Posted by RickJWagner 1 day ago
When you have nothing to worry about, and you can create anything you want, at any expense, of course it's great.
For everyone else, we're dealing with teams who ship slop, company cultures that devalue workers right in front of their faces, and force them to worry about layoffs at any turn.
My read on some of the current melancholy is that the millenial generation is starting to hit their mid-life crisis. Seeing the inherent meaninglessness and inanity of much of corporate work is part and parcel of that. AI makes the contrast more stark, but not new.
Or to come at it another way: the system we live in - capitalism - is defined by the process of 'creative destruction' (coined by the economist Schumpeter). We are always iterating on technology, making it better, finding new optimizations. When these are found, very often one class of people is put out of work while another class of people gains employment.
Whether this process is desirable, moral, ethical, etc. is not answered by the observation, simply that this is how the system works.
I think what's contributing to the sense of dread is that so far at least, it's not at all clear that AI will be similar to past iterations of such "creative destruction". I hope to be wrong but I fear the jobs it does end up creating, if any, will be far lower paid and soul-sucking, and it will likely destroy many more jobs than it creates.
Imagine you are a master craftsman, a furniture builder. You sourced the wood, designed the furniture, built it by hand, took pride in your work. You adjusted your design or how you used wood based on a knot present in the lumber you got, made custom jigs to improve your efficiency or accuracy. You built skills, you were mastering a craft.
Now, suddenly, you manage a factory of outsourced workers who mass produce cheap particle board furniture. At the end of the day both the hand made dresser and the particle board one store your underwear, one is significantly cheaper (even if it falls apart on you after a few years.) so the cheaper one wins and that is what everyone starts producing. Good enough often wins, especially when cost is involved.
Some of these crafts people may have never got to the point of being masters yet either, they were working their way towards it, but now it looks like those skills may not be valued by the market, did they waste their most valuable years working towards a goal that no longer exists? A lot of these people in this situation are also millennials that are currently or nearing mid-life, hard to pivot to a new career at this point. That is not a good feeling. Perhaps a new kind of mid-life crisis.
A lot of the people I know that are excited about AI weren't craftspeople in the same sense, the process of designing and writing code was just a means to an end, they just wanted something to store their socks at the end of the assembly line regardless of how it was made, the cheaper the better.
The worse part is not only is it a craft, its a living and so even when the times are rough you still have responsibilities, housing, family, healthcare so you are forced to use AI even when you know you are feeding the very machine that will grow big enough to eat you.
Some craftspeople will say that the AI makes them better at their craft. They can understand and learn things they never could have done before. I think this is the ideal scenario and believed this at first as well but four problems emerged for me:
1. I kept getting lazier and lazier, letting the LLM do more and more until I wasn't learning I was just trying to get to the end goal.
2. The majority of my team pressed the easy-button slot machine and wholesale let the AI do everything, its practically impossible to keep up with the massive PRs and unbelievable code churn in a team like this especially with every level of management (who are not code crafts people) want that outcome.
3. I forgot how to do simple things, syntax, standard library functions, useful libraries. I started forgetting it, I kept finding myself reaching to ask the LLM how to do this or that, things I knew how to do by muscle memory only months prior.
4. You are giving immense amounts of training data to the LLM companies. Its already been proven they give 0 fucks about copyright in any sense, your code, your ideas, your products go right back into the LLM code blender in some shape or form.
Anyone reading this far that is the same kind of crafts person that I'm describing I will tell you what I'm doing about it. I'm going to starve the machine. I've cancelled all my LLM subscriptions, I've deleted the apps. I'm going back to hand coding. I don't care about the consequences. I will find a way to provide for myself and my family. I might get "left behind" but so be it, I'll do it on my own terms. I will no longer lose the sense of who I am for companies and people that don't care about me, or even humanity in the first place. Guess who's with us? Artists and Authors other creatives hate this shit too, software is a mix of creativity and engineering so its not as black-and-white as other fields but you get to choose what it is for yourself.
Good luck out there.
Every day at my job I search for a chance to write some fragment of code by hand, a place where just for a moment I remember the joyous struggle to be a craftsman.
I have the sense that you're right - musicians, writers, illustrators, actors, animators - they largely seem to hate the way the genAI companies vacuumed up everything that was meant for other people to feed the soulless dreck-vomiters.
I wish I knew the way to unite the programmers who were and are craftsmen with the artists who desire well-crafted tools that respect their artistic autonomy and creative freedom.
There could be some good cooperation there, if someone could solve the coordination problem.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts - I empathize strongly and appreciate what you had to say.
I hope your quest goes well.
> Some of these crafts people may have never got to the point of being masters yet either, they were working their way towards it, but now it looks like those skills may not be valued by the market, did they waste their most valuable years working towards a goal that no longer exists?
This is the tradeoff that hurts me the most. I spent a significant chunk of my 20’s learning new paradigms, languages, and frameworks. I thought I knew the tradeoff I was making. I thought any sacrifice now would pay off in the future. Instead, it seems like any learning outside of the first few years of my career was completely useless.
I would love to go out on my own terms like you suggest, but unfortunately I have at least 25 more years in this profession before I can retire. If the profession survives that long.
Now AI does it instead, with outsourcers out of work.
With the productivity growth since late 19th century, vast majority of employees only exist by tradition, for political and social purposes. It's not "work", it's "service" (not as in "held in service or labor" but as in "public service"). They exist to make organisations they work for, look big and respectable. They exist to make their boss feel like a real boss. They are cheap - famously real compensations have been stagnant since early 1970s while productivity skyrocketed - so keeping them as essentially, pets, wasn't too expensive for business and keeps getting cheaper. They do bullshit work (Cory Doctorow).
This is why i am not at all worried for those workplaces. There is no AI can replace what was useless from the beginning.
Oh well, one thing will change. RTO will be mandatory nearly everywhere.
And it's not like hitting just one sector has ever been gentle: machines entering manufacturing caused an 80 years slump in British occupation rates and salaries.
Machines entering agricultural fields by the end of 1800s caused a similar slump in work conditions in Europe that really ended by the 1960s/1970s (depending on the country).
Automation + AI will keep taking more blue collar jobs at speed while also taking more and more knowledge workers out of jobs.
Seriously, at no point in history we've seen a single technology threatening so many sectors at the same time.
And people telling you "but the workers always recovered" keep ignoring that those recoveries sound good when they were not the ones impacted, and that these recoveries can take a lifetime.
I really enjoyed reading this article. Thank you for sharing.