It’s funny how humans have the same conversations over and over again across generations. When I was a kid in the 70s, the old folks talked about kids watching too much TV and it turning their brains to mush. In the 90’s parents talked about kids being obsessed with Gameboys and consoles and it turning their brains to mush. In the 2010s parents talk about kids staring at phones all day and it turning their brains to mush. Same conversation. Still the world turns.
We do the same thing in the technology space. In the 80s, there were folks talking about computers taking all of the jobs. In the 90s, there were folks talking about the internet taking all of the jobs. In the 2010s people talked about AWS taking all of the jobs. Today we’re talking about AI taking all of the jobs. Still the world turns.
Whether kids brains were ever turned to mush is, perhaps, debatable. But regarding various technologies taking all of the jobs, we have data on that, and it’s provably false. Well, at least it’s false from a raw employment perspective. It’s absolutely true that certain roles ceased to exist, but the people in those roles migrated to other, possibly brand new roles.
That’s not to say there weren’t other impacts on peoples’ lives & careers, though: for those who saw computers and decided not to learn about them and how they could be adopted in their work, they eventually became seen as complacent, or in the way, or behind the times, etc., and those folks (and I’m speaking from my own observations of family members way back in the day) had trouble finding jobs, eventually, and when they did find work, it was with a company that was still doing everything manually, because (for example) the owner found it cheaper to hire people than migrate to computers because computers made filing clerks in very low demand. Sounds like a great place.
Something similar happened when AWS adoption was building steam back in 2008-2010. There were only a few services back then. The concept of a VPC was brand new, for example, as I recall. I thought it was great and was getting real work done with these new tools, where I could write code to deploy an EC2 instance, and store files in S3, etc. At that time I was a member of a lot of system administration groups and Linux user groups, and there was a meeting where someone took an informal poll that showed that less than half of the folks in the room wrote code on a regular basis.
That really shook me. I was friends with almost everyone in the room. I also could plainly see that AWS was getting bigger faster – not slowing down, or plateauing. Within the next meeting or two I put together a talk that more or less begged everyone in attendance to learn to code in whatever language fit their brain. To take their shell scripts and port them to Python, or Perl, or Ruby, or anything. Any language would do. “The reality is”, I said, “that Amazon is creating APIs to allow developers to do your job.” A couple of smirks, a couple of knowing nods of agreements – from coders. “It’s not that there won’t be any jobs” I continued, “It’s that the jobs that are left are going to be the ones we all hate doing now, like changing printer toner.”
It has been nearly 20 years since I gave that talk. LinkedIn is a thing. There were probably 30 people in attendance at that talk, all locals, and the people who smirked are verifiably either not working in technology at all, or are working in tiny 1-man shops that require a physical presence and require them to change printer toner.
So, I tell you all of that so I can tell you this: I don’t think AI is anything to panic about. There are realities, though, that history tells us are likely coming, though. What history also tells us is that the folks who wind up landing on their feet are those who learn to adopt the new technology. The ones who wind up having a difficult time staying afloat are those who are complacent in their roles, think that AI could never replace them, or who try to foster anti-AI cultures, or the like. And, like computers, and the internet, and AWS, it’s not that there won’t be any jobs. It’s just that you might not want the jobs left in the wake of AI.