I can't help but get the sense that we're trying to tell ourselves "evolve or die" and that the web jobs will move towards AI/ML if you want to stay employed in the 10-20 year range.
But, I think ML/AI is a bit different than that. ML seems like more of a backend thing or specialized application. How many people need to work on face authentication? Or object recognition? I’m just not sure how much AI/ML will be considered a general purpose programmer requirement. Interacting with models, sure... but not necessarily making them. In this respect maybe ML is similar to databases — we all use them, but don’t need to make them.
There will always be programmers writing at the interface between the user and the computer. Right now, those developers are heavily skewed towards web apps. But there is a sizable amount of mobile development too. If anything, I’d think the web jobs would move closer towards mobile as opposed to ML.
This is one of those situations where I greatly benefited from thinking of the problem from an ML perspective, as it allowed me to create a very simple probabilistic model and verify that it was sufficiently accurate.
I believe we'll get more of those "ML in the small" things popping up even for regular developers. It's not something new, it's just a mental perspective shift toward the probabilistic.
And this exactly why an enterprising software engineer would be well served to be familiar with how to do basic machine learning. You don't have to be great at it, you just need to know how to copy somebody else's notebook or whatever and get it to work on your simple data set.
You should still learn some ML because it's cool and fun, though, and will give you valuable perspective.
Whilst I have been involved in Android since the beginning I personally would not encourage younger folks to focus too much at the expense of new technologies (inc. blockchain tech for that matter).
That said, we hopefully have another 10 years!
But, I could totally see AI/ML driving voice interfaces in the future.
But no, I’ve been enjoying the experience more and more. Texting my girlfriend by voice. Asking Siri to find something on a map for me. First time I’ve been impressed by the pragmatic nature of it and not just finding it a clever toy (at least in some time).
I’m still wary of some of the implications, but I’m cautiously optimistic now more than I would have been.
That said, it’s certainly not my area of expertise so I’m also wary it spells my own career doom if I don’t get smart.
For certain industries - e.g. tech - people like quiet to concentrate. Not unique to tech of course... libraries are quiet too for the same reason. I cant imagine the average office where concentration is required benefiting from a call-centre-esque environment where everyone is talking out loud.
.. but I guess it might mean we can get away from open offices and back to private offices?! :-)
The other guy is the one who will never talk in public to a computer.
Finally, you have the guy who can’t imagine not using a keyboard to program.
For the rest of us, we have no problem talking to our computers, and we anxiously await the future to arrive.
So whilst ChatOps might be fairly basic today I am open to it becoming very much more advanced in the coming years.
From Wikipedia:
Computer chess engine Zor won the freestyle 2017 Ultimate Challenge tournament. The best human plus computer came in 3rd place. In 2017, chess computer engines are superior to human plus computers.
"AI/ML engineer" is the new "web developer".
Soon everybody and their mother can make ML models and apply them. You may ask if it isn't already the case.
However, just as many people can hop in to web development and quickly create value (or at least CRUD apps), you still need really experienced people with a breadth of knowledge to push the field/work on really complicated or large scale systems.
It's the same for AI/ML/DL. Basically anybody can train an image classifier right now, but only a handful of teams on earth understand computer vision well enough to attempt to tackle self driving cars.