Many conversations in developer communities currently (Spring 2024) center on some product enhanced by artificial intelligence taking the jobs of humans employed as software engineers. Despite the dystopian imagery this may invoke of automation replacing humans, it’s more accurately an assessment that companies en masse will decide the most strategic decision they can make to produce production software is to rely on other software rather than humans. However you envision it, here’s a few scenarios of highly likely futures involving humans and artificial intelligence. Perhaps you’ll find a scenario that you can position yourself in.
The first scenario is non-integration. In the near future, people who do not consciously use artificial intelligence in any way will be the then equivalent of living in a digital desert now or being completely computer illiterate. Having seen robots serving drinks, delivering food, and cleaning bathrooms, it’s clear no job role will be exempt from some influence of AI and automation. Having worked in hospitality myself for 17 years, if I were still in that space, I’d consider
Job changes where possible
Learning how to use some of these AI tools
At the bare minimum, beginning to use AI assisted tools to enhance non-work aspects of my life to and honestly, just keep up with a rapidly-advancing society.
The second scenario is what I’m calling the user. While devs are watching the direction firms like OpenAI and others are taking with product development, enterprises are observing as well. In that observation, these companies are evaluating from the perspectives of efficiency, speed, and profit. It’s not unreasonable to anticipate that the expectations around how long processes should take will be exponentially faster than those of today. Accordingly, the amount of “work” that the worker is expected to produce will be dramatically increased as well. I’m saying any and every rank-and-file 9-to-5 employee employed in a role that combines mental skills and computer execution will have to begin using AI to facilitate that level of expected velocity in the foreseeable future. At a minimum, all office workers will utilize some form of prompting to get faster answers, faster execution and more units of completed work.
The third scenario is what I call an AI explorer. The AI explorer is the developer who sees the writing on the wall and chooses to “join em rather than beat em”. The AI explorer digs deep enough into understanding AI to facilitate them being able to shape technology without necessarily re-inventing the wheel or tackling writing artificial intelligent systems from scratch. They are the early adopters of AI technologies, experimenting with and implementing AI in their projects, contributing to open-source AI projects, or even starting their own ventures based on AI advancements. APIs made available from firms like OpenAI and others give developers the power to make unintelligent systems “smart” through use of that enhancement. In the example that follows by Marcus Hellberg, VP of DevRel at Vaadin, he demonstrates using langchain4j to take a reservation system, give it access to select data and integrate that with AI to automate certain customer interactions and functionality. Embracing AI in this way positions developers in a way that makes them more productive and potentially increases their career longevity. (Video here)
The final scenario in this context of humans, AI, and the future of work is the AI engineer.
AI engineers are the ones building the backbone of what will likely be our future's most groundbreaking advancements. They can be found leveraging machine learning algorithms to solve real-world challenges, they’re instrumental in developing autonomous systems for self-driving cars, and certainly they’re the minds behind large language models (LLMs) like GPT, a family of AI models that has garnered tons of attention recently. AI engineers can be found applying their skills to enhance medical diagnostics, improve climate change models, and optimize supply chain logistics. If there is a pseudo-safe programming role, AI engineers are most likely it.
A shift is coming and impact will accompany it. For most scenarios, there are means of making that impact a positive one, rather than adverse.
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