Be not afraid ( fear of AI )

I can see that recent AI trends have caused a major wave of fear among people especially young gen. with most of 'em from software engineering. It includes me as well ( an AI undergrad ) felt that fear for a moment but quick self-introspection / awareness saved. 

" No one is you " (and that’s the whole point!)

Btw this is not a sugar coated, ai generated stuff you generally see. The core psychology is simple:

Most people are afraid of AI replacing them in their jobs which is a genuine fear. But if an AI can give same output with same quality as them, then they're not doing anything special or great.  No, this doesn’t mean people are mediocre. It just means that they're competing only on output, while humans bring judgment, idea, taste, ownership & context that don’t show up in raw output metrics.

Okay… don’t get angry at me. Lemme explain this a bit.

Let’s say you’re not anywhere near the software domain. Assume you’re a chef instead, where you’ve naturally drifted into this field because you genuinely love cooking & making tastier food. And in real time, you can see people loving what you make. Now suddenly, your hotel hires an AI robot that cooks good food. They replace you with it, even though they know the robot’s food is only 70% as good as yours, because they’re convinced by the calculated ROI.

Now tell me: do you really think this chef-version of you will be afraid after the layoff? 

NOPE.

Because now the options are clear. You can start your own small restaurant or a food truck and keep going. Because your passion is cooking, not cooking under that hotel. btw here’s the funny part - the hotel’s ROI calculation may not even be accurate, because it’s heavily tied to that remaining 30% taste and some innate humanly possible things around that. 

The moral is simple: a bird always trusts its wings, not the branches of the tree

Obviously, real life isn’t romantic - bills, families & visas exist. Fear is human, but freezing in fear and doing nothing is still the worst possible response.

I also agree that the 'chef' analogy isn’t a perfect match because in software, that “70% performance” from a robot might actually be higher. So yes, things change a bit. We may have to be in a co-existing space (which is already happening) where humans and AI build systems together. And all that you should be doing is this: 

instead of staying out, afraid at zero - you do what you do best 

What people fail to realize is that every human is wired to be happy when they do something they genuinely love not for applause or money at first, but because the brain literally gets absorbed into it. They fall in, rewards disappear, time disappears. That’s rare, powerful - like the climax scene in the F1 movie.

When you genuinely love the craft, you naturally go deeper than surface level competence. That depth is what makes you harder to get replaced.

And from a much logical and business pov, there are a hell ton of problems left to solve using software (comparatively fewer than before, agreed). So you just need to shift & change the mindset. Yes! as the domains shift, the problems also started shifting to much complex and much different level (for example: pivot of few probs from software to hardware - if needed will explain in the next article ). Probably the right thing to do now is to ask the right question - Elon said it somewhere.

AI will definitely change the landscape. But history shows this again and again: people who trust their wings adapt. People who cling to branches panic. So the real risk isn’t AI replacing you. The real risk is you reducing yourself or staying the same of something that has become replaceable.

Never be afraid. Come, let’s make this world a great place to live!!