Will AI Kill Jobs?
Yes. There. End of post. Whew, that was hard. But really, yes, AI will kill certain jobs, but it’s creating a lot of new jobs. Just like the automated elevator killed the elevator operator, AI will kill jobs. But here’s the thing, it’s not a bad thing.
Aren’t You Afraid of Losing Your Job?
No I’m not. Yes, AI will end up doing a lot of network engineering work, but there will always be things that will require a human. Maybe instead of worrying about port configurations and 802.1X it will be something else, but it will be something else.
When I started in IT back in the late 20th century, I did a lot of work in Linux. It was a big learning curve for someone used to point and click in Windows, but I really enjoyed it. After a while, I could compile my own kernels with ease along with being able to exit from vi. One of the things that I did quite often was setting up webservers. Apache was king at the time. Even though package managers like RPM and apt existed, often the version of Apache or the modules you needed weren’t available in a packaged format. So you downloaded the source code and created long strings of options to configure, make and then install Apache. After that was done you still had tons of conf files to wade through and configure to get a fully working solution.
Tonight I moved this blog from one Linux server to a new one. I didn’t compile a single thing. I installed everything using apt and had to create one configuration file to add my site to the nginx configuration. I don’t miss all of the compiling and configuration from the old ways. Instead, I spent that time on making sure that my security was in place and that I had IPv6 properly enabled.
So what’s your point Ben? Change is the only constant in technology and what was complicated 10 years ago is simple now and what didn’t exist then is now complicated. AI will help us simplify the mundane stuff so that we can think more and do more with the newer stuff.
Final Thoughts
I don’t fear AI, and neither should you. Go out and learn this new technology. Embrace it in your daily routines and free up your brain for more important things. I encourage you to go take an online course, play around with a LLM, or even build your own application to utilize AI. Now is the time, how will you excel?