I was recently listening to a Cory Doctorow interview where he was discussing the concept of "reverse centaurs". Essentially, if a centaur is a human who uses technology to perform a task they cannot alone, a reverse centaur is the opposite. Think amazon warehouse workers. An algorithm tells the worker where to pick up the box, and where to put it down. It does all the thinking, and the human is just a pair of hands.

One path you can take is that you have skilled professionals who have a depth of knowledge in their field, and can skillfully use an AI to enhance their work. The AI can for example, proof-read human made code and look for typos, bugs, or other possible mistakes that we all as humans occasionally make. This is a centaur situation, where the human is in the driver's seat.

The other path is that corporations can have fewer skilled professionals in fields that were previously difficult to automate. AI allows you to fire 90% of those professionals and the ones that remain are essentially glorified amazon warehouse workers who do the bidding of the AI. They hit enter on the keyboard, they sign off on the code, and they most importantly fall on the sword when the AI fails. This is the reverse centaur situation

So while these jobs may be "safe" from AI, it's important that we avoid the reverse-centaur path. Though with corpos' tendency to chase profit over all else, this might be a big ask.

it kills the joy in CS

I heard people being concerned that a job in CS would change from writing code to fixing bugs in AI code, and that sounds dreadful

Someone close to me is an accountant, and is facing layoffs, downsizing, and much-longer working hours, as management pushes remaining staff to use more and more AI in accounting analysis and reporting. Trying to get one accountant to accomplish what used to take several.

I'm surprised at the inclusion of "accounting" on this list.

Pretty crazy since I keep hearing from engineer graduates that they can't find jobs anywhere.

Until AI boosters are mercilessly persecuted like script kiddies of yore open source won't get better. Codeberg has the right idea.

There are generally only so many jobs that really need a CS degree, more people hold the degree than are needed and the usual catchment path of 'IT Janitorial' is being eaten by AI.

I have two of the degrees in that list, and yet I still don't feel safe from AI.

Hopefully it will widen the gap between those who can and those who cannot (at least yet), even if there will be loads of more of the latter.