All Hands on Tech

7The Skills and Personality of Citizens

This chapter is intended for people who want to be citizens, as well as those within organizations who are responsible for identifying or creating more of them. It’s especially for you if you’ve read this far and you’re asking whether you have what it takes to be a citizen developer, automator, or data scientist. The short answer is probably “yes,” because you clearly have an interest in the subject and the motivation to pursue it. Let’s first take a look at the likely future of work and what will be required to be a successful worker in that future.

Workers of the Future, in the Future of Work

The fear that AI is coming for our jobs is a common theme, even if workers have so-called future-proof digital skills. We are relatively optimistic that most humans will not lose their jobs but rather that they will increasingly work alongside AI instead of being replaced by it.¹ That belief is captured in a phrase we’ve begun to hear quite often—some variation of “AI won’t take your job, but someone working with AI will.” We’re not sure how often that will happen, but in citizen development and other job domains, we do believe that AI and related tools will make workers more productive and effective. We didn’t find any examples in our research of substantial layoffs resulting from automation, AI, or any other tools we explored.

However, at a minimum there will be job change from AI. In the book The Work of the Future, which arose out of a broad ...