Let’s assume that in 10 years, AI has advanced absurdly, insanely fast, and is now capable of doing everything a Senior SWE can do. It can program in 15 different languages, 95% accuracy with almost no mistakes, can create entire applications in minutes, and no more engineers or SWEs are needed… What will all the devs do? Do they just become homeless? Transition to medical field, nursing? Become tradespeople like plumbers, HVAC?
Someone still has to write the instructions. AI might not become a replacement for the engineer, but a more powerful compiler, that is still fed with code written by engineers.
Yeah, I agree that’s the more likely scenario. People seem to worry way too much about AI, when it’s really only going to replace junior devs, and only for short-sighted companies.
But I mean many people have already lost their job because AI automated it away.
True, and many people have lost jobs because something else automated it away, like toll booth workers, grocery clerks, and telephone switchers, and computers (i.e. people who would compute things by hand).
Jobs disappearing because technology advances is natural. It sucks for those impacted, but it’s natural, and IMO it’s only a problem of new jobs aren’t created fast enough, or whole industries disappear. Fighting to keep jobs in spite of automation runs the risk of having an entire industry disappear, such as if dock workers win the fight to prevent automation on the docks, they’ll just all lose their jobs at the same time once automation can replace them all at once.
The better plan is to adjust and adapt as technology changes. If you’re entering CS or a recent grad, make sure you understand concepts and focus less on syntax. If you’re a mid level, learn to incorporate AI into your workflow to improve productivity. If you’re a senior, work toward becoming an architect and understand how to mitigate risks with poor quality code.
Fighting AI will at best delay things.
That is certainly true. It just sucks, that so many people are scrambling for jobs and rich people get richer. There has to be a better way.
I think the root is that change is scary and hard. As a dev, I feel that too, but I also think people are overreacting a bit.
Just like how COBOL still exists, traditional software jobs will continue to exist, it’ll just be harder and harder to find those roles as companies find more and more use cases for AI. But it’ll also take several years for companies to get on board. So I’m not too worried, though I can’t recommend my field to college students unless they’re really interested, because it could be a bumpy ride.
For me the other scary thing is the loss of control. We are already drowning in code everyone needs and noone understands and now we build systems, who can produce mountains of that.
But then again you could use it to explain code. We will so quickly become dependent on it.