5 How AI will affect jobs and how to stay ahead
This chapter covers
- The qualities that will help protect jobs from being replaced by AI
- How software engineers can future-proof their jobs
- How AI can generate new opportunities for software engineers
- Discussing the effects of AI on the economy and whether it could prolong unemployment and misery
Because generative AI can write code, many software engineers—and aspiring ones—have become worried that their careers might be in danger. NVIDIA’s CEO argued it’s no longer necessary to encourage young people to learn how to code. “In fact, it’s almost exactly the opposite,” he said. “It is our job to create computing technologies that nobody has to program and that the programming language is human: everybody in the world is now a programmer—that is the miracle” (https://mng.bz/GenJ).
This chapter discusses the possibility that AI may replace the jobs of software engineers and how to protect such jobs. The first three sections discuss three qualities that will help them resist AI: a wide gap between “just fine” and excellent work; the need for stringent validation of the output; and the need for tight control over the output.
At the beginning of each section, we discuss the topic in general—outside software engineering. I hope this gives you a wider view of the AI affects jobs. At the end of each section, I relate the topic with software engineering specifically and share advice on how engineers can protect their jobs.