AI Already Replaced These…forever

                                                                 Photo by Mathew Schwartz @cadop on Unsplash

It’s an open question. What has been completely replaced by AI will never go back to the way it was done before.

If nothing has been made obsolete perhaps the initial fears around the technology were misplaced.

Look through this list and make up your mind. Has the AI revolution changed our world forever, or is it much the same as it has always been, just with a conversation or two with a chatbot bolted on?

Those Already Replaced Activities…

Asking experienced coders for help

This includes Stack Overflow. I mean I still don’t understand why people are rude to others needing help, so I guess this helps them out of the box?

This has been replaced this with asking a chat bot your questions, and patiently asking why the answer it gives is wrong. You’ll get a good answer in the end, with none of the judgment!

Even Stack Overflow themselves understands the shift that is happening. https://stackoverflow.co/company/press/archive/openai-partnership

The will to write any work email

I just copy-paste the answer straight. Does this make me a bad person?

My imaginary online friend

In fact, any need for me to have any friends at all. I just pretend the chatbot is one and live happily evermore.

It’s just reassured me that this isn’t sad at all.

Paying people to write your essay

I’ve noticed a wonderful, happy decrease in the number of people advertising to write a first-degree essay for a few $$$.

At least something good has come from the AI bubble.

I hope this will never return.

Interview Prep Websites

I’ve used ChatGPT to get my previous few jobs. You can use it to throw possible questions at you, and iteratively improve your answers with the feedback it gives you. 

Go pro and give it a copy of your resume, and job role and get it to list questions you might get asked. Even get it to suggest things you should ask the interviewer!

Building Excel Formulas (AKA trivial coding)

It’s a bit simpler than those LeetCode questions it can (and will) get wrong. 

Same with RegEx, especially since it’s a known problem space and you can easily check the answers. You’ll never need to learn SQL!

Don’t get me started on renaming when paired with PowerShell. Glorious.

Memorizing SSH commands

I guess I don’t need to know much about them at all, at this point.

Creating Simple VBA scripts

Go one step further and get it to teach VBA to you. You have a spare hour, right?

Stupid questions

I thought Machiavelli was an author? Wait, is this even related to philosophy? What is humanism, and is that the same as post-humanism?

You’d be too embarrassed to ask these questions of anyone. Now you can, without the judgment.

Performance reviews at work

Instead of taking days to create your own compelling performance review, you can get an AI-assisted version in a few hours.

Promotion incoming?

Lorum Ipsum

All those websites. All that copy-pasta. Easy typographic text at the touch of a button (or write of a prompt).

Grammarly

Wasn’t this always AI, though?

YouTube tutorials

At least those who don’t get to the point and think that they’re comedians.

Boilerplate code

Coding server actions in Python. Doing really any grunt coding labor. Boilerplates, project planning, data maps, analytics. Fuck I honestly can’t imagine life without AI already. I feel bliss just knowing I’ll never have to puzzle over stupid small stuff ever again and starting and conceptualizing projects will always be a breeze.

Arms

The thing most guaranteed to be replaced with new stuff are methods of mass slaughter. The military complex likes it that way.

And those that are on the way…

Thinking hard

Yes! We got rid of the big one! Don’t need to hurt my heads anymore!

Ok, so calculators also eliminated much of our necessary thought. Yet kids are still taught how to do computation by hand in our early education years

Google Search

Ok, you got me. It’s still not there yet but AI is poised to replace web searches.

The summarization can certainly be more powerful than aggregate news and without the bias (mayyyybbbeee)

Manipulation

The internal struggle of the doubt when dealing with a person that may be manipulating you online, when you can simply feed mountains of conversation logs and let it point out what looks like manipulative behavior, spells out why and allows for further strengthening potential victims of narcissists.

Companionship

So, future iterations of language models or even AGI could potentially replace human beings in areas such as companionship.. which is a bit dystopian, but not entirely unrealistic either. It already has for some people.

Translators

There are still (surprisingly) a good amount of translation jobs around. Part of the job is trust and accountability, two things that AI doesn’t have a great track record on. Chatbots don’t pay attention to tone or nuance, it’s still a human thing (right?)

And those that will never be replaced…

The Old Way

Vinyl records still sell well in the age of streaming and apparently outsell CDs. The media in the 80s said CDs would kill vinyl.

Paperback books outsell ebooks in 2024. They used to say we would have a paperless future, but it turns out people prefer the feel of a real book in their hands.

When new technologies are introduced, they just increase the number of choices and options people have, but never seem to replace the old way entirely.

That’s what is going to happen with code. Right? Right?????

Conclusion

The clock is probably ticking on all our careers. That’s a cheery thought, no?