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. ;-)
This makes the assumption that LLMs do what says in the tin
Some people are comparing it to the industrial revolution. If it is like that, then most artisans will be driven out of a job, be forced into much less rewarding, more dangerous, and much lower paying jobs; the world will be flooded with low quality but cheap products; living conditions for the UK working class will decline and stagnate for 100 years (until the labor movement gains enough power); and much of the 3rd world will be forced to go back to an agrarian lifestyle.
Calculators and spreadsheets: Why learn arithmetic when a machine can do it?
We still teach kids arithmetic without calculators.
The PC revolution: Everyone would be building their own applications with Excel, Access, 4GLs and SQL. Why would we need professional programmers anymore?
People are too lazy to try it themselves.
The internet: Entire industries were doomed. Travel agents, real estate agents, newspapers, retailers… who needs any of them when everything is online?
They were right about real-estate, travel angents, newspapers, and countless others. This one was pretty spot on. An the collapse of news funding has been a problem, making Govt. corruption easier to get away with.
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).
That was mostly fear mongering, not so much a real issue outside of manufacturing.
Cloud and SaaS: If someone else runs the servers, infrastructure and applications, what will IT departments do?
This I’ve never heard of. Someone always needs to manage the local network and machines.
No-code and low-code: Once again, developers were about to become obsolete. Business users would build everything themselves. Sound familiar?
Yah sounds like the math one. Need to make sure we teach people coding without AI before making them developers actually working in the real world.
But that’s not the big issue. Think of maps and phone numbers. How many phone numbers do you know? Can you navigate to a place you’ve never been without GPS? Can the 23 years old you work with?
We need to make sure people learn skills without AI first. In all knowledge fields, not just programming.
Or we let them vibe code unstable/fragile systems and make them pay $$$ when they have to call in the ‘old guys’ who know how it all is supposed to work.
I do my best to mentor the 20 somethings and I think I’m having an impact. If not… see above option ;-)
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.
Travel agents have all but disappeared. Newspapers are a shell of their former selves – once proud bastions of journalism have become clickbait mills dependent on funding from oligarchs to push their propaganda. Many retailers – even some quite big ones like K-Mart, Circuit City, and Sears – are in heavy decline or are completely gone.
Out of this list, real estate agents are the only ones doing relatively okay. And even then, their role is much different than what it once was. Now, they mainly function as someone to help you with the paperwork and a trusted person who can be available to walk prospective buyers through a house and prevent them from damaging/burglarizing the place in the process.
Independent newspapers disappeared because their paying audience disappeared. People get their news for free from The Internet™, which usually means those news push some particular product or promote whichever politician that bankrolls them.
Travel agents, well, you can arrange your trip well enough using only Google Maps and your airline’s website, so why pay more? Rich people totally use travel agencies, it saves time.
Real estate agents in my city were more like parasites, they did not draft contracts and carried no legal responsibility, their only job was to arrange a meeting between a buyer and a seller (both are usually present when inspecting the house) and collect their cut. The contract is arranged by the notary with a government’s license, and it has a standard template. The real estate agents’ way of operation was to flood the classifieds newspaper with their ads so they drown out the actual sellers, who would not usually publish the same advertisement each week, and then call those same sellers. If that job disappears - good riddance. They are slowly replaced by renting agencies, who act more like landlords and even perform some property maintenance.
Remember the controversy over e-mail? Sort of a sub-example in the internet category, but there were a bunch of people who thought it would kill mail. While it did mostly kill the personal letter, people were predicting the fall of usps as we knew it. Lots of people boycotted email for a long time.
good point, I forgot that one… Funny story, a year ago I was working in the mail sortation software industry… it’s thriving.
Oh yea. I saw a presentation on the OCR-ing Lockheed made for USPS before OCR was commonly available. It’s pretty old tech, and was pretty reliable for a looooong time.
I hear what you’re saying, and indeed predicting the future is impossible. But a few counter points.
Maybe being automated as a profession is just never a pleasant or attractive thing whatever the productivity gains are. Jobs may remain, but fulfilling ones or soul draining ones, which is a point to easily underemphasised I think. For many, the jobs that will be left simply aren’t the shirt of thing that brought people into the industry.
Increasing productivity doesn’t necessarily reduce the amount of work available.
But likely changes the nature of that work.
With the construction equipment analogy, the points at which it breaks as an analogy is maybe the important stuff. Deterministic machinery that operates as a direct extension of human movement and control … versus swarms of agents?
Going faster than before and in the domain of cognitive work may just be the problems, not mere aberrations.
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.
“Those skills” … what’s left after cognition? What’s experience other than memories of prior cognitive work? What’s creativity other than a form of cognition (and which generative AI can be quite good at I think)?
Sure there’ll be jobs and AI has been overhyped. But the bigger picture here is also alarming and points in directions with issues beyond having a job next year. Do these domains matter? Should our profession which is at ground zero care about them?
Even if only the nature of the job changes, the broader knock on effects of how people are affected by that culturally can be significant and can’t be ignored given the speed and and depth of this cycle.
Ok look, it’s AI slop telling us tha AI is nothing to worry about.
