There’s concern about the future of AI and how it may affect jobs and employment for the masses. I see plenty of people on both sides of the issue. Some are sure AI technologies won’t replace people; some are concerned their jobs will be eliminated, and some are hoping that we will eliminate some jobs and create many more.

Sometimes that’s the same person.

A GenAI can replicate a human, or maybe more accurately, mimic one. That might work well enough for some people to trust the technology more than humans. Or maybe it works well enough, enough of the time, and lots of us are OK with well-enough. After all, I think a lot of us already work with “well-enough” or “good-enough” code on a daily basis.

However, the GenAI is based on what other humans have already done. It’s “trained” on lots of existing ideas, decisions, codebases, etc. It can recall and use those quicker, and often as well as many humans. It might be a light craftsman, but it can’t be a great one.

Humans will be able to deeply understand problems and create better craftsmanship for many systems. Across time, an AI can learn from these craftsman and repeat their work in other systems, but an AI will often struggle to understand the entire context of whether we would apply that solution or a slightly different one this time.

That’s the human advantage. Deep learning and craftsmanship will differentiate us from the AIs because we can contextualize things better than an AI. Or really, we can internalize the context better than another human can express it to the AI. That will be the difficult part of working with AI LLMs, agents, and whatever comes next: explaining what is really needed in a new situation.

Communication is hard. Because many humans aren’t good at communicating, they won’t be able to use an AI to replace other humans. They’ll struggle with the results, and they will need to hire a craftsman to help. However, that also implies that more of us need to become craftsmen, not only for the advantage it gives us over AI, but because those skills will help us better judge AI output, as well as express what we want to see the AI do.

There will be lots of work in the future, even with AI, but I also believe that the jobs that are desired, that will pay better, will go to those who learn to use AI tech and who can judge when the quality of the work is appropriate for the situation.

Steve Jones

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