Most revolutions carry the current of popularization.
Popularization here refers to the feature where the domain of experts is replaced by the domain of ordinary people. In fact, this phenomenon existed even before the Industrial Revolution. The so-called 'popularization of art' is a case in point. Such revolutions — or popularizations — break down or expand existing boundaries. In the past, artists moved from male to female; from sculpture, modeling, and painting to spatial and performance art; and from elaborate depiction to increasingly conceptual and expressive modes.
Only the timing and the object are changing.
The basic problem is that for those of us living today it isn't easy to imagine the car rather than the carriage, and that my today and someone else's today are of different eras. The first issue here speaks to individual conception; the second speaks to one's situation or surrounding conditions.
Not easy, but one's fixed ideas, imagination, and applied skill can be exercised and learned. Organizational-culture conditions, however, are not easy. For example, in the IT industry, some design teams use Figma while many still use Photoshop. For someone who has used only Photoshop, this may sound like a mere difference in tools; but those used to Photoshop, when they actually observe people who use Figma fluently, realize Photoshop shows its limits. It's not simply a matter of design-tool differences.
Even outside one's specialty, countless aspects of my today differ from another's. The most representative is the smartphone. One person buys and uses a 1.5-million-won flagship smartphone but only uses KakaoTalk and phone calls; another is an active consumer who uses games, shopping, and the like; yet another uses it not as a consumer but as a producer — for work, business, and content production.
Here again, let me record the fact that another familiar new wave is rising.
The units and scope of labor — or workers — are changing. During the Industrial Revolution, labor was a simple or repetitive unit. And the jobs of (manual) workers performing such unit tasks came under threat. Those who could began to move to other fields for more stable labor. The so-called knowledge industry.
But lately, even the labor of white-collar workers — labor based on cognitive and judgmental capacities grounded in human learning and thought — and even labor of the creative and editorial kind based on human imperfection, is giving way to AI.
Of course, some will say it's too early. Unfortunately, though, such thinking remains only within the thinking range of the Photoshop designer or planner who has never experienced Figma. Because there are already overflowing examples of chatGPT being used in the field to write IT plans, obtain legal advice, or write code. More precisely, 'my today and the other's today are simply different.'
The landscape of the today I live in looks like this: just like Dorothy Vaughan in the film <Hidden Figures>, who, upon hearing that an IBM computer was being brought in, decided that the way for her and her Black female colleagues to survive was to master the computer — people in various communities are studying chatGPT to understand it well and are researching prompts to obtain good results, and they are sharing information with one another. KakaoTalk chats don't stop until dawn. Meanwhile, unfortunately? in some news outlets, the wording is 'limitations, errors, still far off..' Just like HTML5 vs. Flash in 2010.
Of course, in reality I am usually a crewmember or passenger, not a captain.
Predicting the weather and surviving a typhoon are different matters. If conditions don't allow, one can prepare mentally or spend the remaining time meaningfully with no regrets; if conditions allow, one can try to improve. If the latter..
Personally, I think there will be less room for those who are 'developers but not programmers.' Already in various places many software engineers are being laid off. Of course, it takes time for overseas issues to reach Korea, but my personal view is that the time lag should be used as a warm-up period to respond actively rather than waiting for the actual results.
I think this backdrop is because the scope of the worker is being adjusted (expanded).
In an era when manufacturing was the unit of production, manual labor was honored by machines; in today's era — and the era ahead — where information (content or data) has become the unit of production, I think software development sits within AI's food chain.
Of course, I know.
There are still startups designing in Photoshop.
There are still companies building websites.
There are still shops selling and repairing computers.
Just saying.
Recently in the community, there are more mature posts written by people who summarized all this better, so I'm adding them here.
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