Will AI (Such As ChatGPT) Steal My Job As A Software Engineer?
Yes. Well, probably not ChatGPT at its current version, but its successors will probably take a significant part of what you define as a software engineer job today.
With this out of the system let me explain.
An absolute marvel
If you didn't try the recent AI tool from Open.AI - ChatGPT you are in for a treat.
ChatGPT allows you to ask it any question in natural language and get an amazingly detailed human-like response.
It can also write code in almost any coding language in existence, ChatGPT will even add comments and explanations in key areas of the code to make it more understandable.
The revolution
What an amazing time to be alive. In the last few decades, we witnessed the internet revolution which led to the data revolution which led now to the recent AI revolution as some call it. Like previous revolutions, it comes with a cost. Take the industrial revolution [1760-1820] for example - before it, a major part of households was self-sufficient with most people engaged in agriculture and farming. How many farmers do you know today? But let's not go that far, let's look a hundred years back from now to 1920 and see what were the most common jobs in the USA back then. Among the top 10 most common jobs are Dairy farm, stock raisers, Servants, and Carpenters. None of these professions are on the US top lists nowadays. Every revolution forces us to adjust our behavior, and humanity always finds a way.
Adapt
It is unlikely for AI to completely replace us software engineers in the foreseeable future. But that does not mean our work environment and responsibilities will not change. Multiple things we do today like writing every method, connecting each and every service, and learning by heart every tiny improvement a coding language introduced. Areas that could possibly be automated by AI tools such as ChatGPT. These automations will free us, humans, to concentrate on more sophisticated and nuanced projects, designs, and integrations. We should embrace the change and advances and use these tools to our advantage. Usually late to the game players or ones who refused to adapt, are left to lag behind.
Stay innovative, creative, and curious.
Human's edge on AI (at least for now) are our ability to be innovative and creative with our ability to introduce new and original ideas.
But what about creative AIs? Like the famous "move 37" of AlphaGO against Lee Sedol?
The famous “move 37” happened in the second game of the 5-game match, and was described by commentators, once they got over their initial shock, with words like “beautiful” and “creative.” It left Sedol utterly flumoxed, to the point where he had to spend 15 minutes contemplating his own next move.
In my opinion, these actions are not admissible as creative, since in games like GO (and other board games as well) you have a huge benefit in planning as many steps ahead as you can. Combine that with brilliant heuristics and pruning mechanisms (which AplhaGo clearly had) and a human contestant does not stand a chance. But you must understand that this so-called creativity is confined to a very narrow field, and are in no way near genuine human creativity.
Another example is a video of how AI sees human evolution has gone viral a few months ago.
The video starts with monkeys through modern humans to allegedly futuristic humans. The result is truly cool. And again, you need to understand how these AIs are trained to be able to grasp how this is even possible. To train an AI model to make this kind of "prediction" you have to feed it with numerous amounts of data. The data has to be labeled (at least partly by humans) for the model to understand what "ancient" and "futuristic" means. So this is more of all the artwork that was fed to model vision than the actual AI vision of the future.
Curiosity can be defined in several AI algorithms (like the explore part on Reinforcement learning algorithms) some of these algorithms even let the machines explore their surroundings on their own and learn for the sake of learning. Even though, like creativity, this curiosity is very limited by the algorithm domain. You need to stay curious and keep learning not because machines can't be "curious" but because in our dynamic field, you can't be outdated. Knowledge of new technologies, methodologies, and tools will help keep your edge and be more valuable in your area.
Summary
You know what? Let's ask ChatGPT what he thinks about that...
Question: Will AI (such as chatGPT) steal my job as a software engineer
It is unlikely that ChatGPT will directly replace your job as a software engineer. However, it can be used to automate certain tasks and make them more efficient. For example, ChatGPT can be used to generate code snippets or provide suggestions for debugging. It can also be used in natural language processing applications to improve user interface or to extract information from unstructured data. But the main point is chatgpt is an AI model, its main goal is to assist human to make the work more efficient, not replace them.
Think about it, and how it makes you feel. AI is here to stay.
