Artificial Intelligence Coming for Jobs Is Just the Next Evolution of Automation

There is a lot of consternation around the growing proliferation and power of Artificial Intelligence, particularly in software engineering. Some even want to attribute the mass layoffs we’ve experienced over the last two years to AI, at least partially.

That still seems off in the future – for now.

While one can find examples of companies laying off employees and replacing them with AI, the use cases right now are still limited. But jobs like customer support have always been vulnerable to outsourcing, whether to automation or cheaper sources of labor. Businesses will always gravitate towards cost savings, but will still have to balance quality and cost. If the quality stays roughly the same or increases as the cost goes down, businesses won’t burn money for very long.

My brother, a web developer at a small company that builds and manages websites, called me last night stressed out about an AI-based website generation tool they tried out. In less than a minute, it had generated a draft WordPress site based on a prompt. There are probably dozens of these services out there, and he said he might have about two years left in his career before he had to find something else to do. He said sites generated by these tools will be good enough for 80 percent of potential customers.

Taking a step back, this AI approach is a natural evolution of previous types of automation, like multi-step forms that eventually spit out a draft site. At one time, we called these user interfaces “wizards”, implying some kind of high intelligence there too.

My advice to my brother was to use and master these tools himself. Let the tool do the boring grunt work, then apply your skillset on top of it. Then it becomes a marketing problem to solve – “Let me show you why you should pay me to build your site”. Which is a not a new problem at all. Humans have always competed in that arena; the only true difference is a new competitor has entered the fray.

The short-term risk to jobs is more likely to be positions not created or filled because of AI. As employees become more efficient because of better tools and automation, including but not limited to AI, additional job openings become less necessary. This is also not entirely new either; manufacturing has been dealing with this problem for decades, for example, as more and more robotics have been deployed.

Nevertheless, the trend lines are unmistakeable and irreversible.

The best advice I can give is to become familiar and comfortable with these tools, and push the fears aside. Fear is usually born out of the unknown anyway, so the best antidote is education. You’ll find that these tools can make you more productive and allow you to showcase your unique skills, which people will pay for – including employers who are already seeing AI experience as a key differentiator.

Humans are nothing if not adaptable; we’ll continue to develop new ideas, new businesses, and new roles, and stay ahead of the supposed “AI Apocalypse". Our new copilots will be helping us do that too.