Worry Not: Our Hobbies Are Safe from AI

A recent thread over at Reddit’s webdev subreddit asked a relatively common question these days: “Is web dev in danger of being replaced by AI (serious)”. The post’s creator cited an article from Futurism article from Futurism as evidence for the impending end of web development. That Futurism post does have a rather sinister-sounding headline—“An AI Completed 360,000 Hours of Finance Work in Just Seconds”—and goes on to explain that JP Morgan is using a new machine learning algorithm called Contract Intelligence (COIN) to review new contracts for potential errors. According to the company, this could save hundreds of thousands of human hours—hours that are now spend performing rather simple, repeatable tasks. Fearmongering aside, it seems like another example of a company simply finding efficiency where there used to be waste. It’s not fundamentally different than a plastics manufacturing company discovering that using a conveyor belt to move pieces from the injection molder to the shipping area could save someone from doing it by hand. Of course, all of us at SSD Nodes think about the future of AI all the time. We worry and we wonder about the implications for the entire IT industry, and all its unique niches. Even then, technology doesn’t tend to steal jobs from the people who used to do them before, whether its a lawyer dealing with contracts, or a plant floor worker who manually picked and placed widgets. More often than not, the company finds other, more profitable work for these