Many are worried about how AI is threatening to take away jobs, but what’s ironic is that the jobs most at risk are of those people who’re creating the technology.
OpenAI’s board chair Bret Taylor says that the software industry is disrupting their own jobs more than any other by developing AI which amongst other things, can code better than most humans. Taylor however says that this is a positive, because it’ll lead to the creation of new skills which engineers can excel at and be more effective than ever before.
“ It is both very exciting and a little scary because it’s pretty magical,” Taylor said in an interview about AI progress. “It can do (incredible) things. There’s aspects of it that already feel super intelligent. It’s not quite true general intelligence, but it’s pretty remarkable that I think it probably surpasses what most of us would’ve defined as AGI three years ago already, and we just keep on moving the goalposts,” he added.
“But it’s changing our jobs. And notably, I think there’s this interesting meta point, which is we in the software industry are probably disrupting our own job almost as much as any other. And I can’t think of much historical precedent for something like that, but I like it,” he added.
Taylor said that while current coding skills will likely become obsolete, there will be new technical challenges for humans to overcome. “I actually like the fact that what made me like a distinctive engineer in 2005 is obviated by technology. I think that’s kind of cool. Like it doesn’t stress me out, but I think like what would the 10 x engineer three years from now look like? It’s probably a completely different set of skills and that’s really exciting. So that’s why I’m like more looking forward and I hope it’s like a vestige of the past,” he added.
Traditional programming seems poised to be the first big casualty of the AI revolution. Computers can now write code in minutes which would’ve earlier taken engineers days to complete. In addition, AI has enabled the writing of code through simple instructions in English, and vibe coding platforms like Lovable are finding themselves millions of users. This appears to have already led to job losses in the tech sector — Microsoft has laid off thousands of employees in recent months, and Salesforce has said that it’s stopped hiring engineers because of efficiency gains it’s seeing from AI. TCS, meanwhile, has said it’ll let go of 12,000 people over the next year because of changes in how work is now happening. It remains to be seen to what extent these job cuts extend, but as of now, they seem to be most affecting the very software engineers that built AI in the first place.