Februar 10, 2023

How to secure your career in the AI age

Exposure – T h e year of artificial intelligence – once again …2023 is finally supposed to be the year in which AI tools for everyman:woman came to the big breakthrough. This has already been announced several times, most recently ten years ago. But now, with the media hype around ChatGPT, DALL-E and numerous other hopeful AI platforms (such as you.com), the general attention is finally there, the public awareness sharpened to deal with the opportunities and risks of the (incredibly) fascinating Machine Learning (ML). Here applies to explicitly everyone:r: Don’t just read about it, just try it out!    

2 - 1 - The illustrations were created by OpenAI's DALL-E on the task "Human coder and AI challenging each other in coding, a cyberpunk illustration".

Analysis

Yes, it’s true that ML-generated content has amazing qualities, even rolling through job interviews for demanding coding jobs for a senior developer (with over $180,000 annual salary). And yes, it is true that AI-generated texts, lectures can be used without extensive editing – illustrated with adequate AI images. The issue of honesty to be re-evaluated in dealing with „AI-generated fake content) I have recently pointed out in this blog post: https://digitalevangelists.de/hype-around-ai-digital-challenge.

In the everyday life of a web developer, Google searches – not only on the eventual forum posts at StackOverflow.com – have always been learned practice. That’s where an AI chatbot „typed“ summary of search results stands out as easily consumable. Helpful and nice, so coders are admittedly brightly excited about the new AI assistance. But the fact that entire coding tasks can be written with just a simple, one-line description at the push of a button – that’s new and (incredibly) revolutionary! Notabene: Without any knowledge of the respective programming language, it will not be possible to evaluate the code lines, let alone adapt and develop them further. 

In view of the practice of having entire exam tasks and coding tasks simply done by copy & paste with free AI help, the question arises: How threatening is this for one’s own coder career, now already and in the near future?  

3 - 2 - 1 - The illustrations were created by OpenAI's DALL-E on the task "Human coder and AI challenging each other in coding, a cyberpunk illustration".

Recommendations for action

Yes, the invention of the calculator didn’t put any accountants out of work. Algorithms, however, did. AI inventions can be threatening, just as the industrial use of looms once led to the weavers‘ revolt in 1844. Ergo: If you don’t want to get stuck at the bumper of history, you have to get up to speed, you have to become agile in order to keep your nose in front in an inventive way. This requires an alert mind, a quick grasp, empathic intelligence and proactive communication:

Stay curious! Follow closely relevant news about innovations in technology and science in general. Read deeper into topics of particular interest – in relevant blogs, forums and professional publications.

Train yourself to be open-minded! Confront supposedly threatening subjects, circle around them, encircle them and get to the root of the issues. Be it Deep Learning or post-quantum cryptography, as long as you can somehow understand it, read the papers on it. Just for numerous topics in Artificial Intelligence, free-to-use platforms like KI-Campus and openHPI offer courses and help.

Develop your empathic intelligence further! Think outside the box (in the best scientific sense, without any politically questionable connotations), do research beyond the boundaries of the everyday, seek insights into other industries, trades and fields. While data models are able to deal with topics covered so far (and they do so excellently!), the research urge and inventiveness of humans proves to be so far uncatchably strong. Until there could be so-called GAI general artificial intelligence, which can do everything and anything, many, many decades will pass. It is possible that such science fiction will never become reality. In highly demanded professions such as Data Science, interdisciplinary skills such as industry knowledge, consulting skills, communicative brilliance in addition to technical skills such as programming in Python or R prove to be extremely effective. 

Proactive communication keeps you in the conversation: What good is a specialized coding genius if no one knows about it? Self-marketing has to change from occasional liking on the social web to strategic employee branding – including content marketing, a professional landing page for skills and character, and up-to-date business profiles on the business web (LinkedIn & Co.). Set up an editorial plan for what you have to say and get to work on publishing it consistently! (Ideally with the help of AI-generated content, as long as you label it as such).

4 - 3 - 2 - 1 - The illustrations were created by OpenAI's DALL-E on the task "Human coder and AI challenging each other in coding, a cyberpunk illustration".

This text was conceived and created without AI assistance. The translation into English was done by DeepL.com © Carsten Hennig, February 2023

The illustrations were created by OpenAI’s DALL-E on the task „Human coder and AI challenging each other in coding, a cyberpunk illustration“.


Just playing around with you.com/chat – ‚Write a Python code to automatically reject a CV if it has a typo‘ …

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