June 12, 2026
Most people are not software engineers And I can’t bare to hear more AI hype Since about the last US election I quit listening to podcasts - it had become too much. But I have started listening again and of course many podcasts are filled with chatter about AI. I recently heard an interview of a Silicon Valley type who confidently proclaimed that AI would wipe out 50 percent of office jobs - This job-category, Gone! That job-category, Gone! What nonsense. Not that I don’t see that as a possibility, I just don’t think he, or anyone else, can with any confidence actually say what affects AI will have on the job market. Experience from the last 40 years gives no indication that office jobs will be eliminated at scale. When I was a young child, most offices did not have computers and no offices had access to the internet. The efficiency and productivity that the combination of digitisation and internet has brought have been enormous for many tasks. And true enough, several cateogories of jobs or job-tasks have been eliminated. You do not have many office workers that are typists any more. But in those fourty years we have not seen fewer office jobs - there have become many more office jobs. Working with a computer has went from something only a few, highly trained specialists did, to something everyone does. The computer has made office work more productive and that has lead more people to do it. But, there are probably very few job announcements for computer-operator anymore. I wonder if we will see a similar dynamic. The most optimistic and pessimistic takes on AI (often from the same person) are from people that work with software full-time. AI has already turned their professions and industries on their heads. And they rightly might suspect that the demand for sofware developers might change when, with the help of AI, anyone can develop sofware. I don’t know how things will pan-out. But I suspect other people’s confident predictions of the future of work under AI will also be far off the mark.
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This is my first blog post using Jekyll and markdown. Learn how to write blog posts easily.
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