you’re gone. But when you look around you’re not going to see any young people.
I’ve seen this point a lot on the web, how people compare AI to junior devs, and bring up an idea of replacement. This is of course a pipe dream. In fact I work with a few people just from the college, and I see how AI helps them get up-to-speed faster. Even senior engineers benefit from AI coding a lot. Their value to the company is not in how fast they can churn out new code, but in deep domain understanding they build, and in agency to drive the project they are responsible for.
As for the “destroyed steps behind me”, I wouldn’t take the same steps if I was starting my career now. My point was to actively seek and learn what’s needed by the industry.