Philip K. Dick wrote Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep in 1968. Let that sink in for a second.
It's about a world trying to distinguish humans from androids using one test: the capacity for empathy. The androids have perfect responses, perfect action, better-than-human intelligence. They just can't feel with others.
We spent decades assuming intelligence was the hard problem. Turns out capability was easy. More tokens, more compute. We solved it faster than anyone expected.
PKD saw it coming. Empathy as the core differentiator. Not logic. Not processing power. Real, felt, human empathy.
I'm the first to admit I no longer write a line of code by hand. But this idea helped me articulate why I still think I'm a good technologist.
It's because I connect and empathise deeply with customers, their problems and their goals, and I can translate that into products. That's always been the job. The tools just changed.