00:00 Stephanie
Every technology has its warnings and fear-mongering about what comes after employment. And importantly, they were right. Hmm, hmm. We have automated all kinds of jobs throughout history. Humans are really good at that. We created more jobs. Is it possible that the degree is different this time? Yes, absolutely. But what I find encouraging is when I look at some of the research about what happens to workers when you give them these tools. Harvard Business Review has this great article:
00:36 Stephanie
Workers feel very busy. It also contributes to increasing added value. It is too early to tell whether workers will actually be laid off. It will replace some of them. But I also think there’s a lot of opportunity in task expansion, in expanding the frontiers of human activity, and we’ll have to see how that evolves.
01:03 Speaker B
Well, Greg Yip of the Journal had a good article. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but his view basically, I mean, to some extent matches your view, Stephanie. What he meant was that there have been many technological revolutions in the past, and those that have created jobs in the past have certainly caused job losses and job changes, but they have also created many new jobs. New fields, new industries.
01:30 Stephanie
that’s right. Yeah. Automated teller machine, ATM, that’s what it’s called. Automatic teller machine. They came after a job as a bank teller. But what’s interesting when you look at the data is that as ATMs grew across the country, employment for bank tellers actually grew for about a decade. what happened? The bank teller’s job has evolved in real time. And that’s happening in many ways in software engineering today. It’s not that software engineering isn’t necessary; it’s now called AI Forward Deployment Engineer.
02:11 Stephanie
As we all know, the world’s best software engineers no longer write any code, so the job itself has evolved significantly. But it’s too early to tell if they’re actually replacing these jobs completely, or if they’re really just transforming them in real time.
