General Discussion

I retired last fall after a 40 year career in IT (the last 20 as a Cybersecurity Engineer for a government agency). I watched in horror over the last 10 years as tax payer data was moved from “on-premises” secure physical servers that we could touch and defend to one of the 3 major cloud providers (with no provision to revert). Programmers learned to use cloud-based development tools, virtual machines that get automatically added or destroyed as workloads change and use cloud-based services (zero servers to manage). Traditional IT operations moved to the cloud and there’s virtually no more capital expense— it’s all a monthly bill based on usage (just like your power bill). Worst of all, all of these development & management tools are cloud-specific, so there’s.no way to pick up & move to a cheaper cloud provider when the monthly bills get too high — True vendor lock-in.

I say all of this to point out there is very little “infrastructure” left. Dramatic, sweeping change take place quickly — AI just accelerates it even faster. So, do *I* think there’s going to be a massive collapse of white collar jobs due to AI? I don’t know, but I certainly think it is possible. I just thank my lucky stars I managed to retire with a pension before any collapse could happen. But I do worry about the fate of my former co-workers.