{"id":166,"date":"2026-09-22T13:30:13","date_gmt":"2026-09-22T17:30:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.cedarville.edu\/stem\/?p=166"},"modified":"2026-09-22T13:30:13","modified_gmt":"2026-09-22T17:30:13","slug":"persisting-in-a-changing-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.cedarville.edu\/stem\/2026\/09\/22\/persisting-in-a-changing-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Persisting in a Changing World"},"content":{"rendered":"

Persisting in a Changing World<\/strong><\/p>\n

S. M. Gollmer<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I am reminded how blessed I am as I read JH Baek\u2019s post \u201cI Have Survived 4 Tech Extinctions Since 2002 (And AI Is Number 4)<\/a>.\u201d He relates that over his 24-year career he had his job \u201cdeclared dead four separate times.\u201d\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t change overnight.\u00a0 Being a physicist, I still expect gravity to keep me rooted to the earth and expect the sun to rise as it always has.<\/p>\n

I shared an article with my data science students on the impact of AI (AI Isn\u2019t Replacing Developers. It\u2019s Doing Something Worse<\/a>). 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.<\/p>\n

After reading the article, one student asked what I thought about the future for junior developers.\u00a0 I shared how there is an increasing rate of change in the computer world and its impact on everything else.\u00a0 I’ve seen the progression from mainframe computers with punch cards to mobile phones connected to AI. The landscape is constantly changing.\u00a0 What keeps a person relevant is avoiding passivity and learning new skills.<\/p>\n

Twenty years ago Thomas Friedman in The World is Flat<\/em> updated the saying \u201cfinish your dinner\u2014people in China and India are starving\u201d by saying, \u201cGirls, finish your homework\u2014people in China and India are starving for your jobs.\u201d He saw that in an interconnected world, jobs \u201cwill go to the best, smartest, most productive, or cheapest worker\u2014wherever he or she resides.\u201d Given that warning, I admonish everyone to maintain their relevance by being the best human God created them to be.\u00a0 If we misplace our identity on things that are temporary and don\u2019t grow in judgment when things fail, we will not persevere in a changing world. \u201cPassivity is unacceptable\u2014AI is starving to replace humans who act merely as machines.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Persisting in a Changing World S. M. Gollmer   I am reminded how blessed I am as I read JH Baek\u2019s post \u201cI Have Survived 4 Tech Extinctions Since 2002 (And AI Is Number 4).\u201d He relates that over his 24-year career he had his job \u201cdeclared dead four separate times.\u201d\u00a0 What stood out to… View Article<\/a>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cedarville.edu\/stem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cedarville.edu\/stem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cedarville.edu\/stem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cedarville.edu\/stem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cedarville.edu\/stem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=166"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cedarville.edu\/stem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":167,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cedarville.edu\/stem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166\/revisions\/167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cedarville.edu\/stem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cedarville.edu\/stem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cedarville.edu\/stem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}