These two words sum up both the long-term danger of AI and why it is so useful to some of us.
Offloading is getting AI to do work that you already know how to do yourself, freeing you up to do other things.
Offshoring, on the other hand, is getting AI to do work that you don’t actually know how to do yourself.
With the first, you retain the skills and control; with the later, you become dependent on somebody or something else.
It’s a distinction that has huge implications for our skill sets and the future of the IT industry.
If I, for example, use AI to write code, I could just do it myself, I understand what I’m expecting at the other end and can then validate and correct the results. It is simply making my job easier and faster.
However, someone without the same expertise is effectively offshoring their work. They have to trust the output implicitly, without being able to validate or correct it, and they don’t learn anything from the experience.
Now currently I learn bits and bobs from AI. I’ll ask it to do something relatively simple, and when I’m reviewing its output, I’ll go, “Oh, that’s a clever way of doing that,” or, “I didn’t know you could do it that way.” I’ll then be able to track it down to a GitHub repository or something similar, where someone much, much cleverer than me has implemented a new approach, and AI has used it.
Brilliant! Fine! But that’s offloading tasks. I could have worked it out myself, and I knew where to look and how to track it down. In that situation, AI is no threat to me. It is only a benefit.
However, if I have to trust AI implicitly and am not gaining any knowledge from the experience, then I am offshoring my work. Sooner or later, I risk either being replaced or finding myself in a vulnerable position because I lack the necessary skills.
Those of us who are successfully offloading our work, without realising the wider consequences, are actually contributing to this problem. If we, as more senior members of the industry, are not giving younger people the opportunity to develop the expertise that will enable them to use AI effectively, we are running the same risk as we did, as I seem to recall, about ten years ago.
So much mid-level and lower-level IT work was offshored to places such as the Indian subcontinent that it became increasingly difficult to hire people locally because they hadn’t had the opportunity to develop the required skills.
We are in danger of doing that to ourselves all over again, but this time we’re not even offshoring the work to another human being. We’re handing it over to machines controlled by very, very rich people, who will not fail to take advantage of the situation.
So, again, it’s the same boring warning, and you’ll have seen it in a billion posts. But don’t forget how things work. Remember how to do them yourself, and make sure you pass on your knowledge to another human being near you who can use it.
Don’t be selfish with your skills.