What steps have you taken to help ensure your place in your line of work is secure?

• Workplace-wise, there is a QA R&D department constantly looking for new ideas & gaining insights into them, what might be useful, what might work for the company etc.
• Individual-wise, it’s extremely important IMO to keep up to speed in general. Nowadays there are always new libraries, tools, programming languages or existing language updates & patterns coming out. Keeping on track with news, vendor sites, forums, newsletters, Email subscriptions & the like can really help. It’s not enough anymore (again IMO & I’ve been burnt by this personally) just to keep up to date with a current company’s tech stack but to build knowledge & experience on a wide range in the industry (try multiple tools, write in many programming languages etc.) 

Are the fears of artificial replacement overblown?

Hugely! I personally hate the term AI as there’s little to no intelligence. It’s ML machine learning. Sure, more impressive than a ton of IF statement choices nowadays but still each implementation is highly structured for a limited use case: shape recognition, text scanning etc. there are no wide implementations mimicking a brain or capable of performing all the tasks of a human in most fields. Look at the continual failure of self-driving cars - we are a hundred years away from such “AI” capability. 

Is there anything you think we should prepare for? 

For future proofing, absolutely - continually explore, trial & keep up to date. This goes the same for all IT fields. 

That’s an interesting take, because I hadn’t really considered how often people conflate the two. I heard someone suggest recently that the new AI explosion we’ve seen in the last couple years might just be a sigmoid curve, where we won’t necessarily see exponential growth, but rather sit here at this level of technology for awhile before another big jump.