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Learning Future

When J was still in high school, we often chatted about how technology might impact choice of career. We generally agreed that she would be served working where the process of getting something done is ambiguous, needed a mix of skills ideally unrelated and having data really does not help. In a sense we were trying to come with criteria that defines a job that would be hard to automate in her lifetime.

It is no surprise that such discussions happened because stories like this one started to show up in the media once too often. I saw the sea change in the world of software testing in a few short years. Large QA teams were replaced by testing automation and a few developers that were needed to build the scripts. There used to be a change and release managers in most companies I worked for in my early career, releasing a new version of software was huge event and required multiple teams to pull all-nighters to make it happen - those concepts are so antiquated now that developers would in horror if a release manger role was needed in their place of work. So it's not unrealistic to believe more change is coming in this domain.

Just over a year ago, an OpenAI beta tester posited that AI may one day replace many coder jobs. At the time, OpenAI hadn’t yet released its code-generation engine, Codex, which now allows AI to autonomously write code in multiple languages. While the Codex of today is fairly primitive, one doesn’t need to be a futurist to see how this technology could be used to automate away many coder jobs in the future. As AI gets better at understanding code and writing it, it will soon come to match and ultimately exceed human skill levels.

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