As likely many of you, i love being an engineer.<p>Lifelong learning may sound like torture for many in different fields, for me it was always a great outlook for the future and a reassuring promise of never getting bored again. (I think i was not genuinely bored since 20 years.)<p>I love 1) thinking and learning about, 2) planning and 3) tinkering on / implementing solutions for problems with technology.
Doing this somewhat successfully, kept up my motivation and passion.<p>But since the LLM hype and the writing on the ever closer coming wall, saying that most of my skills will be obsolete in the near future somewhat cripples this mentality. I'm not as excited anymore and often stop at 2), because i tell myself: "And in 2 years some MBA will push a button to come up with a much better solution, skipping all the work i put into building up my mental models."<p>I know that this ironically aligns with the overall goal of technology, but why me? :)<p>I can imagine, that some of you are also struggling with this and would be happy to hear your thoughts or coping strategies.<p>My current coping strategy is to think, that i can still learn about how nature and things work, till the end of my days, but the active part of solving problems is missing.
I am fairly confident that thinking and creative humans will not be swept away, but may change the things that they do, eg move up the abstraction stack, some of the time. (I will still be hacking shell scripts on my RPis and successors by hand until those hands are nearly cold and dead...)<p>Yes, lifelong learning is an enabler for that, which is why I am doing a part-time PhD.<p>I am fairly upset about the bullshitting and general cheating and dehumanising that the current hyped 'AI' is enabling. There is good AI stuff going on: we don't need to be using it to destroy the planet and people's sense of self-worth.