Tech workers are becoming concerned about the possibility of AI taking their jobs.
Workers have taken to the social networking site Blind to wonder whether AI will make their employment obsolete since ChatGPT made news late last year. On the site, which asks users to authenticate their employee email addresses, software developers have posted scores of entries on the subject, ranging from surveys on when AI will replace them to admissions that the “golden age is over.”
The employment of the users mentioned in this story was not independently verified by Insider.
“Software engineering is a dying profession,” a Microsoft engineer wrote earlier this week in a Blind post titled “Face it, the golden age is over.”
“And since GPT is already great at writing its own prompts, you’re up a creek without a paddle,” they continued.
Nearly 500 people responded to the post, with one saying “the profession is fine” and another saying “basically every white collar job is dead.”
A Blind user started a poll in a different post asking whether young software engineers are screwed. The survey received almost 12,000 votes. 41.3% of respondents replied yes, 37% said opportunities have remained the same, and 21.7% said there are more chances currently.
Several other Blind employees have expressed “concern” about the future of AI in general. One Google developer questioned whether it was time to start their career “from the ground up again.”
According to an Amazon employee, the trade they have been honing for 15 years is shifting. “Yesterday, I played with gpt-4, and seeing the results left me with a sense of dread and sadness,” they stated.
This fear comes as tech firms place large bets on the future of AI. Semafor reported earlier this year that OpenAI had begun teaching its AI software engineering, while Insider previously noted that AI developments like ChatGPT have already begun to challenge software professionals’ job security. Emad Mostaque, CEO of Stability AI, has further stated that “no programmers will be needed in five years.”
At the same time, computer workers are facing significant layoffs and wondering if their high incomes are here to stay. Vox reported earlier this week that software engineers have been impacted the hardest by the layoffs, undermining the idea that learning to code provides job stability.
Nonetheless, some users believe that AI will be beneficial to software engineers. One Blind Shopify employee compared the “doom and gloom over ChatGPT” to the bad talk around 5G, cryptocurrency, and Web3. Another commenter questioned whether most businesses would be technologically adept enough to adopt the system.
“You’ll be fine if you treat AI as a productivity booster rather than an enemy.” In reaction to the fate of software engineers, a Microsoft employee wrote, “We made it, it didn’t make us.”
