The role of AI in my profession

There are some days I just sit in front of my laptop and just start pondering; "Should I even continue with this?", "What if I'm just wasting my time?" All these questions are bought upon because of AI, and it's actually funny that many people are underestimating AI. The way I see it, anything is possible in the world of AI and while you might think it won't be able to take over certain jobs right now, it might be able to do so in the next couple of decades. I might have thought otherwise if I'm not actively following up on AI trends and I can tell you that the future of AI is actually scary.

Robots aren't much of a threat on their own, but combined with AI? Dear Lord. I recently watched a video of a robot equipped with AI that can harvest ripe grapes on a farm. There's also one where a robot can transplant young plants from a greenhouse to an open field and also monitor their growth. Now this might not be that interesting to you but do know that in the past, these are jobs that were done by people and they get paid for it. You can see the video of the robot that harvests grapes in the video below (it's just 30 seconds long). Notice how it detects ripe fruits and cleanly harvests them?

That video was from 2 years ago, do you know how advanced that technology will be now? Or in the next 5 to 10 years? The actual problem with AI and robots is not they replacing all jobs but is that job availability is reduced. Let's say a big farm requires 50 workers to run it, the owner can just employ 10 workers and fill the remaining space with robots. Now, they won't actually buy 40 robots, just 5 will be able to do the work of 40 people, why? Because they never get tired and can work all through the night. The 10 workers are just there to supervise and assist the robots with tasks that need humans touch.

AI vs my career

Right now, the sector that's most threatened by AI is tech, specifically web development. It's funny that we programmers are building the tools that will eventually replace us in our field 😅. Right now, there are a lot of AI tools out there that can design and build a simple website within seconds, something that might take a developer several minutes or an hour to accomplish. And the craziest thing is that more and more AI tools keep popping up every day and they keep getting better. At first it was chatGPT, then Google came up with Bard AI, and Microsoft brought out Copilot AI. Now we have perplexity, Claude and Devin AI.

Each of them keeps improving on the work of the previous ones and they keep getting better at what they do. If AI wants to start taking over jobs, it's going to start with digital skills because that's easier. And by digital skills, I mean copywriting, graphics design, animation, coding, etc. Copywriting will probably be the first to go because right now any AI can easily come up with good content as long as you ask the right question. People who previously employed copywriters to generate content for their business can now easily do so with AI, so why bother paying someone to do it?

In the world of coding (web and app development, software and cloud engineering, and all others), everyone is getting tense about the possibility of AI replacing us and some beginners have actually stopped learning to code because of this. But for now, I don't see AI replacing programmers, because I have used most of these AI tools to work on certain coding projects and they still have a very long way to go before they will be able to build a good website on their own. Also note that these AI companies are currently working on something called Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which is basically an AI with human-like intelligence and the ability to teach itself

But for real, I don't know what's going to happen in the next 10 years. Just watch the above video and see what AI is capable of doing right now. That's an AI robot that is aware of its environment and can react to things in the environment, it can even evaluate its performance! Just imagine what it can do as they keep working on it for the next 10 years. Still think AI is not much of a threat? By the way, the same company that made chatGPT is also the one developing that robot, so it's a very big project. Anyway, if AI eventually takes over my job, I will just upgrade to the field of machine learning and AI (it's still a field under programming). Or maybe I will just set up a fish farm, after all that's what I studied at the university 😁

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