Your Job Is Safe From the Computers — For Now.

Good piece, but I wouldn’t even be so sure about that “for now” part. These days, even absent true AI, it’s more a matter of cost than of capability.

For instance where I work now, I could pretty easily eliminate 30% of the jobs in the entire company if someone gave me $500,000 and two good coders for a year.

Hell, if someone gave me alone a year of uninterrupted and undivided time just to work on what I know is easily possible, I could probably eliminate 20% of those jobs all by myself with some simple scripts and a few off-the-shelf tools.

This is true most anywhere.

When anything even approaching decent AI (even domain-specific) is out there, the cost proposition will look even better.

Right now if you have a job that is mainly doing the same thing over and over it’s actually shockingly easy to automate, but the bean counters haven’t realized it yet because things are moving fast and they are always 5-7 years behind.

But they will realize it. Oh trust me, they will.