The 1800s paradox that predicts exactly what AI will do to your job

Everyone's convinced AI is coming for engineering jobs. Tom Goerke, National President of Engineers Australia, thinks that fear is almost exactly backwards, and he's got 19th-century coal miners to prove it.

In this episode, Tom unpacks Jevons' paradox: the counterintuitive economic pattern where making something more efficient doesn't reduce demand for it, it explodes it. He walks through what that means for software engineers right now (spoiler: more code is being written than ever, and more bugs with it), why "coders are the typists of the '70s," and why the real crisis isn't job losses, it's a widening skills gap between engineers who've mastered AI and everyone else. We also cover the one stat that stopped us in our tracks: 66% of engineers have had zero formal AI training from their employer.