I’ve been through quite a few technology panics over the years. To me AI feels pretty familiar, although this one is moving a hell of a lot faster.

A few examples, roughly in chronological order:

• Calculators and spreadsheets: Why learn arithmetic when a machine can do it? Why hire accountants when Excel can do the calculations? Somehow accounting survived. Turns out knowing what the numbers mean is more important than calculating them.
• The PC revolution: Everyone would be building their own applications with Excel, Access, 4GLs and SQL. Why would we need professional programmers anymore?
• The internet: Entire industries were doomed. Travel agents, real estate agents, newspapers, retailers… who needs any of them when everything is online? Some took a beating, others adapted, and entirely new businesses appeared.
• Open source: Why pay for software when Linux, Apache, MySQL and countless other tools are free? Commercial software was supposedly doomed. Instead, we got an enormous industry built around open source.
• Outsourcing and offshoring: All the programming, IT, accounting and other skilled work was headed overseas. There wouldn’t be any jobs left here. Didn’t quite work out that way (this one had me a bit scared in the late 90’s).
• Cloud and SaaS: If someone else runs the servers, infrastructure and applications, what will IT departments do? Apparently quite a lot. Robotics and automation: Factories wouldn’t need people anymore. Some jobs certainly disappeared, but manufacturing didn’t stop employing people.
• No-code and low-code: Once again, developers were about to become obsolete. Business users would build everything themselves. Sound familiar?

And now AI.

There is a difference this time. Previous revolutions mostly automated physical work, calculations or specific technical tasks. AI is going after cognitive work: programming, writing, analysis, research, design and even decision-making.

That’s understandably unsettling when you’ve spent decades developing those skills.

I’m not suggesting AI won’t eliminate jobs. It absolutely will. Some skills will become less valuable, some jobs will disappear, and some industries will change dramatically.

But we’ve seen this pattern before. The PC didn’t eliminate programmers. It helped create an enormous software industry. The internet didn’t eliminate the need for people who understand information. It made information available on a scale nobody could have imagined. Cloud didn’t eliminate IT. It changed what IT people do.

A few things worth remembering:

• Automating a task isn’t the same as eliminating a job.
• Making something easier doesn’t make expertise worthless.
• Making knowledge more accessible doesn’t replace experience.
• Increasing productivity doesn’t necessarily reduce the amount of work available.

I’ve seen this movie a few times. Every new technology comes with predictions that this time it’s different, that entire professions are finished and the skills we’ve spent years acquiring are about to become worthless.

Sometimes those predictions are partly right. Jobs disappear, industries change, and people have to adapt. I’m certainly not dismissing that.

But we’re remarkably bad at predicting what comes next.

AI may well be a bigger disruption than anything we’ve seen before, and it’s happening much faster. I don’t think anyone should underestimate that.

What I question is the assumption that today’s jobs, skills and ways of working are somehow permanent, and that anything which threatens them must necessarily be bad.

We’ve been wrong about that plenty of times.

For my part I’m doubling down on fundamentals with my team. Deep understanding of design/architectural patterns, sounds coding practices, critical thinking and knowing how to recognize when something is wrong. AI can certanly generate a ton of code, that doesn’t mean it’s good or even right. The tools will keep changing, the fundamentals are what let us use them effectively.

p.s.: I’ve recently compared AI to heavy construction equipment. It replaced a lot of manual labor, can do tremendous damage in unskilled hands and in the hands of a skilled operator do 10x the work. ;-)