Authorship, Entrepreneurship, and AI

We had the privilege as a class to talk with Erik Hanberg, an accomplished author and entrepreneur who has been navigating around the rapid growth of AI in our workspaces. Erik shared his years of experiences telling us about the dangers and successes he's faced and what he predicts to come in the future. Today we'll be focused around my line of questions, why I asked those questions, and and how both of our journey's will change with the changes made through AI. A line that stuck with me is when Erik brought up how we (software engineers) shouldn't look forward to the job market especially for when we graduate. In my opinion he's right, this isn't just like when the internet came out. When the internet became big it forced many companies to shut down because it was no longer needed because of an easier way of completing whatever the company was responsible for online. Now with AI, the jobs aren't being created, it's being wiped out. There is a black hole in the software job market due to AI taking over the entree level jobs forcing hundreds of thousands of jobs to go obsolete because a "robot" can do their job. Erik brings up how even in the Authors realm there is a huge rift with AI as well in many categories. He brings up how there is an entire section dedicated towards AI writing and some people even bypass that to then flood the book spaces with AI written books that is ruining the other authors engagements. Even with audio books there is now a shortage of the need of voice actors since now you can create audio messages with AI that can take the voice of anyone famous and even with some information it can take your voice as well. After hearing all of this my questions started flying since I am in the field of technology, I had to understand what my future could hold. My first question had to do with Erik's career and what made him cater towards people online. Online spaces allow Erik to build that relationship and reach a more global audience that authors back then never had the opportunity to do. Frankly, it's much easier to sell online compared to in person. When you look at the evolution of books you can see that over time we went from ancient scripts to physical book copies to digital formats to now audio books with no visual words. Erik told us about the shift of how readers and their transformation on how they'll get their books. There is now AI books that can make a never ending story that the reader could feed more information into. You'll be able to read something that essentially you created but without the help of authors. These type of advancements can be very harmful and also redefine how readers engage with texts. When you look at AI and careers, Erik spoke against diving into the fields if your following the trend. That isn't bad advice to be honest. Many people are following this trend of becoming junior engineers due to the money but if you were able to instead dive more into the roles of things like AI and creativity like user experience design, ethical AI consulting, data structuring and/or much more. When you look at AI and authors I brought up the fact that it seems like AI is replacing authors. Erik was bit more optimistic on this question due to the creativity of authors compared to AI. He talked about how even though AI can write an infinite amount, it can never compare to the human mind and the creativity of our story telling. I believe we can tie that into any job, I believe that I can maintain the same mentality that Erik shared about how our brains and creativity can not be recreated or overthrown by AI.