For a long time in the history of our planet, we have been the dominant species, at least when it comes to intelligence and sheer brain power. That is about to change profoundly. I have written enough about the advent of AI but now I see that everyone around seems to have woken up to it and has come to some level of acceptance as well.
TCS laid off 12000 employees and I think the churn has begun in IT, at least at the lowest level. It is going to be extremely unprofitable to recruit huge numbers of under-prepared freshers anymore for body shopping jobs. Forget fresher recruitments, I highly suspect any kind of recruitment will be off the cards pretty soon for a legacy coding job. What is the point of a human ‘Tab Coding’ autogenerated stuff when that also can be done by AI. Instead the focus will turn to retaining just a handful of Architects, at least for a short period of time. They can come up with solutions and work with AI engineers to get to market much faster than we ever thought possible.
I call it the great AI subsumption. Going forward in a short period of time (think few years), AI will subsume traditional jobs both horizontally and vertically. Horizontally it will eat up more domains than just IT and vertically it will start at the lowest point but make redundant even the architects and eventually the CEOs as well. There is still scope for some horizontals to co-exist with AI but not for long. The end is near and clear.
I, like most of us around, have no clue on how things are going to pan out. So take this with a grain of salt. In fact I would hope for the jobs to continue in a modified form. But one thing is for sure – a major disruption is underway and more than ever our adaptability is going to be tested. There are already talks of AGI being very near (think AI super-intelligence) and of UBI (Universal Basic Income for everyone – as there are no jobs to be had and hence no salary, so Government will give a subsidy salary to all). These are definitely scary times but also within that fear there exists a child’s curiosity to see what is going to happen next.