Moose out front: People need to come to terms with the fact that a lot of these tech jobs are going to be taken over by artificial intelligence. Website design? Coding? Mobile app dev? All in danger of being replaced by robots. And not in 100 years or 50 years or even 10 years... more like within the next 5 years.

People have been claiming the same thing since the first huge AI bubble back in 60s.

And let's not discount the large amount of AI that is already being used in industry. From compiler optimizations to the auto-refactoring that makes my code better, to the search algorithms that make it so I can find the solution to my problems.

All of this things increased developer productivity, but it didn't decrease demand. We just have more complex software.

ChatGPT is the elephant in the room. It's really good at what it does. It's impressive. And it can spit out lots of impressive code...but that's mostly because we ask it the same questions. If you tell it to make a function that generates prime numbers, it can do that because it's already seen many examples of it.

It can solve old popular interview questions because it learned the answers already and because they are designed to be simple with very little context needed to answer.

For, at least, a decade, you could just Google these questions and find the answer. Now ChatGPT can generate the answer. Cool.

Can ChatGPT generate a simple website for a generic business? Absolutely. But so can tons of existing tools. There are tons of tools that require zero coding and you can have a professional looking site up in minutes. You can already go on Fivver and get these types of jobs done.

But it hasn't destroyed the industry.

Put simply, if ChatGPT and similar AIs are written by humans either...

1 - The AI isn't as good as humans

Or

2 - The AI is better and can write a better AI than ChatGPT

If we are in scenario #1 software engineers will continue to do stuff, but will leverage AI to increase productivity. In turn, we will see more complex/better/more feature rich software....

If we are in scenario #2 - we are basically living in a Sci-Fi movie. The Singularity is real. ChatGPT would generate ChatGPTvNext and, by definition, we know that this new AI would be better than what we could write. And since the new AI is better, it could generate an even better AI. Etc etc etc

You can pick whichever sci-fi/Phil 101 outcome you think is the most likely. But an AI that can fully replace programmers would be able to replace any knowledge worker. And because the AI would be better than humans, all sorts of assumptions we have about the future are likely to be wrong.

In such a scenario, everything becomes 'at risk'. The only thing preventing the automation/AI replacement of physical jobs is the cost and limitations of the robots we can produce. We do have some amazing robots, but they are costly.

But the AI will be smarter than us. We should expect advances in EVERYTHING. We struggle with self-driving cars, but the AI is better than us. It can make better software, it can make better hardware. It can make a better AI...it will be able to automate things we can't.

Depending on how exactly you define it, there are about 70-100 million knowledge workers in the US. That's more than half of the workforce. Even if the AI only replaced them; everything would change. On a scale and timeline not experienced in recorded history.

Regular people can't prepare for that in a meaningful way. If you are rich, sure, buy some land and stockpile for the future. Regular people? It's like global warming...try to vote for sane people...hope for the best, but it's not like you can quit your job as a dev and go somewhere else and avoid the whole AI situation.

At best, you would buy a few years before either AI takes over your job, or the mass wave of half of all workers flood your labor pool.