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>Something like doctor or lawyer feels like it would much better chance of being AI-proof. For variety of reasons someone might prefer a person performing medical operations, giving legal advices, or designing software.
Like if I could send a radiology scan to a doctor who has a 75% chance of identifying cancer or AI who has 95% chance?
Look, if that's true, then in the medium to long term what other skill isn't pointless?
We're not talking about commoditizing craftsmanship to mass manufacture cars here. We're talking about commoditizing knowledge work and later any work as a whole.
But to answer your main question: I think the best way to deal with any anxiety is to allow it to be there and actively experience how it feels instead of trying to suppress or avoid it.
Write down what you're most worried about and then put these thoughts to a test. Think them through to the end. Do they still make sense or is the fear irrational?
I think what you're experiencing is pretty normal given the hype about AI replacing our jobs and how the software (engineering) market is developing at the moment. Maybe it helps a bit to know that you're not alone with these feelings.
To go beyond that, you would need an AI that can talk to a non-technical person, or imagine what such a person needs or wants, and then remove all the ambiguity to provide almost precise instructions that a junior engineer can follow, or perfectly precise instructions in a computer language.
That same person has to be able to monitor the output of the junior engineers or AIs, and correct it dynamically.
It's obviously not impossible to produce such an AI, but this is a general artificial intelligence, not something that produces plausible code given a prompt.
The thing to do, the opportunity, is to know how to use AI to be more productive. That cements you as the translator and supervisor to bridge business needs and software implementation.
Even today with the globalised market, internet, mobile phones, ecommerce and all of the apps and social media to fill our time, we are still close to 100% employment.
We just seem to move onto higher level activities with each new generation of technology and find more stuff to do with our time and sell to each other.
Even if I’m wrong, knowing how slow big companies adopt disruptive technology, it would be decades before this is a real issue for developers.
Consume news in chunks. If you don't believe that AI is going to tomorrow take your job away, you don't really need to be learning about what it can and can't do every single day. So start small, only read AI roundups once a week.
I'm not saying stick your head in the sand, I'm saying, what value can their possibly be in you getting AI news at a trickle every single day, rather than as a chunk at specific times with the addition of context.
In addition, if you are going to keep getting news, spend more time reading research papers and less time listening to breathless coverage on Twitter. There are exciting and impressive things that AI is doing, but there is also a very real hype cycle filled with motivated actors that are giving incomplete pictures of where the technology is, what it's capable of, and where they think it's going. Those people should not be your primary news source, people like Sam Altman should not be your primary news source about where the field of AI is. Understand that those people have extremely powerful motivations to hype their technology as much as is humanly possible -- regardless of where the technology actually is. If the technology is going to replace you in 3 years, they are going to tell you that it will replace you in 1.
My experience is that for many topics, not just AI, perspective helps with anxiety.
There are deeper questions you're asking, and I realize this is not actually advice on how to make yourself AI-proof. But if your goal is to understand the technology, understand where the risks are, understand what to worry about and what not to worry about, being constantly inundated in this stuff is counter-productive.
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Take a week, program something, don't think about or read about or look at AI news for the duration of that week. Install a browser extension to filter things out if you have to, block HN if you have to. Give yourself a little bit of space to breathe, realize objectively, if you take a week to breath the world is not going to fundamentally change over the course of that week and you're not going to get fired from your job over the course of that week. Then, do targeted research about the state of the AI industry, play with the technology to get a feel for what it's good at and bad at, come to some conclusions. Repeat, give yourself time to get away from it all.
If you are surrounded by people who are telling you 24x7 that you are going to be expendable, and are constantly throwing random pieces of information and demos at you without context, that is going to make you anxious regardless of anything else going on. If you are constantly getting news and updates about AI and you never time to digest anything or think through anything or just be away from all of that noise, then you never really have time to form plans or execute plans or do anything other than worry about what the next update is.
Even if AI is going to replace your software job eventually, living in the hype cycle 24x7 and being constantly stressed about it is a bad way to approach solving that problem.
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Also, just general advice regardless of the context that therapy is awesome and if you have good health insurance (which you may have as a software engineer) remote/telehealth sessions are often fully or mostly covered. I would avoid some of the weird startups that get advertised on podcasts, I would try for a licensed therapist from a medical practice, but if you can find a good therapist, this is exactly the kind of thing that can be helpful to talk about with one, both for digging into anxiety and for forming actionable plans around what you want to do next.
Although these things are developing all of the time, they are still a very long way off being able to deeply reason anywhere near as well as a human being can. It seems premature to worry about the security of a skilled programming job at this stage due to "AI" alone.
Instead, I will tell you this. Anxiety is an absolute beast. You should get help slaying it. There will always be existential threats. You need to build the tools to accept and adapt.
To get the most out of AI, you have to be on the top of your game. You have to be able to phrase your needs extremely well and evaluate the output for possibly subtle problems.
As the tools get better, the need for deep understanding will increase.
Therefore, you should apply yourself to getting very good at using AI. That's where a lot of your career will be going forward. And if you're good, it will INCREASE your value to employers.
My message to you then is to take heart! You are well on your way to being one of the few who can do great things with these new capabilities. To be honest, your career may go through some ups and downs as the world learns to adapt to AI. But if you stick with it, you'll always be on the cutting edge!
Ask ChatGPT. :-)