I've heard this argument over and over. I used to be an avid believer in this myself.
However, this has been the fear of people for years, with every new tech and every time, it seems like some new thing replaced the old, or even added to it. The electric guitar, the synth, DAWs, they never replaced musicians, they just gave them more tools, yet there were always nay sayers.
I see this happening in business too. People haven't been fired en masse due to tech and we're currently having massive shortages in the work force. Even with McDonald's moving to self-service screens. I'm getting less and less scared of tech taking over and removing people from everything.
It's easy to discount a disrupting technology when you see yourself as far removed from it.
- Autonomous McDonalds doesn't bother me because I don't work at McDonalds.
- Stable Diffusion doesn't bother me because I'm not an artist.
- Copilot doesn't bother me because my code requires creativity and critical thinking.
But then again, Copilot doesn't need to be "good" before it starts to take away programmer jobs. It just needs to be better than the worst programmer on your team.
And yet, McDonald's and many restaurants in general have been almost permanently short staffed since Covid. In spite of attempts at automation.
I have yet to see anything impressive from Copilot. You still can not describe a set of business requirements to it and have it translate that into a full stack application that factors for performance, security, GDPR, usability, etc. It's at best a form of auto complete.
However, this has been the fear of people for years, with every new tech and every time, it seems like some new thing replaced the old, or even added to it. The electric guitar, the synth, DAWs, they never replaced musicians, they just gave them more tools, yet there were always nay sayers.
I see this happening in business too. People haven't been fired en masse due to tech and we're currently having massive shortages in the work force. Even with McDonald's moving to self-service screens. I'm getting less and less scared of tech taking over and removing people from everything.