Random thoughts on AI

I’m mainly writing this so I can revisit and laugh at myself in the future, but as the tech person in my friend group, I often get asked how I think AI will affect us in the near future.

• No one really knows the potential or the effect that AI will have on the workforce, anyone who says they do is to be treated with caution.
• For the majority of people, AI won’t “take your job”, its far more likely that someone who understands and uses AI to their advantage, creating a differentiator for themselves, will take your job.
• Most established businesses won’t be able to move fast enough to integrate AI into their systems, so instead they’ll buy the startups that are powered by AI. This will, for a short amount of time, create a seller's market in AI-powered SaaS. In turn, this will create a temporary bubble for these companies - emphasis on temporary.
• Those of us that are flexible and evolve with AI, will move into more architectural roles, for example a developer will use their knowledge of the system to architect a new feature, the actual code will be written by AI. While these "prompt developers" may seem strange, humans moving further away from assembly code has been happening for years, this is just the next rung up the ladder. I can already see this happening for product design too.
• Non-technical founders will be empowered like never before, and many will find wealth, it's the no-code movement on steroids. Most serious startups will still require a large engineering teams though, as while AI may write more production code, humans will still be necessary to architect and manage the direction.
• There will be a slimming down of the workforce as AI takes over a whole category of jobs. This will result in a large increase of unemployment, but also an increase in efficiency and productivity. Government areas such as the IRS or Inland revenue, will likely to be slow to adopt, but stand to gain the most from utilising AI.