ChatGPT Might Take Your Job, but it Won't be Taking Mine (for now)
With the rapid adoption of Open AI's ChatGPT, and both Google and Baidu not far behind, we have undoubtedly entered a new age technological advancement. So now what we must wrestle with is anticipating the effects of this tech and how to harness it to keep our jobs.
The world is simultaneously rejoicing and panicking over the surge in commercialized AI chatbots. With the rapid adoption of Open AI's ChatGPT, and both Google and Baidu not far behind, we have undoubtedly entered a new age technological advancement. Realistically, we don't even quite know yet what that means. Even those of us in the tech world are scrambling to make sense of these new tools and how to best implement them. Regardless of where you stand on the ethics of all of this (that's a different post altogether), the newly kicked-off arms race between the world's largest tech giants means we're not likely to see an "AI winter" for quite some time. So now what we must wrestle with is anticipating the effects of this tech and how to harness it to keep our jobs. Although I'm very cynical when it comes to certain professions (RIP copywriters, SEO specialists, etc), I'm still optimistic when it comes to my own job. This may be pure "copium" on my part, but my goal here is to set out my reasons for optimism and thereby encourage those of you in similar positions.
If you are a regular reader then you already know that I own a small software company, so I won't hash all of that out here. More to the point, it's what I do day-to-day that is the main source of my optimism. Operationally, I am a portfolio manager, product owner, and client relations manager. The nature of all three of these roles is deeply human. ChatGPT can be extremely detail oriented, which is vital to executing my job well, but that's where the overlap ends. The strategy, execution, and relational elements of what my job entails is simply far outside the scope of what these tools can currently handle. To put it another way, the vast majority of my work takes place "pre-prompt".
To explain my next reason I'll need to go a bit more in-depth with one aspect of my current role– that of translator. I don't mean here that I translate business documents from German to English, but from "people speak" to "dev speak". I am typically our clients' primary point of contact from project conception to delivery and onwards. As such, it is absolutely vital that I am able to translate at two levels. The first is to translate a client's perceived needs to their actual needs. The majority of the time our clients will bring great ideas to us with no prior knowledge of what our industry looks like. So it's up to me to interpret what they say they want into what's possible or in some cases optimal. The second level of translation involves taking my initial translation of the client's needs to the devs. This new translation often takes on a much more technical form with possible solutions, packages, frameworks, etc. I won't belabor the point, but suffice it to say that again all of these things are far outside of the current scope of these commercialized chatbots.
If I were to put a label on the most distilled form of my source of optimism it would be the human element. It's not my position that we should avoid these tools altogether (we use them every day), but when it comes to job security I'm not ready to hit the panic button just yet. It's my hope that if you have a job similar to mine that relies heavily on your soft skills and your ability to translate on similar levels then you'll take a deep breath and share in my optimism.
Related Articles
Dalton Reed