There's a joke going around among people who do the kind of work I do. When the conversation turns to AI, and it always turns to AI, someone eventually jokes: I guess I'll become a plumber.
It gets a chuckle, but then everyone goes quiet for a second.
I program. I design. I code. I evaluate. I critique. I've spent years getting reasonably good at these things. And somewhere in the last couple of years, a low hum started. Not panic. Not burnout. Just a persistent, uncomfortable question: what happens when the thing you're good at stops being something only humans can do?
This isn't new anxiety. The factory worker in 1985 felt it. The travel agent in 2005 felt it. The difference is I'm watching it happen in real time, from the inside, using the tools doing the disrupting.
I use AI every day. Several of them, actually. I find genuine value in it. It helps me think, build, get unstuck.
That's the part nobody talks about cleanly. Most of the discourse is either AI is going to save us all or AI is going to hollow everything out. The evangelists tell me everyone can be an entrepreneur now, that it's easier than ever. Maybe. But that advice comes from people who already understand the landscape. I work with this stuff daily and the future still feels murky. I can't imagine what it looks like from further out.
What keeps nagging at me is something I can't fully prove. A loop. AI displaces the people who would have used the products built by AI. Fewer employed designers, developers, analysts. A shrinking base of people with the income and need for the tools. Eventually it's just AI, building for AI, optimizing for an audience that isn't there anymore. I don't have data. It might not even hold up. But it has the shape of a logic, and I can't shake it.
My own response has been to quietly explore whether AI can handle more and more of what used to require a team. Not because I'm certain it's the right move. More because standing still felt worse than figuring it out. You adapt, or you wait to see what happens. I've never been good at waiting.
I don't know how this resolves. Nobody does, including the people who sound most certain about it.
What I do know is that I love taking Bowie on walks. The birds are still out there, waiting to be captured by my camera. And the work I can do today is still worth doing well.
The floor might be fine. I guess we'll see.