Persisting in a Changing World
S. M. Gollmer
I am reminded how blessed I am as I read JH Baek’s post “I Have Survived 4 Tech Extinctions Since 2002 (And AI Is Number 4).” He relates that over his 24-year career he had his job “declared dead four separate times.” What stood out to me is that what once was valued is now treated as a commodity. It is no longer necessary to know technical details, just look it up online. What was once revolutionary is quickly copied and assumed the new normal.
The author saw the first three extinctions take away the tools he had honed for success and the fourth extinction taking a part of himself, where his job is now to keep up with the machines. I count myself blessed because keeping current technologically for me is an avocation, not a vocational necessity. I am an educator and keeping current is important; however, the core competency of my discipline doesn’t change overnight. Being a physicist, I still expect gravity to keep me rooted to the earth and expect the sun to rise as it always has.
I shared an article with my data science students on the impact of AI (AI Isn’t Replacing Developers. It’s Doing Something Worse). In this article Lawrence says that AI deforms developers by allowing their programming abilities to atrophy and to skew their judgment when evaluating computer code. This deformation applies not only to programmers, but to everyone who substitutes AI for their ability to synthesize information and to critically analyze it.
After reading the article, one student asked what I thought about the future for junior developers. I shared how there is an increasing rate of change in the computer world and its impact on everything else. I’ve seen the progression from mainframe computers with punch cards to mobile phones connected to AI. The landscape is constantly changing. What keeps a person relevant is avoiding passivity and learning new skills.
Twenty years ago Thomas Friedman in The World is Flat updated the saying “finish your dinner—people in China and India are starving” by saying, “Girls, finish your homework—people in China and India are starving for your jobs.” He saw that in an interconnected world, jobs “will go to the best, smartest, most productive, or cheapest worker—wherever he or she resides.” Given that warning, I admonish everyone to maintain their relevance by being the best human God created them to be. If we misplace our identity on things that are temporary and don’t grow in judgment when things fail, we will not persevere in a changing world. “Passivity is unacceptable—AI is starving to replace humans who act merely as machines.”
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