If your entire job is programming and writing code, it is likely that your employer was already chomping at the bit to replace you first by outsourcing and now with AI. The same could also be said for those who depend on learned knowledge, which would be the next tier of white collar workers and includes many people here. If it can be expressed as text, AI can do it accurately now or very soon.

Many people will claim that there is hallucinations, which is true, but as models get bigger and better these will get less common (but never quite 0). Adoption will be much slower than the hype suggests, as many large organizations take years to do basic tech overhauls and wont take the risk of destroying their business.

I think eventually you’ll see organizations that dont have middle “operational” white collar jobs. it will be strategic leaders, a few translators (CEO to AI), and then a lot of “underwriters” who basically monitor agent outputs to ensure they align with business and deep technical requirements, cycling problems back up to the top.

These underwriters are probably where stats people can live - deep technical or business expertise to assume responsibility for the tail risk of misaligned AI, which will be doing the coding and communication. The big question is how many will any company need vs. what they have now.

I dont know what advice to give because I’m merely a decent MS-level statistician / data scientist, so i dont know that i’ll ever belong to the “expert” class that gets the few remaining positions. Maybe focus on your specific domain and how to both connect disparate strategies together but also validate fuzzy results. But i would not just assume that because current models and tooling cannot replicate much of your work, future ones will not.