The information technology event I chose to write about continues with the AI trend invading and overtaking the computer professional’s workspace. In this article by The Wall Street Journal, Isabelle Bousquette talks about how AI is now crossing into the coding side of the computer workspace. This subject is familiar to me because I have family in computer programming at a large-scale company and I have been hearing about the encroachment of AI into this space for a while now. It is interesting to see this topic get coverage in The Wall Street Journal. In this journal Bousquette speaks about how the implementation of generative AI shifts the focus of the workers in the coding and programming space while boosting productivity. Generative AI is charging the daily workflow and focus of these programmers from writing the code to more of a focus on prompting and debugging. This makes productivity go up because programmers now change small parts of code to make the desired output but don’t need to spend tedious amounts of time coding every detail. This also helps take out the human error aspect of coding. A good example the article points out is spending hours of unnecessary time combing through lines of code because you forgot to close a parenthesis somewhere. This is a somewhat common occurrence in coding and this kind of issue is not present when using generative AI. It is easy to see how the implementation of AI would boost productivity in this sort of environment. However, generative AI comes with its own set of risks and fears that are associated with it. Firstly, it shifts the daily workflow of the average programmer. This changes the job requirements for the position of computer programmer. If the job description is changing, then the job requirements are changing. This could make it more difficult for programmers to find work, especially if the boosted efficiency resulting from generative AI means that big corporations can cut back their workforce and lay programmers off. As of right now these AI tools are stated to be strictly an aid to software developers and programmers and not a replacement for actual workers. However, as these tools continue to advance and become better at their generation there is a constant fear that they will begin to take over the job market because they make less mistakes and cost less money. This would be devastating to so many people across the world as well as devastating to the economy, raising the unemployment rate across our country and countries all over the world.
I believe the government will see the potential risks to the economy and to the country itself and begin implementing legislation to halt or hinder the implementation of generative AI as soon as it begins to take over jobs and become a problem. They could put in place some kind of legislation stating that generative AI has to be developed in a specific way to ensure the safety of our workforce or they could hinder its development after a specific point. I believe we will see some sort of legislative hindrance to generative AI in the coming years and it will be marketed to the American people as a way to safeguard the workforce and economy of our nation. If the government doesn’t take some sort of action, they would need some way to create jobs for computer technicians or possibly create a way for humans to constantly check or program alongside AI as things are working now. I don’t see how sustainable this would be considering the constant growth and advancement of generative AI. It’s only a matter of time until generative AI becomes advanced enough to do most of the jobs we get paid to do. When this happens I believe the only reasonable course of action would be a considerable reworking of the roles we play is society and how they correlate to how we obtain and value currency.
References
AMC TechNews. (2025, March 7). ACM TechNews. https://technews.acm.org/
Bousquette, I. (2025, March 4). How AI Tools Are Reshaping the Coding Workforce. wsj.com. https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-ai-tools-are-reshaping-the-coding-workforce-6ad24c86
Andrew Kennedy 