I am a database and application developer. At my age I suspect part of the reason why I was included among the estimated 40K employees that were terminated, in the year Larry Ellision decided to burn his house down for AI, is that the assumption would be that I might be resistant to AI, or not capable of learning new skills that would make me successful with AI.
I’m not going lie
and say that this is false; because I have a healthy skepticism of what impact AI
can represent on the world today, some of which the world is now seeing and
many of us who were replaced so that ai can be provided for over our past
contributions.
My skepticism is as follows:
1.
The termination of ( a whole lot of) highly
skilled workers in favor of what essentially becomes a modern cookie-cutter
solution
2.
The AI cookie cutter is not necessarily a cost
savings as
a.
Massive Data Centers consume physical Assets, Electricity
on a “by powerplant scale”
b.
are being trained by lower wages, lower skilled
workers, resulting in incomplete, insecure, and some flat-out wrong results
c.
In order to use the AI cookie cutter the “developer”,
or more likely their organization, must also pay for the privilege.
d.
Debugging is often required, which requires some
of those highly-skilled worker you just put back into the job market.
3.
The AI cookie cutter also stifles innovation.
Sure you can tell it what you want but it is going to produce its “solution” based
on a lower-skilled knowledge base and therefore you lose the true power of code
innovation in the form of organization, performance optimization, security-minded
constructs, and sheer confidence that what you produce will pass a regulatory
review.
That being said, I consider
myself partially (time will tell how bad it can get) correct in these cases. Now I also have a powerful need to make my
mortgage payments and feed my family, and since I am not a billionaire that can
buy and sell the media using the same dividends that could have bought a good
AI foundation while still respecting his employees and the needs, I have begun
updating my skillset to include AI concepts and specifics for projects both
personal and production related. My initial
assessment is as follows…
You have to know what you want.
In great
detail. I have been seeing all these
training programs that tout a code assistant without needing to know code. Please reference my above points. This is the path to literally paying for production
code that, if you are ignorant enough to publish without meaningful review,
will create the largest amount of expensive technical debt we will ever see in
the field. If you as an AI user don’t
understand the term technical debt, then you are the current and future problem
in this space. If you want to be a
developer or an IT professional, you need to do the work and learn your trade.
You have to know how to describe what you want.
Again, in great
detail. Of course, this also comes with
the idea that you have to be knowledgeable in the end result, how it look, how
it behaves, and especially how it fits the needs of the problem you are
solving. See my previous assertion that
like the blacksmith apprentice of old,
learn your trade.
I have had some
interesting test interactions with AI, that I will bring out in a future post
but the things I have leaned in them are “educational” it presents an
opportunity of sorts that might just make the disillusioned, highly-skilled,
and by necessity “petty” developer and IT professionals even more valuable in
the destopian AI future that we find ourselves pursuing like Alice heading down
the rabbit-hole.
EOL
