AI Took My Job...

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Automation, AI, machine learning, whatever it is, is changing the way we live and work. I started playing with ChatGPT a few years ago when I got early access, and found it to be a bit boring at that point.

Not any more.

I've had a few people ask me if I think AI is coming for our jobs.

The answer: Yes, and no.

There are a load of jobs that, unfortunately, will be eliminated through automation. Whether this is repetitive services like box packing and package retrieval, a la Amazon, minimum wage jobs being replaced by AI workers like Taco Bell's AI order bot, or base content positions generating ideas, blogs, whatever, there is going to be an impact.

BUT, I think AI by itself will replace far fewer jobs than we impact. What WILL replace jobs are people who know how to utilize AI. People who understand that the first 10% and last 10% belong to them, and ChatGPT can easily fill in the 80%.

Here's how AI Took My Job...to a different level (see what I did there):

Help Me Ideate

Can I be creative? Absolutely. But sometimes, I need to figure out 10 ideas for something in 5 minutes, just to unblock me.

"Here is my data. Can you give me 10 creative work arounds for this problem?"

Some of these are going to be garbage. But I'm looking for enough inspiration to get me unblocked.

Help Me Debug

Every developer slowly becomes an expert at Google-Fu. We know how to look through the vast world of the internet to find the assistance we need.

But every dev know the pain of looking and looking for a solution, and not finding anything.

I've found ChatGPT and Claude to be incredible helps in these situations, both for helping figure out a problem, like "In NGINX, please help me cache these weirdly placed CSS files", or creating, like "Build me a gallery WordPress plugin."

Help Me Make Decisions

Running multiple businesses often gets to me to the place of decision fatigue. And when we are tired, we become lazy or cowardly.

"But AI is lazy." Well, yeah...but I'm not using this for massive business decisions. Sometimes, I need a super quick predictive analytics to forecast business outcomes. Sometimes I need a decision trees t o help make a more informed decision. What I often use is historical data to help me analyze a situation from a couple of different angles.

Help Me Learn

There is just too much going on nowadays, and things are complex. Sometimes, I just want to move as quickly as possible to know about a subject, or need to learn in a hurry. What I find even more often is that I need to understand some of the nuance of things, or think differently and have AI play devil's advocate.

Asking ChatGPT or Claude to give me a high-level overview, an in-depth comparison, or real-time feedback is an incredible way to get a leg up and save hours of less-nuanced learning.