AI to save time, not money
When having a discussion with my Codeable peeps, I realized in the recent AI hype, it's important to remind myself and fellows in the web industry, that we should use AI to save time, but not money.
Unless you're training your own models, the costs of adopting AI tools are very low. It's usually $20+ per month per seat for most of these services, like ChatGPT or Cursor Composer etc. It will never cost you the amount to hire a junior developer to your organization, while it is very likely, give you the benefits to almost the same extent. However, I would still argue not to save the money to hire another developer position.
We should hire more but not less in this AI trend, if we believe in abundance of mankind. We all hear the saying that AI is stealing jobs from human, which is only true when you believe in scarcity. And isn't that where all the misfortune starts with?
When I get to choose, I believe in abundance. I believe I will keep making more money when I deliver good work and products to this world, and most importantly, the others will also make more money becasue I'm doing well. The money I make isn't the money I steal from someone else. It's not like if I'm making good money, the others will suffer from loosing money or getting no job.
The same applies to AI. If I use these tools well, they makes me more efficient, I can either do more work with the same amount of time or free up my time for something else I love, while the total values I create will only go up in this trend, but not the other way around.
It's tempting to simply things in a way that, when AI can code, no one wants to hire humans to code. This is true in the context of human taxi drivers v.s. robot taxi drivers, so I understand where the anxiety is coming from. But I ask myself this: do you code because you have to earn a living, or becasue you like it?
Again, we can argue that a human taxi driver can be enjoying driving and still loses their job to a robot driver. But are you sure this is an undoutbtful truth like 1+1=2? Even 1+1=2 is not so unchallengable and is wrong in the context of a binary number system.
AI is the tool that we invent to help us to do things better. No job will be stolen by it. On the contrary, more jobs will be created by it. If it weren't for abundance, humans wouldn't have created AI models and robots. Seeing AI just as fire. All cook use fire to cook, but they don't worry the fire can steal their jobs. Seeing AI just as those advanced kitchen utensils, like a pressure cooker. A cook would never worry the pressure cooker steals jobs from them, so neither should we develoeprs worry the same about AI.