The impact of so-called "AI" in coding, programming, cybersecurity is deep and will be more and more so. Many kinds of activities will become much faster or are already so.
Predicting the implications of these facts on the job market is hard, though, as predicting the future always is.
When I was a student I used to buy the BYTE magazine every now and then. In September 1990 I bought this issue, that I still have in my library:
The Internet had been "invented" several years earlier (TCP September 1981, DNS November 1983). I took my degree in December 1989 and at the time we did have the ability to download files from very far away and obscure locations, with ftp. A couple of lectures about computer networks were part of one of the courses I took in 1988. Yet, in 1990, none (none) of the "63 of the World's Most Influential People in Personal Computing" included the Internet in their "predictions of the future". One of the few truly disruptive technologies of the last century; a technology that has transformed our society in ways that are difficult for those who were not around before to understand. Yet many knowledgeable and competent people were unable to realise its importance. Just a couple of people mentioned something like "the convergence of computing and communication tecnologies".
The blockchain...ahh, the wonderful blockchain that will soon disrupt how companies sell, trade and so on and so on (Deloitte 2019, PWC 2020). Is there anyone who can point to a successful blockchain application (except for cryptocurrencies) that is really based on a blockchain (rather than on something that is different but is named blockchain anyway for marketing reasons)?
And please let's not forget the billion dollars impact that NFT and the metaverse "could have by 2030" (Morgan Stanley 2021). A bright future just around the corner: "our hope is that within the next decade, the metaverse will reach a billion people, host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce, and support jobs for millions of creators and developers.". Expectations that have not aged well.
Nowadays, a lot of people feel fully sure about what the technological future will bring us. AI will disrupt the job market, there will be no more need for you name it and so on.
You will forgive me if I am a bit skeptical.
As I wrote at the beginning, predicting the future is difficult. I am no exception, of course. However, I firmly believe that there is far too much hype today about the impact of AI on our work and the job market. In my opinion, this hype is often propagated by organizations and people in one or more of these categories: with immense conflicts of interest for economic reasons; that only read headlines acritically; that do not really understand how AI works or the reality of the jobs that will supposedly be replaced by AI (of course, there may be people much smarter and more competent than me that have, in good faith, an opinion different from mine).
Furthermore, I firmly believe that the need for certain skills and competencies will remain. Probably AI will make some of these competencies even more important than they are today.
A few sentences copied from a very interesting and very well written report that I found this morning (and that pushed me to spend one hour writing this blog post):
Your AI assistant just received a WhatsApp message. It ran a shell command. Then it wrote new code and executed it. This is how OpenClaw works by design — and why 104 vulnerabilities appeared in 18 days.
OpenClaw (previously known as Clawdbot and Moltbot) is an autonomous local AI agent that can write code, run shell commands, access files, send messages, and control a browser. It has become the fastest-growing GitHub repository in history. When the pace of development overtakes security scrutiny, bad things start to happen.
On February 19th, 23 vulnerabilities were reported on OpenClaw in a single day, more than half of them rated High or Critical severity. This volume in such a short span of time is unlike anything we have seen in the history of software security.
- The vulnerability classes are as follows:
- CWE-78 (OS Command Injection): 14 issues
- CWE-22 (Path Traversal): 16 issues
- Injection (XSS/CSRF/Prompt): 17 issues
- Auth bypass or missing auth: 16 issues
None of these vulnerability classes are new. They have appeared in the OWASP Top 10 repeatedly. The fact that AI introduces them in bulk points to a deeper problem.
Dangerous by Default: What OpenClaw CVE Record Tells Us About Agentic AI
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