A lot of technologist are rightfully fretting about what the future holds for tech careers, especially in software developer roles.
Perhaps it is time to think less about what tab-tab-go programming would mean for the future of developer roles and rather how those existing skill-sets could be leveraged in an AI world.
There is tremendous potential in reorienting technologists from a focus on churning out the next app from an IDE and towards thinking in a more holistic manner about how to leverage what already has been built out both in terms of software and infrastructure.
The past 30 yrs or so of the tech industry has been a ginormous build-out of technological capability. We in the industry may not have seen it that way since we have been the ones engaged in the build-out process. In other words we have seen the build-out primarily as just our jobs, and less as a process perhaps with a terminal date.
I wouldn't go so far as saying the build-out is complete by any means, but it seems it may have reached a critical point where one needs to start asking what comes next. To me the answer to that question is simple, figure out how to integrate the capabilities of the technology that has been built into the rest of industry and society at an unprecedented scale, in order to aide in solving real world problems.
Technologist should be thinking about how they can lead the way in getting effective AI implementations into industry. In other words think more in terms of how existing know-how would/could help drive potentially impactful automation in industry....The consultants shall win the day :)
This does not preclude continued build-out and careers within that or continued innovation, it simply means the focus of at least the bulk of our effort shifts towards industry. One could think of it as a sort of forward integration of the technologist skill-set.
One could even argue that AI infused integration of tech into industry is just another type of build-out, one that would ultimately lead to highly intelligent systems that might remind us of something out of your favorite sci-fi movie.
The end-goal (long-term) of forward integrating current tech infrastructure into industry with AI tightly integrated would be to get to a point where the human focus would be almost entirely about creativity,imagination,wants,needs and desire, and perhaps a lot less of the day-to-day technical "how-to"...a dream perhaps?
Now for my own pitch, consider these demos, part of our Intelligent Workspace series. Imagine how technologist skills coupled with the skills of someone who's a mechanical engineer or biomedical engineer could impact results in those domains.
Technologist skills applied to non-tech domains is not new, but AI presents a radically different possibility for the pace and scale at which such co-mingling could happen.
AI and its impact is still in a great deal of flux, ie no one knows for sure what's coming.
Are we going to all get copies of super intelligence that builds our houses and spaceships (wouldn't you want to go explore the infinite universe?...it's dark,cold and mostly empty though, so buyer beware:)), or human + bot collaboration solutions such as our Intelligent Workspace approach to move things forward?
I would say this remains an open question.
Bottom line, the death of toil has been greatly exaggerated, there is still a load of work for humanity to do, we just have to think about it in the right way.
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