Which jobs are being replaced by AI and is software engineering affected?
At least since the release of ChatGPT, everyone has been concerned with artificial intelligence technologies and wondering, “Will I soon be replaced?”
Here are some jobs that I think will be taken over by AI in the future:
Translations: In the future, translators will only check what a programme has translated. They will find very few mistakes.
Proofreading: The actual checking of a text will still be supervised by a human, but this will be supported by AI. Grammar improvement will be completely automatic. Just like Grammarly does today, but on steroids.
Photo retouching: Photoshop and Lightroom could face serious competition in the future as anyone can spice up their images with a few clicks.
… and probably a lot more which I cannot think of right now.
What about software engineering?
I do not think software engineering will be replaced anytime soon, even though these jobs are threatened not only by AI but also by the recent hype around NoCode/LowCode tools.
Even though ChatGPT might become a better alternative to Google and StackOverflow, the generated code snippets still need to be scrutinised and put together. The hardest part of writing code is not writing the code, but finding the right place for the code. This is a very difficult subject and even though there are many principles that can help with this (SOLID, DRY, GRASP, Siedersleben’s blood groups, …), few manage to get it right (whatever right means, even that is hard to define).
A far greater hope for making the work of software development obsolete are NoCode tools. These tools are basically a Microsoft Access for SaaS applications. While it will not be possible to create every kind of software with them, a large proportion of applications will be created with these tools.
Similar to NoCode solutions, tools like Figma might replace front-end development eventually. Or let us say: Front-end creation will become much easier and will eventually be done by UX designers. I am curious about the future of coding bootcamps, especially those that teach the basics of React in a short time. I think people who attend those bootcamps should rather focus on UI/UX design instead of programming.
But there is still a lot of code running in large organisations that needs to be maintained. This is mainly code that does not have a user interface, but glues APIs and data sources together. Even Cobol programmers are still needed today to maintain very old code bases. Looking at this, I am pretty sure Java programmers will not be out of a job anytime soon.
Checking applications for security problems will also become more popular in the future.
Best Regards,
Oliver, working on MonsterWriter
