The role of AI in my career

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been trending all over the world for the past few years and I guess we can all thank OpenAI (the makers of chatGpt) for setting the stage for AI advancement. It's funny how AI has been in existence for years but most people never paid much attention to it because it mostly had applications in small niche areas and some of those areas are too complex. But with the rise of large language models like chatGPT and Google Gemini, everyone can now use AI for regular everyday tasks.

AI started as something we could all have fun with, just asking chatGPT questions and getting nice but sometimes not-so-accurate answers which were very useful for assignments but as AI kept advancing, many people began to see the risk it posed to our careers and the first people to have that fear of AI taking over our jobs are those of us in tech. Whether you're a software engineer, graphics/UI designer, virtual assistant, data analyst, or any other digital-related career path out there, we were all afraid of what the future holds for us as regards our chosen career path vs AI.

Before I go on, let's first talk about what constitutes a career. For me, I see a career as the overall professional trajectory and types of work you do, regardless of the subject you studied. A career path is the combination of skills, adaptability and experience and considering how AI and automation are transforming the job market, your ability to adapt plays a big role in weathering the storm. Now that we have settled that aspect, I definitely agree that some jobs are going to be replaced by AI and one example can be seen in the video below.

That is a robot that harvests ripe grapes with the power of AI. You can see how it precisely cuts the ripe grapes from the trees and collects them, and it can detect which grapes are ripe or not, amazing, isn't it? What that robot is doing is what people are paid to do on farms but right now, some big farms now use robots to do most of the heavy lifting while the number of humans needed has been reduced. That's why I believe no career is 100% future-proof because even though AI doesn't completely replace a job, it can reduce the number of available jobs.

Let's use the example of that farming robot I mentioned earlier. Let's say a farm needs about 20 workers to run it properly but then the owner decides to add 3 of those AI robots, and he ends up firing half of his workers while the remaining half are there to supervise and assist the robots. It's the same thing in the tech industry where a task that is usually handled by 5 software engineers is now reduced to 2 software engineers because AI is speeding things up. It is part of the reason why there are lots of tech layoffs happening recently

All the same, I still believe AI can't take over my career right now but maybe it will in the next decade. For now, it is very terrible at what I do. I'm an aspiring software engineer specialising in web development and I use AI every day in my projects. Let me give an example of what I mean by saying AI is terrible at what I do. The software I use for writing code has Google Gemini integrated in it which helps me to code faster and suggest solutions. I had a problem earlier today in my project but I didn't know where it was coming from.

I asked Gemini to scan my code for errors and it responded by saying the error was coming from line 56, then it wrote out the code block that was causing the error. I looked at the code block it gave me and realized it wasn't in my code, it just made it up. I knew Gemini wouldn't be able to solve the problem so I had to manually go through each line of code looking for the error, and then I found it in another line (not line 56). That's just one example and I have come across a lot of blunders that AI cooked up all in the name of trying to come up with a solution. That's what alleviated my fears of AI taking over my job because from what I have seen, it is very terrible at critical thinking and problem-solving.

And that brings me to some of the jobs I think would exist in the future and the first on that list is anything that involves AI. Things like AI engineering, AI risk management, prompt engineering, and so on. Then jobs like healthcare and cyber security will also exist in the future and cyber security is very important as the use of AI systems keeps rising, there will be a lot of vulnerabilities that require the services of cyber security experts. I know several jobs would still exist in the future but these are the ones I'm sure of.

We the way things are going right now, I think it would be best for everyone to develop skills that complement AI rather than trying to compete against it. Critical thinking, problem-solving, and the ability to learn continuously will be very important. I used to see AI as a threat to my career but now, I see it as just a tool that improves productivity. Anytime I think about AI taking over my job, I remind myself that washing machines didn't replace Laundromats and Laundry houses, rather they helped to boost their productivity.

Thanks for reading

This is my entry for May Inleo Prompt, day 21. Come be a part of this awesome daily prompt by clicking on this link.

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