I have mixed feelings on AI: on the one hand I'm afraid for many industries like copy writing, graphic design, etc but on the other hand, I'm slowly watching so

I have mixed feelings on AI: on the one hand I'm afraid for many industries like copy writing, graphic design, etc but on the other hand, I'm slowly watching some of the most annoying parts of being a software engineer evaporate. Developers will be fine because software engineering is an arms race - a rather unique position to be in as a professional. I saw this play out during the 2000s offshoring scare when many of us thought we'd get outsourced to India. Instead of getting outsourced, the industry exploded in size globally and everything that made engineers more productive also made them a bigger threat to competitors, forcing everyone to hire or die. Businesses only need so much copy or graphic design, but the second a competitors gains a competitive advantage via software they have to respond in kind - even if it's a marginal advantage - because software costs so little to scale out. As the tech debt and the revenue that depends on it grows, the baseline number of staff required for maintenance and upkeep grows because our job is to manage the complexity. I think software is going to continue eating the world at an accelerated pace because AI opens up the uncanny valley: software that is too difficult to implement using human developers writing heuristics but not so difficult it requires artificial general intelligence. This is just the beginning and there is still a lot of work to do - all the lumberyards in my area still use DOS computers!