Expectations about AI are high right now. Many people, especially software engineers and developers, are scared that their jobs will be automated away.
But I've been in IT for over twenty years, so this is not the first time I've heard about technology automating jobs.
I remember when the cloud was the new kid on the block. When the transition from in-house server rooms to the cloud was happening, the fear was that our jobs would be eliminated.
And here we are, almost 15 years later. Our jobs didn't just prevail, the cloud created many more opportunities.
AI is technically the same thing. If I had to find a term that defines AI, it would be "automation on steroids."
The only difference between AI and what I have seen in the past is that AI has become mainstream so everyone has access to it, and it can speak to you in natural language.
This has led many people to believe that just because a large language model can speak so fluently, it can also do your job.
And that's the trick.
AI has been trained on an enormous amount of data to be able to simulate our language. But AI is like a fish in a pond. A fish can only swim within the pond. It can never get out of the pond, realize it's in a pond, or see the entire pond.
It's the same thing with AI. It only knows whatever it has been trained on.
For new ideas and new synthesis, you have to be able to get out of the pond and see the water.
It's funny that this brings us right to the idea of Plato's cave: so we can say, AI can only see the shadows never the real things.