How To Future Proof Our Career In The World of AI ?

There is a company called Stability AI which is in the forefront of AI development. They are building open source AI and behind the development of one of the most revolutionary Image generation AI models called Stable Diffusion. Their CEO Emad Mostaque said something which is making headlines these days. 

This is a super big thing to say and makes up for a significant amount of jobs. You can check out the complete article here. Now it is important to understand that this will not be limited to tech jobs. If coders will be losing jobs because AI has outsmarted them for very low cost, there are many other skilled jobs too which are in danger. If AI can code, it can do a lot of other tasks too like filing taxes, giving medical diagnoses, coming up arguments for court cases, teaching kids and so on.

If the prediction comes true, the big question is what can be done in this scenario ? Should we just wait for the inevitable to happen, let our jobs go, and suffer in chaos that happens afterwards ? My answer to all this is a big “No”. I strongly feel that this new AI technology is bringing a major shift in how the world will operate. And when changes of this scale happen, there are always opportunities to turn chaos into big opportunities. We should be doing the same, but how ? The answer to this question is, be on the forefront of what all is happening out there in the world of AI. Do not just go in denial and wait for things to happen. Go deep into what innovation is happening out there, try to think how it will impact our lives and then come up with ideas to benefit from this change.

To understand the future, I watched a 3 hour podcast of Stability AI’s CEO himself. It gives great insight on how AI is bringing a major shift in the world. You can check out the complete video here. I have summarised the major learnings from this video.

• Using AI, the quality of content that is created on platforms like Youtube will be much higher as compared to what it is now. For example: One will be able to make a Hollywood quality movie just sitting at home in a matter of a few hours with just a one person team. So what took maybe 100+ people working many months could be achieved by just 1 person in a matter of hours.

• Kids will be having existential crises on how to future proof themselves. World is changing very fast, kids will be in a crisis of whether their skills will be useful in the next few years or not. To deepen the problem, there will be distractions like AI girlfriends.

• There will not be one general AI assistant to do everything. Instead there will be multiple personal AI assistants for every specific domain. For example: Body Trainer AI, Diet AI, Time management AI, Teaching AI, AI managing all these smaller specific AI assistants and so on.

• What AI is truly doing is that it is making intelligent humans scale. This means that there will be an infinite amount of intelligent humans available with almost zero cost. You can make as many copies of AI software and use it at any number of places. So to truly understand how AI impacts your country and your community, just ask this one question. “How would society be impacted if there were an infinite number of smart people ?”

This is just the beginning. I am not saying that just watching this podcast will give all the answers. But it will give you thinking pointers on how the world will look in the next few years. Being at the forefront of the AI industry will make us aware about what all new tools are being built using AI. This will help us understand how we can use those tools to solve problems in the future. If the AI scare is real, and if one has to survive it, we will have to think like a problem solver and not just software engineers.