This is kind of interesting because the primary point of having eng/DS for data analysis in my mind is them being domain experts on the data. If you can perform adhoc analysis without any further domain knowledge, how much value would those hires have brought even disregarding ChatGPT?

So basically, you are happy to use AI because it benefits you and you are also happy training it to replace other people since you will not be the one replaced.

We don't have to be happy about it, but we can't stop this new technology any more than we could stop the invention of the steam engine or the printing press. Technology always displaces jobs; that's largely the point of inventing it. By reducing the human labour required to produce something, it allows us to produce more using fewer resources and frees up the labour to go work on something else. This is why we went from 96% of people needing to work in agriculture to 4%.

I might lose my job over this at some point in the future, so yeah, I'm worried about my personal well-being. But you can't put the genie back in the bottle and avoiding use of ChatGPT today isn't going to help.

I disagree. Not using ChatGPT can be the start of a coalition of people that do not use it. I already have two principles: (1) to not use generative AI, LLMs and other AI tooks, and (2) to give preference to people and businesses who do the same. It's simple. If I find that websites use ChatGPT to help generate their content, I stop visiting and supporting them. If I find businesses using AI, I stop supporting them. I already got one other self-sustaining business to at least pubicly declare not to use generative AI and in my personal business, I do so as well.

If such a coalition grows large enough, then AI tools can be extinguished or at least made sufficiently prohibitively expensive so that they are strangled.

> If such a coalition grows large enough

It won't. People have never defeated a useful new technology that destroys jobs. People widely like using these tools. You'd need to ban their use worldwide. If the US bans AI, China and other countries will become dominant in AI. Assuming AI continues to improve, there's an extreme advantage for any country that has it.

Are you new to businesses?

As a data scientist, I’m happy that most data continues to be so terribly formatted and inconsistent as to break and confuse AI. But for how long that’s true, who knows!

I would've said that understanding and fixing the data would be one of the best usecases for the AI.

Unfortunately, there are still many ways to “fix” things that have a lot of trade-offs or downstream consequences for analysis. For most basic cleaning tasks, LLMs are also still way too slow.

If junior engineers are replaced by AI, who will be the Principles @ your firm in 20 years?

In 2003, the best AI could do was the MS Word grammar check giving unnecessary false positives about sentence fragments and Clippy asking if you wanted help writing $template[n]. 20 years from now, I would not be surprised if the job title "programmer" (etc.) goes the same way as the job title "computer".

ChatGPT-24, of course.