The Value of Expertise

I've been reading a lot about the impact that AI^[1] has had and will have on the software industry. Some herald the death of Software Engineering as a profession^[2], others claim it's a full-on paradigm shift in our work^[3], while some hold mixed^[4] nuanced views of the landscape^[5][6]. I don't know what the right answer is here, but it has pushed me to think a lot about the true value and the role that expertise plays in our industry.

Script kiddies have long been accepted to have some measurable impact on the industry^[7]. They operate by copying and pasting code from StackOverflow and other sources without really understanding what they are doing. They can't debug their code when things go wrong or build anything new from scratch. Despite their low skill, they are a threat actor that professionals have to account for, however, they don't offer much expertise to be worth hiring.

In contrast, when you hire a professional engineer, you aren't hiring them for their ability to copy and paste code from StackOverflow. You are hiring them for their ability to understand the problem, break it down into smaller pieces, and then build a solution that solves the problem. In essence, you hire them because they know what code is the best fit for the problem.

I think this is true for almost every profession. Most medical information is available on the internet for anyone ambitious enough to study, but you wouldn't trust a random person on the internet to provide you with medical advice. You hire a doctor because they know which medical information to trust at a given time. The same goes for lawyers, plumbers, accountants, technicians...

Generative AI has a lot of downsides but an upside is that it has the potential to lower the floor to create a new generation of expertise until it's able to bring the expertise that humans to into the room, I think we're safe. At least for now...