What Is Your True Value In This World of AI ?

We all have come across news like these where CEOs of tech companies are talking about how AI will replace the jobs of the software engineers. One of the recent news in circulation is from the CEO of Open AI Sam Altman himself which goes like the image below.

There is a big reddit thread on this news, which you can checkout here. Now if you read the comments on this reddit thread, you will see many software engineers worrying about job losses and unemployment. One of them even said jokingly that they will have to go begging if AI takes away our jobs.

In times like these, it is important for us to understand our true value, our true identity. Are we just software engineers ? Do we bring nothing else to the table apart from writing some snippets of code or designing a software architecture ? If a company is paying us say 1 lakh INR a month, why are they valuing us with that amount of salary ? It is important to know the answer to these questions to understand one’s true value.

If the answer to the above questions is that we as software engineers are only valuable for writing code, and we do not have any other skill of value, and our salary value is only for writing the code, then the reddit comment about begging due to unemployment may indeed come true. But I strongly feel against this. As engineers, we are not just code monkeys. We are actually problem solvers. All these tech companies pay us to solve some problems. Code is just an implementation of the solution to that problem. Our actual value does not lie in the code that was written, but in the solution we came up with. We are not just software engineers, we are the “Problem Solvers”. 

Our true value lies in our ability to come up with solutions to problems at hand. The more complex problems we can handle, the more valuable our skill sets are. I truly believe, as long as humans exist, problems will exist too. Even if the number of software jobs reduces, we as problem solvers will be able to pick up new skills and use them to solve the problems of the new age.