Things have changed so much in AI space (where no one can hear you scream) since I wrote my 2019 blog titled What the FAQ are AI, ANNs, ML, DL, and DNNs? As an aside, I’m also rather proud of the other members of the FAQ series:

 

I’ve been writing a lot about various aspects of AI recently. In fact, it just struck me that I should write an FAQ column explaining the concepts of perceptive, enhancive, generative, agentic, and physical AI, but all that will have to wait for another day.

Some of my recent AI-centric musings have been about AI-focused processors, such as the following items, for example:

 

Others have tended more to AI-enhanced tools and technologies, such as the following items, for example:

 

It’s the latter two items that are currently giving me pause for thought. If you’d asked me just a couple of years ago, I would have said that things like PCB layout and ASIC verification were among the last bastions of activities where the human brain reigned supreme (not my brain, you understand, but definitely a human one), but it now seems we are standing with one foot over a precipice and the other on a bar of wet soap.

Is AI coming after your job? (Click image to see a larger version; Source: The Washington Post)

The reason for my somewhat glum countenance is that I was reading an interesting column on The Washington Post website. This features a dynamic interactive tool that allows you to “See which jobs are most threatened by AI and who may be able to adapt.”

Sad to relate (at least, sad for your humble narrator), “Writers and Authors” don’t fare well, being “most exposed” and halfway between “most and least adaptable.” (I’ll bend over backwards to be flexible… does that count?)

As the column notes: “No one has a perfect road map to the future, but researchers at GovAI, which studies technology policy, and the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, used a novel approach to estimate which workers may be most and least able to adapt to AI. One bright spark mentioned in the column is that “They [the researchers] concluded that many people most at risk if AI transforms work are also the best placed to find new jobs.”

I must admit to feeling a twinge of melancholy at the thought that one day soon a machine might do a better job of being me than I do myself—especially when you consider how hard I’ve practiced at being me. Still, there’s something oddly comforting in the idea that the very people most exposed to AI are also the ones best equipped to adapt.

We writers, engineers, and designers (I tick all three boxes) have always lived by our wits. Perhaps this is just the next chapter in that story—whether we like it or not. In the meantime, if you’re looking for me, I’ll be over here behind my keyboard, being as adaptable as I can… just in case.