Is AI going to replace me?
tl;dr
The short version is no, for the most part. Will my job change? Most assuredly, with a few exceptions, everyone’s job will change.
Thinking back to the early days of the internet, Silicon Valley, before Google, Facebook, and Twitter, was big tech companies (Oracle, HP, Sun, SGI, etc.). And for them, the internet was a new thing, but nobody thought it would be what we have today; well, maybe a couple of people had a pretty good idea (e.g., Marc Andreeson). The point is that everyone’s job eventually changed as the internet was adopted and monetized.
Examples
So let’s take a couple of examples, sales executives and software developers. Both are near and dear to my heart. As a sales engineer, I work with both daily and can see how AI has impacted both.
Sales Executives
For the salesperson, AI has not fundamentally changed how they work. They still do outreach, prospect, get meetings, and work through their sales process. What has changed with AI is the mechanisms of how they do some of the items listed above. Such as outreach, they may use ChatGPT/Bard/Bing to help them draft an email, but still, they must know what they are trying to say and what they want the prospect to get out of the email (the call to action). I cannot see how companies will be ok buying from AI, especially in enterprise sales. At that level, you are buying from people, building relationships with people, aligning with executives, going out for dinner, etc. That is not something that AI can replace, at least right now (e.g., Westworld).
Software Engineers
For the developers, no AI will not take your job. No matter how good it gets (and it is getting better each week, btw), there will still need to be a human to be imaginative and to validate that what the machine is writing is accurate. If you look at the best AI for writing code right now, GPT-4, it still often writes bad code. It misses key imports and loses its marbles if you ask it too many questions and the context window/token limits are exceeded. In addition, It is constantly apologizing for mistakes. Basically, it can be trusted to write junior-level code, but that kind of output will not be pushed directly to production. I mean, it better not be, right? That would be crazy.
Let’s wrap this up
So in closing, no, your job is likely not being outsourced to AI just yet. Maybe one day, but if you are good at what you do, learn how to use AI effectively, and take this opportunity to get ahead of it, then you are must less likely to be found redundant. Also, realize that this issue has come up before, in kind of a cyclic concept of revolution. Think back to what you learned in school about the industrial revolution, then more recently with the information revolution (or whatever it is being called), the Internet, self-driving cars, etc. There will be jobs that are just plain redundant, there is not much that can be done without stopping progress, and I can promise you that stopping progress has far more lasting consequences than embracing change. A wise person once said, and I am paraphrasing, that there are only two certainties in life, death, and taxes. And an even wiser person once said that change is the only constant in life. So take this opportunity, learn some new skills, and embrace the change.
