RE: Will AI replace CAD developers?
Reminds me of an article I read this morning, New AI assistant threatens software engineering jobs.
Devin stands out due to its ability to actively collaborate with users during software development, Cognition AI said in a blog post. This includes providing real-time progress updates, accepting feedback, and working together to make design choices. Overall, Devin acts as a seamless partner in the software development process, the company claimed.
The history of the last couple centuries is clear. Every major technology has destroyed some jobs, changed the nature of some jobs, and created still others. I expect it to be the same with AI. As your commentary and the AI commentary above both suggest, I think that the future of work is fundamentally about the blending of human and machine intelligence.
As to the exact nature of jobs to be destroyed, changed, or created... I don't think that workers of the late 19th century/early 20th century could have predicted the labor markets of today, and I'm skeptical about our ability to anticipate the jobs of the future with a whole lot of accuracy.
It's also important to talk about time frames. On a long enough time frame, I do think that both CAD developers and software engineers will be obsoleted by AI and/or other advances, but I think that time is still multiple decades away. When I entered the job market in the 1980s, people were already predicting the death of the mainframe computer, but here we are in the 2020s, and I still see job ads for people with mainframe expertise. When I stop seeing those postings, maybe I'll start to worry about AI taking our jobs on a faster time frame. 😉
I've been seeing a lot of repercussion around Devin recently, and the article you shared definitely helped me to formulate a better opinion about it.
I agree with you, both on the "blending" (I really liked the use of this term in this context) of human and artificial intelligence to improve our creations, aswell as on the fact that we probably don't have the ability to predict the jobs of the future. About your last paragraph, I dare to go even further: if these professionals do become substitutable, we will probably have arrived at a point as a society where value generating and working are a concept so different from what we have nowadays, that we truly cannot even begin to comprehend what it shall be. I also believe that professionals with expertise in specific topics may be substituted by AI models in the objective practical side of things, they will remain relevant in using these models and reviewing their work, even if indirectly. An aspect of this was mentioned in the article, about how prompting may become more and more important as a skill as time passes. It is subtle, but this is a point that really makes me more optimistic about Humanity. Prompt engineering is nothing more than learning and practicing how to communicate more effectively and objectively, in a clear and a lot of the times polite manner. I like to believe that it may be the starting point for humans to go back to investing properly into verbalizing and communicating with each other in a decent and fair way; and maybe that will be part of our salvation as a society.
Thanks one more time for your insights and time, Steve! Not to mention your concrete support on this platform, not only through upvoting, but specially by really reading and interacting with my contributions.
This is really a good point that I hadn't considered. Ad hominem arguments don't work against an AI. I hope you're right about what this implies. It would be nice if AIs could teach us something about how to communicate with each other.