Stunning if true...
Google’s Jeff Dean predicts we’re about one year away from having an AI capable of performing like a junior engineer - 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And the bigger challenge? Senior engineers may soon find themselves managing the equivalent of 40 AI assistants. (These claims are made around the 24-minute mark of this video.)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dq8MhTFCs80
If this doesn’t stir really, really strong feelings - both amazement and unease - you’re wired differently than me. It’s hard to imagine this won’t have sweeping implications for productivity, pay, and employment.
Engineers and developers may soon shift from being solo contributors or small teams to managing entire squadrons of AI assistants. On the surface, that sounds like a dream: productivity through the roof, rapid iteration, endless capacity.
But it should also make you pause - because it raises profound questions.
Will this replace jobs - since one person can now do what once took forty?
Probably.
Or will it create jobs - as companies scramble to hire every engineer who can manage a digital army and generate compounding returns?
Also probably.
The economic logic for hiring skilled people becomes overwhelming. The leverage of a single employee expands dramatically. And the fear that someone, somewhere, will be replaced by a machine is matched only by the hope that those machines will unlock new opportunities, industries, and tools we’ve only begun to imagine.
Either - or especially both - promises gales of creative destruction of hurricane force. It’s hard to imagine this playing out like anything we’ve experienced before.
In a moment like this, I feel like the only honest way to spell AI is as an exclamation:
“AI… Ay yi yi!”
It may be artificial intelligence - but the feelings it provokes?
Very real.
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