~~ From Symbian Phones to AI to Why I am Not Worried About Becoming Obsolete ~~
[Photo: Me looking ridiculously young in Le Mans, France, 2006, probably holding a Nokia phone!]While browsing my old folders, I came across some photographs… technology is amazing right? I saw my pictures from my first international trip – a couple of months in France. It was in 2006 and I was just around one-year into my professional career (2005 engineering). And there I was, this young developer coding WAP and MMS modules for a mobile phone's core OS.
WAP is nothing but the current browser you see, it was rudimentary that time… and then sending multimedia messages through MMS (remember?).. that is what I was working on. I used to think that I am working on "cutting-edge" mobile technology!
Symbian was the hot cake back then, used to get multiple calls from different companies to interview with them as a Symbian developer. Android and iPhone (smartphones) were a thing of the future.. no one knew….
Remember those Nokia phones with keypads? I remember sitting at a café in Le Mans (France), confidently telling colleagues: "Keypads will NEVER disappear from phones. That's ridiculous! Lets look at laptops – do you think keypads will disappear and we can code without keyboards?" I used to literally laugh out loud when anyone suggested phones without keypads. "Type on a screen? That's the most impractical thing I've ever heard!" What a joke, right? 🙂 Though laptops still have keyboards (for now), our phones don't anymore. Android's 2008 launch and the smartphone boom instantly made my hotcake Symbian skill obsolete.
I see AI in similar grounds… That time, I went to France to work on cutting edge technology, my friends/colleagues went to the US to do the similar work… but in a few years things changed…
Now I'm hearing the same certainty about AI replacing engineers. My father asked me last week, "Won't these AI tools make your job obsolete?" It's everywhere – LinkedIn posts, tech conferences, worried conversations.
But here's what they're missing (I think), humans aren't just data processors. We're gloriously illogical, emotional, and intuitive beings. While AI gets increasingly logical and data-driven, we humans reserve the right to be illogical, to follow gut feelings, to understand other humans in ways algorithms simply can't. We make decisions based on anecdotes, instincts, and emotional intelligence.
That's our edge! Not just knowing how to use tools, but understanding the messy, complicated humans we are building for. In the core, engineers are "problem solvers with various tools".. AI is just a tool…
Looking at these France photos reminds me that technology changes dramatically, but the fundamentally human elements of "problem-solving" remain constant. The master will always be needed to guide the tools.
Who else has embarrassing tech predictions from their past? Share your "this will never catch on" moments below! 😊
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