Dear friends,
I’ve been hearing from people at all levels of seniority about a feeling of job insecurity. High-school students wonder if there will be a job for them, engineers worry about keeping up, C-level officers wonder if they’ll manage to help their businesses transform with AI, and many more. Amid the frenetic pace of AI advancements and multiple sources of geopolitical uncertainty, the future feels less certain at this moment than at any other I recall. In moments like this, I think about what we can build to take advantage of the exciting possibilities ahead. But I also think about what is stable that I can count on, such as community and skills. To those of you who are navigating an uncertain environment, I hope this will bring some comfort.
The frenetic pace of AI advancement makes the future of jobs and of many businesses uncertain. On the business front, the venture investor Chamath Palihapitiya wrote a thoughtful article on how share prices are affected as businesses face disruption from AI. tl;dr. The value of many companies is in the cash flows they are expected to generate in the long term, and if their cash flows might be impaired due to disruption by AI, they become much less valuable.
Further, even though representatives from frontier AI labs often make confident-sounding predictions about the future, when I’ve spoken privately with some of them, they share that they really don’t know what will really happen in a few years. In software, some trends are clear: Highly agentic coding systems will continue to get better; the Product Management bottleneck, which is already acute, will get worse; and many more people will be coding. But despite these trends, exactly what software engineering will look like and how software engineering teams will be organized in the future is only slowly coming into focus.
Separately from the pace of AI advancement, many flashpoints add risk to the future. The war in Iran, which is leading to tragic civilian deaths as well as the Strait of Hormuz blockade; uncertainty over the future of peace in Taiwan and the impact on semiconductor supplies; potential overinvestment in AI infrastructure; and China’s control over rare-earth metals. Because of our interconnected world, any of these can significantly impact people anywhere, thus enhancing risk for everyone.
Jeff Bezos famously said that knowing what’s not going to change in the next 10 years creates a stable foundation on which to build a business. Many many things in the world will still be the same in 10 years as now. But for individuals who are worried about job security, I would put forward two things that I think will be stable in that timeframe: Community and skills.
First, 10 years from now, I know that my friends and family will still be there for me. Just as I know that no matter what, I will still be there for them. Relationships can be incredibly durable. During Covid, many communities bonded and supported each other. This is why, in moments of uncertainty, having communities — networks of relationships — helps everyone. That’s why opportunities to build relationships are so valuable and help us both get more done and protect ourselves against downside risks. This is why I find in-person gatherings — where we can make new friends and refresh existing relationships — especially valuable. If you would like to attend an event, please come to AI Dev, which will be held on April 28-29 in San Francisco.
Additionally, whereas a particular business may or may not do well, many skills will continue to be valuable. Your skills are something that you can always take with you, and no one can ever make you lose a skill you’ve earned. Exactly what skills are valuable will change, so it’s worth investing in a range of them to give yourself more options, and perhaps even learn some skills that might not be immediately applicable. Further, skills stack on top of each other (e.g., understanding prompting is important for using coding agents, and understanding AI building blocks is important for understanding how to architect certain applications). So building skills makes it easier to gain additional knowledge, and investing now in building a range of skills means that come what may, you can still accomplish a wide variety of valuable things.
I’m optimistic that many of the risks we’re seeing will work out well, and our collective AI future will be far brighter than it is today. You can count on me to be here to support you, and to support the AI community. As we navigate this fast-moving and uncertain world, let’s help each other out, build community, and keep helping each other gain valuable skills.
Keep building!