My personal belief is that the most effective leaders do in fact deeply understand the technical side of their business, yes. To be fair, I am biased, because I was previously a nuclear reactor operator on a USN fast attack submarine, and the Commanding Officer is absolutely expected to fully understand technical issues. I think that a lot of organizational and technical problems would be solved if companies took several notes from the Nuclear Navy’s playbook. FWIW, Google’s SRE program was heavily influenced by it.

I of course don’t have a crystal ball, and can’t say with certainty that AI will never replace human intelligence and judgment. However, I don’t see a viable path forward where that occurs, and we all still have jobs. Why would I be kept around if a superhuman AI can do my job 1000x better and faster, and at a drastically cheaper price? Or, if I was kept around as a human QA agent, why would I be paid nearly what I am now?

I don’t see humans allowing AI to replace them. UBI is a pipe dream that would be destroyed by rent-seeking behavior anyway, and there’s no way billionaires would go for an AI tax, so we’ll be at an impasse.