One thing I recently realized is that the evolution and discussions of AI very closely mirrors those of offshoring, when offshoring first started off. Back then too discussions were about:

1) The quality of work produced being sub-par, with many instances of expensive, failed projects, leading to predictions of the death of offshoring.

2) Unwillingness of offshore teams to clarify or push back on requirements.

3) Local job displacement.

What people figured out soon enough was that offshoring was not as easy as "throwing some high-level requirements over the wall and getting back a fully functional project." Instead the industry realized that there needed to be technically-competent, business domain-savvy counterparts in the client company that would work closely with the offshore team, setting concrete and well-scoped milestones, establishing best practices, continously monitoring progress, providing guidance, removing blockers, and encouraging pushback on requirements, even revisiting them if needed.

Offshore teams on their part became culturally more comfortable with questioning requirements and engaging in 2-way discssions. Eventually offshore companies built up the business domain knowledge such that client companies could outsource higher- and higher-level work.

All successful outsourcing projects followed this model, and it spread quickly across the industry, which was why the predictions of the death of offshoring never materialized. In fact the practice has only continued to grow.

It's very interesting how much the same strategies apply to working with AI. A lot of the "how to code effectively with AI" articles basically offer the exact same advice.

On the job displacement side, however, the story may be very different.

With outsourcing, job displacement didn't turn out to be much of a concern because a) by delegating lower-level grunt work to offshore teams, local employees were then freed up to do higher-level, more innovative work; and b) until software has "eaten the whole world" the amount of new work is essentially unbounded.

With AI though, the job displacement could be much more real and long-lasting. The pace at which AI has improved is mind-boggling. Now the technically-competent, business-domain savvy expert could potentially get all the outsourced work done by themselves through an army of agents with very little human support, either local or offshore. Until the rest of the workforce can upskill themselves to the level of "technically-competent, business domain-savvy expert" their job is at risk.

"How many such roles does the world need?", and "How can junior employees get to that level without on-the-job experience?", are very open questions.