What can be automated, eventually will be automated

End of the year had brought AI to naffy. Recent popularity of ChatGPT and other AI powered projects had pushed many products into adapting or at least experimenting with AI in their solutions. No wonder Google is rising the alarm as products like ChatGPT had proven their potential to revolutionize the way we search for information on the web. Some approaches were taken already, but none had succeeded to beat the Google in their core service. However the Google’s position had been challenged like never before.

I’m currently using ChatGPT over the Google or Stack Overflow to search for any specific IT related answer. It’s faster, more accurate and ultimately saves me a lot of time and effort. I really do benefit from using ChatGPT over Google or Stack Overflow.

It seems that ChatGPT’s popularity had caught many people off guard and not prepared for what AI is capable of. Many was surprised and concerned of how much ChatGPT, in terms of NLP, can do. Sure, people were aware that there’s this AI thing, but most of us weren’t following it’s progress on a daily basis.

AI is progressing rapidly and is not going away. Quite the opposite. It will start influencing nearly every part of our lives. So the natural question that many people will ask is whether AI will replace them in whatever job they’re doing?

“In the future, factories will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment” said Warren Buffet and he has a point. Even though this statement is exaggerated, we should expect that more and more of our work will be automated. That we will be replaced with technology. We already see that in production facilities and we will see similar change in other industries were more intellectual and creative work is being done.

It seems that human role will be narrowed to the one who is instructing the technology what to do and eventually do the final touch for whatever outcome was produced.

It’s hard to predict the pace in which human labor will be replaced by AI. Some jobs will be replaced faster some slower. Some will be replaced fully and some will have specific tasks done by the AI. However, this perspective should not scare anyone. It should rather motivate us in looking for ways we can take advantage of the AI’s help. It is pointless to resist.

Even the IT industry, that despite of the attempts still is holding strong against the automation, will eventually be impacted by the AI and automation. We can see how ChatGPT is good in providing code snippets. There are attempts to bring AI closer to the tools developers are using like GitHub’s Co-pilot. Soon we won’t need to memorize tons of CLI commands instead we’ll be instructing our machines to perform tasks using natural language. Eventually this functionality will be brought to the cloud platforms so that system architects will be able to provision whole systems with a matter of asking the AI a proper question.

Matt Welsh is predicting that software engineering as a practice will be obsolete and replaced with the AI systems that are going to be trained. It doesn’t sound that crazy if you think about it. Programming language is just a higher level way of instructing computers to perform things. It can be be a natural language as well if we just train our AI models well enough. Seeing what progress those models made in past 12-18 months this idea can materialize sooner than anyone expect.

So, should we be afraid of AI taking our jobs? Well, automating tasks and processes is natural progress in any industry. We should adapt and look for way we can take advantage of what AI offers.