AI is here to stay. It will evolve, it will get better at some things, and we might decide that it's not good for certain tasks. It's a weird, new, different technology that somehow seems magic, extremely intelligent, and at times as dumb as a box of rocks. It can do things that I could never do, or would never do, for myself. Heck, I'm not sure I could or would pay someone to do this by hand. Yet this was less than a minute for a computer system to take this image and transform it into something fun.
Christian Buckley wrote an interesting post about AI challenging our identity, which sums up nicely one of the struggles many of us have with AI. Many of us identify with our work. We spend most of our lives for decades toiling away at a craft that we (hopefully) enjoy and in which we have success. We build skills, and we're proud of our accomplishments.
Some of us are more proud of our scars.
Either is OK, but AI challenges that. AI can do work in seconds that we used to take minutes, often tens of minutes. Sometimes hours. It can remember things that we spend time googling or looking up in SQL Server Central forums. Our ability to search and navigate docs for an obscure setting, like that strange exit code you found in your CI/CD pipeline. We're proud of where we've been and what we've done.
I wrote recently about experts wanting to still solve problems themselves, without AI assistance. Some people don't embrace AI because they think it devalues their knowledge. Others are afraid of the technology and potentially making mistakes with code an AI wrote that they don't understand. They see this as a risk (and they should).
However, choosing not to use the technology at all, or not trying to learn how and when to use it, is a mistake. We need to embrace the tools in our world, learning to take advantage of them.
And more importantly, show our current and future employers we can do so.
AI does challenge us. It challenges the way we used to work and some of the skills we used to rely on. We have to learn to flow with this challenge and make it a part of our future career.
