Spoiler Alert : A Sci-Fi novel with NO Terminator robots, No aliens in saucers, No Matrix style Agent Smiths and no zombies sucking on human blood .
Based on current trends in AI and related tech I present a realistic prediction of where we would b...
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The office of JBM Tech was pretty full that day. Work from home policy had been completely revoked by HR, following normalcy post-pandemic. People who still resisted were silently let go.In fact Mr.Thilakan had even mulled over the thought of doing away with laptops altogether and giving all employees only desktops, so they can never take any work home. But that was stiffly resisted by his HR, saying women employees would find that highly repressive and may just quit. It was a completely different mindset now, 'work-life' balance was a key factor in employee motivation. Free coffee or latenight pizza did not do the trick anymore to holding back your top performers. On any other day, Thilakan would have just fired them or messed up their appraisal. But they have been signing a lot of new contracts now, and business was even better than before COVID days. So he just let it go, for now.
The cubicle didn't have any of the usual IT office decors - no post-its, no lava lamps, no family photos of kids on vacation. Except for a poster of Keanu Reaves doing his bending-over-backward pose in the Matrix. The little metallic grey nameplate read 'Zevi Cohen''.
Dave scurried into Zevi's cubicle. "Have you seen this? ChatGPT has started writing code! Check this out". He typed in a prompt to the chatbot window "Write a web application for playing AngryBirds, but swap the roles of pigs with the birds". Within seconds came the code in HTML,CSS,Javascript with instructions on how to execute it.
Dave downloads the code and there runs on his screen a perfect Angry Birds clone with pigs throwing stones at the birds now.
Zevi gave a false sense of amazement. He knew who in his AI-pocalypse team had worked on that project and he had even tested it a couple of weeks ago.
"You know what's worse. Stackoverflow is shutting down !"
Zevi nodded, as he too had been hearing that for quite some time.The IT industry was filled with so many 'software engineers' who could hardly even write 10 lines of code, and had survived purely on forums like Stackoverflow where they would post their problems and some dude would post the code. And there were tonnes of pre-written code available, and all it needed to impress your boss was just download and run. Even though most people messed up, it was Zevis's job to keep correcting all the mess before pushing things to production.
"Do you think Thilakan has seen this?" Dave was worried. Zevi just threw up his hands and smiled, "Don't worry, I won't tell him" as he went back to doing his code review of his team's work.
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Thilakan was in the Newton conference room. His phone notification message chimed and read "Tech companies layoff more than 15% of their staff citing AI-related impact. Google's CEO Sundar Pichai warned that more might follow". A few business cards and pamphlets were neatly placed on the table. It read "Deepika Bhatnagar, Head Sales and Marketing, North America".
"Can I continue?" queried Deepika, pointing to her presentation slide on the conference room screen.
