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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- A job apocalypse for tech professionals is unlikely.
- ‘Chief question officer’ and agent fleet manager are emerging roles.
- AI-driven development will expand the software profession.
There has been no shortage of pronouncements from industry leaders that many tech jobs will fizzle away as the artificial intelligence wave washes through our economy. However, one of AI’s leading thought leaders suggests a different path is in store for tech professionals.
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Rather than disappearing, roles may shift, with titles such as a “chief question officer” emerging, and managers charged with overseeing fleets of agents that will execute on ideas.
The real value is defining the right questions
These are some of Erik Brynjolfsson’s observations as a Stanford University professor, author, and inventor. I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Brynjolfsson, who emphasized that AI cannot create value on its own. Humans are needed to initiate and enable actions, and then evaluate the value of those actions.
Going forward, “the real value is defining the right questions,” he said. “Understanding the problems that need to be solved, defining them in a way that really are useful to people. So those who can identify those opportunities are going to be more valuable than ever before.”
Look for instances in the more recent past when technology jobs faced existential threats. The introduction of labor-saving technologies such as fourth-generation languages and cloud services did not reduce demand for programmers but did accelerate demand in new areas.
“Some people became database experts and did a bunch of new things,” Brynjolfsson said. “It didn’t mean that the people who were writing operating systems went away. Both of those things were important.”
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Nor will the rise of agentic workforces necessarily threaten jobs, he predicted. “In some cases, it does replace what they’re doing. But at the same time, it helps people be twice or even 10 times more productive.”
In the process, expect to see the worldwide software developer population rapidly expand, not contract, he said. “A tiny fraction of people do coding and software development. Going forward, I wouldn’t be surprised if 10 times as many people do it. They may not think of themselves as coders, because you can do a lot of it by speaking English and describing what you want. But they will be creating valuable working software and applications that previously only very specialized people could do.”
Managing such a rising class of citizen developers “requires guardrails to make sure that they’re safe, preserve privacy, security, and doing what you really want,” he cautioned. “It doesn’t mean just go willy-nilly and throw everything out there. It means partnering with people in the organization that can help with some of those guardrails. The great thing is that some of the tools themselves increasingly can be used to help check what you’re doing.”
Brynjolfsson urges everybody to lean into AI technology. “It’s not just for computer science. If you’re doing art, music, philosophy, literature, or marketing, almost every category can be amplified with these technologies,” he said. “You don’t have to spend years studying coding. The best way to do that is to get hands-on and start working with it, to drive people to use the tools.”
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Since time immemorial, addressing problems has been a three-part process, he explained. It starts with first defining or framing the question, then executing on it, and then evaluating it. “AI has been very good at doing that middle part,” he said. Importantly, “humans still have a role, in fact an even bigger role, in defining the right questions, and evaluating them,” Brynjolfsson emphasized. People will oversee fleets of agents, and “those who do it first are going to be massively empowered.”
Technology is a complement, not a substitute
To assist both technical and non-technical people in understanding the implications of AI, Brynjolfsson is launching master classes addressing the new rules of wealth and revolutionizing workflows with AI.
There are two ways to classify technology, he explained. “One is as a substitute and the other as a complement. The substitute replaces the person. The complement amplifies them and allows them to do new things they couldn’t have done before.”
The issue we’re facing is that there’s been fear about the substitute approach. “Really, though, most of history, complements have been more important. One of the ways you can see that is historically, wages have gone up. That’s because we have more tools at our disposal.”
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He predicted this upward lift would continue. “Humans are still essential, but humans with machines can do things that no human could have done, or no machine could have done on their own.”
Think about the impact of jet engines, he illustrated. They make pilots “way more productive than when they had biplanes or propeller planes. Does that mean we reduced our number of pilots? No. It meant that all of us are flying a lot more, we go on vacations to faraway places, and we do more business meetings. There’s more demand for pilots than there ever was.”
