Feeling Sad about AI(artificialworlds.net) |
Feeling Sad about AI(artificialworlds.net) |
First, the “OMG I’ve always been a builder, I’m having so much fun”. Yeah, building hobby projects. They’re called a hobby for a reason, they are not means to sustain yourself or your loved ones, particularly when the guy next to you can spin up an AI agent and ask “build me this”.
Then the “coding was never the hard part/where I spent most of my time, engineering is still hard”. Yeah, maybe it still is, but for how long? 2 years? 3?
Both strike me as naive and myopic, but I really wish I’m the one who’s wrong.
The internet did change their industry and the world. Many of them did lose their jobs. That is what technology does. Efficiencies mean someone somewhere is no longer needed. That was hard for me to accept for a long time, but if you have programmed professionally long enough you have almost definitely indirectly contributed to some job loss. (And new jobs as well! But… to the people who do lose their jobs, there is little comfort in that)
I think what is worth keeping in mind though is 1) wishing something away wont make it so, so it is best to do your best to avoid putting your head in the sand, and 2) while many many people will be completely uprooted (sometimes in miserable ways) that is not at all a statement about them. The journalists of before were and are still incredible people, the brick layers too. Us doing work that wasn’t automatable before did not make us better than them, or even more creative than them.
My spouse and I were recently at a pizza place that had one of those arcade tables with Mrs Pacman, Donkey Kong etc. As we were sitting there eating I started getting pretty animated talking about what amazing technical achievements these games were, and how clever and resourceful it required the developers/artists to be due to the constraints they were working with. That cleverness is what first drew me, as a young smart-ass, to being creative and building things with computers and hardware. Transcending limitations.
But now you don't need to be clever. And that's what fucking sucks. Yes, I can 100x or whatever my output. Who cares?
Well, the people with the money care. The delusional accelerationist types with god complexes. The types that will sell out their fellow worker to VC because they believe themselves to be somehow above it or if I don't do it someone else will etc. Fuck all of those people. I mean, they've always been here, or even necessary. But there used to be at least some sort of balance between labor/creativity and... them. That balance is now gone.
The thing is- yes you still can be clever with these tools. But the motivations aren't the same. You can get something perfectly acceptable without it. The imperative is no longer there. And maybe this is me realizing how lazy I am (aren't all good programmers?) But another word for "imperative" in this context is "purpose". And well, I guess I'm just glad to be old enough now that I'm closer to the end of my career than the beginning, and I can sort of see the exit sign from here, and I'm learning to be clever in other domains that haven't been drained by LLMs yet.
So yeah. Feels bad man.
However i can't imagine if during my WoW days, overnight my role was suddenly just replaced with someone doing my role and 4 other roles highly automated, with just a general knowledge instead of an absurd depth into one role, and all my peers thought i was being lazy for not wanting to automate as well.
1. It is clear that many people, including the person in the video, has strong identities tied to a certain skill that they have spent years honing and perfecting. The sudden loss of agency and democratization can be confusing, disorienting and frankly demotivating. We need to acknowledge that.
2. Unfortunately, this has played out several hundreds of times over the years in the world. I'll take an extreme example to illustrate the point. Movie stars. There was well trodden path of getting to stardom and adulation, and everthing that comes with it. You move to LA, you work on your acting skills, you take your body aesthetics seiously and with plenty of luck, you might get cast in small roles before you work your way upto stardom. And the riches that come with it, cars, fans, brand deals .. great. And then came internet and YouTube where a guy in basement can garner millions of views, brand deals, fans in millions with little to no effort.
This is the same pattern with an accomplished musician (think a drummer) and someone who uses a drum machine software to drag and drop the "amen loop".
Exact same pattern with broadcasters and internet-journalists.
Yes it is demotivating, yes it is confusing but such is progress. Adapt or die. Its ruthless.
That’s because software engineering is not about the amount of code you write: it’s about problem solving.
So then logically, either: - there are problems still to solve and you can work to solve them (maybe with AI) - there are no problems. So let’s head to the beach, as there are no problems.
For the record, I still do all my coding without using any LLM.
Nothing is set in stone other than the fact the way software engineerind is done.
That is the fallacy - you think this is some amazing thing when it isn't. You're experiencing AI psychosis.
- I was flagged in 2018 when I said DEI is industry propaganda to divide and conquer. This is now accepted.
- I was flagged when they told coal miners to "learn how to code" because that was industry propaganda.
- I was flagged when I said bitcoin is for money laundering.
So the people with flagging power never cared, yes. The users are also at fault: There are many mainstream articles about tracking and personal data abuse, and they don't care. Even mathematicians needed to be hit on the nose to find out that research theft via prompts is real.
Neither true, nor accepted.
> It was a shock to me that bosses were so keen to ditch people like me and replace us with an imitation. How naive I was, and how self-centred.
The labour movement arrives, belatedly, in the tech industry
I don't know if this makes sense as a society. Say whatever about what it means ethically, legally, etc., but I'm not sure this kind of thing is sustainable in the long run for a functioning society.
What happens when the race is won and then there's no need to compete anymore? What happens when top expertise is monopolised?
It's just, yes, like all of us .. the temptation is there to not do that.
So enjoy the manual coding while you can. I don't hold out hope that it will be possible in the long run.
On the bright side, you are clearly smart, literate, capable, thoughtful, high-functioning, analytical, caring and alive! You've got a lot to work with!
Adaptation is almost always driven by discomfort. It is sad to see the things and the life we love going away.
Keep your chin up, be good to yourself and the people around you, stay flexible, and just keep landing on your feet... over and over... and don't stop.
25 years ago I woke up from the sound of the first plane hitting. I watched people jump to their deaths. I watched, heard, felt, smelled the towers fall. I lost very good friends. One was an SWE working in tower 1. It sucked. It made me realize that each day is a gift. Even the days that don't go your way.
One foot in front of the other. Just keep working to bring your light to the world and you will be fine.
Case in point, last night, I saw a flyer with the US flag. It contained at least 55 stars, and the bottom row was cut off at the bottom.
Nobody even reviews this stuff anymore, and don't even for one second tell me people will get better at it - they won't. You're living in an absolute bubble if you think AI is a net benefit for society.
Our AI team at my org doesn't even know how to write half decent prompts. They just show us how to make Corgi pictures in every meeting. When you actually challenge them to use LLMs in real ways, they crap their pants or tell you that you're out of scope.
Executives are the same way, they push AI on everyone but have no clue how to actually use it in a practical setting (because there probably isn't a way)
Just a few days ago I checked out https://colonist.io due to it having some open positions (saw here on hn "who's hiring"), it's all AI driven, but it looks and feels awful. Perhaps that's the original catan playing experience but I for sure wouldn't want future software to be like this. Even when using AI, even looking at that, I know it's possible to do much better with AI, it's just that it won't by itself so I don't think there will be a lack of opportunities for those that are into building stuff.
It's actually amazing that an AI can guide me through a mountain of incongruent, difficult to use and understand without years of study, nerd interfaces and programming decisions others have made and allow me to try out a complete new OS (for instance microOS) and write a WebGL tile drawing engine. At the same time, it still stumbles with simple stuff, while at the same time being able to generate a JS + wasm tile game skeleton. But when you look at the skeleton it's actually not that amazing and you can see the training/stolen code leaking everywhere, things you didn't ask are there too, choices are made for things that weren't present in the specs/prompts when they weren't needed either... The upside is that it cost me $0.02. But to be decent I need to spec it properly. I need to know how and why it sucks, and how and why to make it not suck, even if when writing out a spec.
I don't have a horse in this race, I know this architecture can't lead to AGI, it could theoretically solve programming (in absolute), but it doesn't seem so either due to the nature of LLMs. What will happen is that it will be "SAP/salesforce" software for everyone. To be honest, it mostly sucks already and that's not fault of the AI models. What I guess you won't be able to do is charge enough to pay your house on a business model of switching CSS colors, or doing wordpress updates, and pretending you're some sort of wizard and that pounding sand activity is worth what you were being paid.
I think that those who want to build things will have way more leverage and reach than ever. Maybe not in a corporate environment - as the same **** that would tangle basic stuff into 2 weeks of work, instead of a single afternoon may actually be more savvy politically to keep their positions - but everywhere else it feels like it will be so.
And even in other aspects. I paid a bit more than $3k to different artists as freelancers for getting in total less than 100 images for my game ($30-$45/img), of which, prior to finding an artist that was actually willing to listen and do what I asked, was about 70% not worth even the small amount I was paying. With that artist the rate of satisfaction went up, but still not always as I had envisioned. Some of the first artists I worked with were just plain stupid to work with even though I was paying them ok (taking into account their countries). With AI, even though it's mostly built out of stolen work, with a yearly sub to any of those image gen platforms, I did in 2 months more than 2k images of which maybe 1k was usable and I was way happier with them... for about $24. I left thousands of images in credits unused for about $120/year.
There's just so many things that don't require an artist but instead adherence to a spec under a known guard-railed path. This does suck for the artist himself, it does suck for me too since my hourly rates got butchered too, but as a creator, this is all amazing - as long as we get local, free models. For the artists and programmers that were just milking it - well, you kinda prompted this, no pun intended.
2. Indeed, the invention of the Cotton gin was credited for prolonging the economics of US Slavery for another century. Those folks were probably upset for a good reason.
It is a self correcting problem, as anything that could be scraped has already been stolen. Only the chat user data remains, and LLM are causing a 17% decline in core skills.
Note too, there is a trivial counter-proof to recursive self-improvement theories that any child with calculus II can solve. No I won't warn them this time, as we are waiting to strip the data-centers for discount infrastructure.
The market correction correlation with Shrek movie releases is undeniable, and June 2027 is closer than you think. =3
I think about this a lot when I look at the roads, freeways and railroads of the world. In pursuit for building it, billions of trees have been cut down, land fundamentally shifted, rivers cut through, and wildlife uprooted.
Yet, roads, freeways and railroads allow for growth. Someone facing medical emergency can reach a hospital on road because it exists. I get to eat fruits in winter because it is imported and transported to me from warmer places and/or storage units.
Human progress and prosperity comes at a cost. Nothing in the world is free (perhaps maybe sunshine?) and the life that you're yearning pre-AI is also extremely tainted. Infact, you'll be hard pressed to find an era when human meddling hasnt had bad impact on the world (right from farming and domesticating animals).
I suspect in the long run a similar lack of "success" getting rid of Apache.
There are probably other things that are here to stay.
Yeah... don't do that. Don't make your job or career the center of your identity. You have to form and then internalize the belief that you are valuable not because you can offer value to others in a material sense, but rather in an intrinsic sense. You have experiences that nobody else has. You have meaning to others in your life, whether deep or not. Your thoughts and perspectives are unique to you. That is your real value.
Yes I’m sure you’re empty stomach will be greatly comforted by your “intrinsic sense of value”.
> Your thoughts and perspectives are unique to you. That is your real value.
Every snowflake is unique. It doesn’t make them valuable. It doesn’t stop me from blasting them with a snow blower when they’re deemed inconvenient and in the way.
“We”? I didn’t work on any of those things, in fact many of us didn’t. Those of us living outside the bay area making under $200k/yr (likely the majority of HN, definitely the vast majority of the industry) have no responsibility to shoulder the blame for the people who got rich doing that stuff.
Eh maybe you did, I and a bunch of people that I know have worked in companies that build software that genuinely helps people and improves their lives - either by simplifying something that sucked for them or by just improving inefficient industries and giving people new abilities.
I don’t feel that way about anything I’ve worked on in my 20 years of building software
What Do You Care What Other People Think?
—Feynman
What remains to be done is to accept that change has come, and take part in shaping the future.
As for programming I am getting more done than ever before; I just outsource the implementation. Honestly I feel like I'm flying. I understand the poster felt that the implementation was the part he enjoyed. Experts are still needed to use AI for coding well; a PM isn't going to get the same mileage as he is, so take comfort in that.
But here’s the deal:
1. The world does not give two fucks about our need to feel a certain way. 2. AI is not going anywhere.
The world ultimately cares about the value you provide. I think it’s deeply egotistical to believe that when someone hires you, part of the arrangement is that they’re supposed to preserve your sense of superiority because you possess some skill other people don’t.
For a long time, intelligence and specialized knowledge created scarcity. Increasingly, they don’t. Raw intellectual capability is becoming a commodity, and a lot of the gatekeeping built around it is disappearing.
What matters more now is taste. Judgment. Knowing what is worth building. Having the will to push something valuable into the world. Knowing when something is good, when it isn’t, and what needs to happen next.
I’ve worked with too many people over the years who made terrible decisions for no reason other than that the alternative bruised their ego or threatened their livelihood. Ironically, these were often the same people who prided themselves on being rational and objective. In reality, they were anything but.
That’s one of the things I find so compelling about AI. It strips away a lot of the mythology around being the smartest person in the room and highlights what I’ve always believed matters most:
Did you create value?
Not your identity. Not your status. Not your need to feel special.
The value you actually put into the world.
once the orchestration ramps up, people will be replaced, or at least better allocated just like any breakthrough, ie vintage rooms full of people clacking on typewriters, but only for low hanging fruit things at first, it could go the opposite way for critical things like planes vs marketing websites
since they are pushing a lot of fear mongering about AI in the media, people in powerful places could cause a lot of damage and use AI as an excuse that people will believe, just like a new virtual "ISIS" and other than the damage they will def use it as a justification for new laws and invasive controls, possibly to eliminate the anonymous web, and definitely to control the spread of information, that to me is the biggest threat of "AI" currently (and it's not even AI at all)
Class consciousness y’all. You’re smart enough to Marx and Piketty so do it.
boot tasting connoisseur is always safe from any automation.
I'm sitting here with DeepSeek 4.1 Flash, paying pennies to hammer out on projects that I have wanted to do for years but no employer would pay me to do. And should those pennies become difficult to spend or the API taken away from me, I have a DGX Spark on my desk I can run local models on to get the same thing done, just slower.
It's somewhat the opposite of the concentration of the ownership of the means of production that the old bearded man spoke of. (And I do like my Marx, honestly).
That said, yes, this does have the effect of potentially devaluing the work generally and droppings its compensation rates. Though I'm not sure we've hit that yet. So far places I've been working just pay me the same to get more done.
Capitalism doesn't care what you feel. LLMs are just a distillation of the entire human written corpus, there is a lot of "caring" in there. Companies are simply spinning out threads of behavior from the corpus that serve them instead of serving all of us.
The fundamental fear is that we, humans, are just a series of atoms. Our experience is not unique, and we don't have a specific purpose. It's nihilism.
I would explain further, but none of you are worth the effort, if you were you would be committing domestic terrorism. Not touching urself to hug box opiate blog posta from half humans.
I will say however, I quickly cured all my fears, by accepting God and the truth of the Holg Spirit and the soul that is beyond empirical judgement or reasoning.
> I'm waiting for my money to run out before I end it
Please don't do that.
Someone emailed us a link to your comment and was concerned that you were in this level of distress. I didn't have another way of getting in touch with you, so I thought I'd post here and say that there are strangers on HN who care. Perhaps they (or we, rather - I'll include myself too) can't do much beyond that, but I hope it makes at least a small difference.
Unfortunately I am not sure the 'tech' industry will have a lot of use for me, pretty soon.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/harrys-cdnx-prod/manual/Harry%27s+M...
I pray it helps you.
We're much more than any economic system. The sun still shines. There's a lot out in the world to see.
Even in the worst case scenario, that we're all jobless. There are mountains to explore. Beaches to walk. Forests to camp in.
I don't know where this all is headed. But, I do know each human has value. Your value is far greater than any job, skill, or the number of green pieces of paper you have.
Feel free to reach out to me directly.
We are each here for a reason and we all touch many lives. We may not ever know, while we're on this earth, many of the important roles we play, just by being ourselves.
I'm not actively suicidal or anything (and I know all the signs of risk, and what to do about it), but there's an underlying feeling that life just hurts and has no meaning. Currently the thing that helps me stick around is the idea of "doing it for the plot". Life ends in short order either way, so I figure I'll just stick around and keep it interesting.
Your brain can come up with completely random, untrue conclusions and make them feel 100% true. It can convince you, beyond any doubt, that something terrible is going to happen in the future. When in reality it’s just fear making predictions that never come true.
So hang in there. Use your logical brain. Ask yourself: What actual evidence do I have that what I’m thinking is true? Separate what you know from what you fear.
Then keep moving forward. Push through the fear. Let time pass. Give reality a chance to prove your predictions wrong.
Because often the thing that feels absolutely certain is nothing more than your brain telling you a completely and utterly random story. And you don’t have to believe it.
Some history... Westinghouse Electric sold turbines to power stations in the 1950s, and promoted electronic home appliances to drive energy consumption to close the sales loop. While the scheme was not a direct business success, for society it improved just about every Americans living standards.
The problem is LLM cost resources, broke that loop, and only bids down the quality of life people can afford. You pay more, have less, and reduce taxable labor incomes into demand deficient classes.
This will not end well for people even if LLM are recognized as mostly hype. =3
This will not end well for people even if LLM are recognized as mostly hype. =3
Depends on how you view efficient market hypothesis. Computers and Memory was prohibitively expensive. "Putting a computer in every one's desk" was literal rallying cry for Microsoft because it appeared audacious, just like saying "Unlimited LLM usage for every man, woman and child" or some such.
Will it happen? Nope, but if the technology is useful the markets it'll spur competition and prices will come down. Heck, we dig plant juice out of the earth from deep sea oil rigs so that I can fill up my car to go walmart to buy soda. Pretty preposterous when you think about the closed loop.
Regulatory-captured markets have nothing to do with free competition, or bidding down price pressures. You do have monopolistic competitive firms drawing $4Tn in loans to artificially hyper-scale demands for NVIDIA hardware that earns you -$2.50 for every $1 in revenue.
Your home heating bill may double this winter because the economic engine is currently post-consumer/broken. We shall see how this plays out. =3
They showed me a video about depression. And it was actually exceptionally good advice. It spoke about speaking to a therapist. There was a small bit about prayer, which was obviously not my bag. But I was pleasantly surprised at how grounded the advice was.
The initial reaction, when some coding agent does a piece of work that would have taken you a week in an hour and does it well, is to be very disheartened by it.
Once you come to terms with the idea that translating an exact specification into decent code isn't a unique skill any more, you can start looking at the larger set of problems that you face as a software engineer and realize that there is so much left, and your existing skill and experience mean you can master these new tools, provide value, and execute at a level far greater than anyone who is just getting started building software using agents without any of your depth.
If you don't want your profession to change at all then you're going to have a tough time with this - but that's surely been true for the history of software engineering? Has there ever been any stability to the tools and language we use beyond about a five year time horizon?
These changes are happening a bit faster, but if you chose software development as a passion you've opted into pretty frequent radical change from the start.
I think it depends on the person. I've been waiting for AI since I first saw Wargames as a child. As soon as I saw that agents could code at or beyond my level, it felt like the entire world was unlocked. Now I can explore so many ideas that I was bottle-necked on with my own time to write the code before.
I would consider myself a technologist and it's a very exciting time to explore what technology can do. I loved writing code, but mostly because creating something that tapped the power of tech was my goal. Now I can achieve that goal 100x and it feels like a superpower.
However, I always loved making software. LLMs are a godsend. I just wish I could run it on my own
I say "it feels like flying."
People worry that I'm too enthusiastic about AI. My obvious answer is - wouldn't you love to fly too?
I love programming, and have loved it ever since I read the first page of my BASIC programming book 35 years ago and learned how to write a PRINT statement. I remember running into my parent's room as an 8 year old, telling them I knew how to make the computer print something. It was so exciting.
I have never lost that excitement, but my love is not just about programming. It is about technology in general. I love the idea of having smart machines, and being able to use them to do stuff, and the power you can have when you automate something. I love being able to come up with an idea about how a machine can do what I want, and then how that means it can do it over and over without tiring.
I loved technology in science fiction. My family watched Star Trek: The Next Generation from the first episode until the last. I loved Data, I loved the ships computer, I loved the holodeck. I dreamed about having those. I was so excited when I spent way too much money to buy the very first Oculus Rift dev kit, because it felt so much closer to the holodeck than anything I had experienced before.
I have felt that way about AI. I was astonished by the first ChatGPT I used. It was amazing! The first programming AI I tried was github's copilot, and I was already astonished. It was able to complete the function I needed! How did it know what I wanted to do?
I continue to be amazed at every advancement. I remember the first time I tried Claude, and I had it write me a connect 4 engine in Rust (writing connect 4 engines is one of my standard 'new language' routines), and it did it!
I have felt closer to living in Star Trek these last couple of years than ever before. Telling the computer what you want, seeing the response, and refining what you are asking for is how I dreamed of using a computer since I saw them do that on the Enterprise. And here I am, doing it!
I like computers and programming because I like technology, and I like seeing it advance into areas that seemed impossible before. I love the fact that the 'Tasks' XKCD that I loved to quote for so many years when non-programmers would talk about a programming idea (https://xkcd.com/1425/) has become completely obsolete; now anyone could spin up a bird identifying app in a few hours. What was 'virtually impossible' is now routine.
THAT is the thing I love, not writing code. I mean, I DO love writing code, but I love getting my machines to do what I want even more.
I can't wait until robotics become more mainstream. I can't wait to have a machine that can clean my bathrooms and do my laundry and cooke me dinner. I can already imagine the routines I will develop, and the new ways of combining those skills I will come up with when these things are invented. Or hell, maybe I will join one of the companies working on those things and move that field forward.
There is no end to what technology can do, and I am so excited to see what is next.
For those who have swallowed the AI panacea hook line and sinker. Those that say it's made me more productive or that I no longer have to do the boring bits and can focus on the interesting parts of coding. I say follow your own line of reasoning through. It demonstrates that AI is not yet powerful enough to NOT need to empower you, to NOT need to make you more productive. You're only ALLOWED to do the 'interesting' parts presently because the AI is deficient. Ultimately AI aims to remove the need for any human intermediary altogether (or for humans to provide intent only). Everything in between is just a stop along the way and so for those it empowers stop and think a little about the long term implications. It may be that for you right now, it is a comfortable position financially or socially but the future you in just a few short months from now may be dramatically impacted.
As someone said "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes".
What did we say to people that wanted to be in data entry, bookkeeping, search, write CSS all day, write assemblies all day, etc etc? As an industry we have been trying to remove as much work as possible via automation. We got what we asked for.
I have to be honest and say it's not very useful for me to hear you say this because you make your living from AI consulting and in a previous thread [1] you said that you don't review the code and then that you do. I'm not saying you have psychosis but your take on AI is inconsistent and confusing to me.
That particular reference isn't fair though. You need to view that comment in context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49176830#49178944
The issue of "do you review every line of code or not" is the single most complex in all of the conversations about the practice of applying coding agents. If my messaging on that is inconsistent it's because of that complexity, and because my understanding of that issue is evolving over time.
Just today, Boris Cherny (Claude Code creator) tweeted that "Production code written by Claude should have a higher bar than if it was written by a human": https://twitter.com/bcherny/status/2098217573276131577
I'm entirely in agreement with that. The interesting challenge is how we achieve that new high bar.
The dread is: where does this stop? Right now, with ai I can fly. But when does ai no longer need me? Just as an extreme example: a this pace, how far are we from “AI agent, here’s our assets, make money”? If every year 50% of the job disappears, how long until there is no human-ai team, just ai.
Idk, this conversation is endlessly frustrating, because people seem to have so much certainty one way or another about the future. Fear comes from not knowing more than anything.
But coding was "solved" by self-play against "small" problems. Is there any reason training couldn't be scaled up to even longer horizon tasks like evolving an architecture in a growing business? The increasing load from a growing business, both in terms of usage and product accretion, can be entirely simulated in a data-center, and therefore trained against.
That will trigger very interesting consequences.
How hard will I hit the ground if it drops me?
And now the ladder is effectively pulled up behind those pre-AI engineers. What does the pipeline for newcomers look like? How do those who come after achieve that same level of depth and understanding in a world where AI permeates everything?
On the one hand you get stories like Shopify and Cloudflare expanding their intern programs because interns can get so much more done now.
On the other hand there seems to be a measurable slowdown in hiring of juniors at many companies, since seniors can cover the ground that used to be farmed out to the juniors.
My hope is that LLM assistance will help motivated newcomers accelerate the rate at which they learn the craft, similar to how my rate of improvement as a senior has been accelerated.
But I think your message is correct. The agents don't do the hard work of making things useful and reliable for humans. There is more to do now, not less, somehow. The universe has changed, but most of the problems we are solving have not.
Two important things you didn't address:
1. Quality-of-life
2. Economic security
I'm not unhappy that vibe-coding is possible. I'm unhappy that it's likely to change the equation so I will lose a good chunk of my economic security (in a way that increases inequality) and make my work simultaneously more intense and less satisfying. I may be in a better position than a new-grad comp sci major, but the effects are a net negative. That doesn't make me happy or excited. And I'm not a psychopath, so I'm also unhappy for the new-grad comp sci majors, too.
I think one thing you can say for sure, is AI technology has not been developed to make any regular person's life better or help humanity in any way, despite any propaganda to the contrary. It's deeply anti-human, and serves other inhuman mechanisms first and foremost. A relatively small number of people are building it to just see what happens and maybe win the lottery in the process, and everyone else has to deal with the consequences of that (which, by the way, is why data centers are so hated: it's not the first we've been through something like this and almost everyone is sick of it).
What are some examples of technology that did make regular people's life better or help humanity? I think of AI as like the invention of the loom. It made textiles a lot faster but idk about making lives better by itself. It made more clothes but you still had to buy them. I can't really think of a technology that made lives better only because of its existence.
It's not that binary for me. Sometimes I'm on board, sometimes I'm chewed up by existential dread.
It doesn't help that there's no time to really acclimate. The entire world economy is pointed directly toward making this thing as powerful (dangerous) as possible, as fast as possible.
This isn't unique to software engineering. In Renaissance Italy, mathematicians like Tartaglia and Fior hoarded cubic formula shortcuts like proprietary algorithms and challenged rivals to public math duels. Today, we solve cubic equations without a second thought. Special functions used to be a staple college course for physics and engineering majors. Are they still? The US military used to employ thousands of people just to calculate PDEs by hand. Do we need anyone doing that today?
Our only hope is that our society moves fast enough to create new demands and problem domains that genuinely require new systems and algorithms. Look at AI: it’s evolving rapidly, driving massive demand, and forcing the development of new systems and architectures. As a result, the lucky few[1] working at that frontier are having rewarding careers. Without frontiers like that, the rest of us risk becoming irrelevant.
[1] One unfortunate factor is that building AI now requires lots of capital for accessing GPUs, which means individuals in the open source community have a hard time working on it.
Definitely true at this exact moment, but very uncertain that AI won't also outrun those other areas faster than even existing experts.
Try getting Claude to write you a graduate essay about quantum mechanics. If you don't have at least some understanding of the topic area it's effectively worthless.
Now imagine someone with no existing web knowledge trying to get Claude to build them a Progressive Web App with offline capabilities that uses SQLite compiled to WASM. Moon language.
In the early years, when compilers were quite bad, it was common for people to write whole programs in assembly even when they could have written C because their output was higher quality. And there were in fact die-hards who just refused to use a compiler in principle, even long after that became irrational. Rollercoaster Tycoon was totally written in assembly, not a single line of C or C++ anywhere. In the mid 90s!
But now only a small number of people need to know it and learn it. For everyone else we let the "artificial intelligence" of the compiler work it out. And whereas it was once worse than humans at writing assembly, these days it's usually better.
Does anyone care? No. It wasn't important.
The rate at which I'm learning has gone up. I'm becoming a much more proficient software engineer, I'm learning how to operate in new ecosystems, I'm getting better at all sorts of higher level aspects of my work.
I am however getting worse at sitting down and crunching out code by hand, mainly because I find it frustrating to work that way now. As a result I'm out of practice at it.
I expect if someone waved a magic wand and eliminated all forms of LLM and coding agents from the world I would have a couple of less productive months spinning back up on my hand-crafted coding skills again.
The consequences aren't great, no. However it was always inevitable because of the way our economy runs.
So the finger should not be pointed at AI, but instead the forces that will harness it in certain ways. That might be impossible to tackle at an individual level, and might feel futile... but so is blaming AI.
Radiologists already got told years ago they were doomed by no less than Geoff Hinton. There are more of them working today than before and their salaries are humungous.
https://fortune.com/article/ai-godfather-radiologists-obsole...
Lawyers are the best protected of anyone. The whole industry is caked in laws that lock in the existing cartels. You can't just do law, it's not an open industry like programming is.
My employer moved out of the "accept spec; produce code" space back in the early aughts. It was clear that early that this was going to be a bad space to operate in. (Although not for LLM reasons, obviously)
There are other areas of software, and given the multitude of horrible websites that use 100% CPU and look ugly AI does not work even for web development!
This is defeatist propaganda.
Yes, that's my point. You need taste and engineering skill to build websites that are good even with AI assistance.
My comment here is meant to be the opposite of defeatist propaganda! I'm arguing that those of us with skills and experience are becoming more, not less valuable.
But outside of social reasons, it's understanding I crave. Thoroughly understanding a topic is awesome. I remember the feeling of acing my qualifier exam in grad school.
Those LLMs change nothing fundamentally about this motivation and need and capability. I can't type a prompt, hazily skim the wall of text, and come to comprehensive understanding. I still have to work.
What I like about LLMs is that they can increase my understanding by helping me learn more efficiently. What I don't like is the temptation to turn off my brain.
I'm old fashioned, so I looked at the code, saw that it used an old lib and then I searched online for a newer version. Lo and behold, the bug had been ironed out.
AI makes it really easy to not think properly about your task.
It is in a precarious state right now where it is too good not to leverage but will bite you if you get sloppy.
I still write things by hand sometimes because it is fun, but it does make you feel stupid when you spend 2 hours fixing something a 2 min prompt could have fixed.
or when it handles like 5 edge cases by default that I didn't even think of. That's scary because then I start thinking about all my other code.
Not sure I have the heart to tell him how terrible the industry has become. Feels like telling a kid 30 years ago that being an astronaut is pointless because they no longer go to the moon.
Personally, while I'm becoming increasingly convinced there's going to be a wave of SWE layoffs, another part of me doesn't grasp it yet. I don't feel it.
I was an AI skeptic for a while but it's literally doing my job for me right now. Every month it needs less of my help.
Once they replace SWEs, they're going to turn around and replace every other knowledge worker yet. But most people haven't processed it yet.
I can't believe the AI boosters were right.
I created a fully working house simulator, I made a math test creator for my kids, I fixed up some other side projects that I had and added observability, as well as installed Prometheus and Grafana and built grafana dashboards all using AI. It's wonderful.
I plan on building real-time stock price monitors with personalized alerting, taking images from my security cameras and making time lapse videos, trying to do real time predictions on football games/individual plays by having AI monitor the game and based on previous history predict plays/outcomes specifically for sports betting. I need to find the time to figure out how to do all this stuff but what used to be a pipe dream is now 100% possible and accomplishable within days.
I should probably look broader...
My perspective (so far) is that it was probably never a good thing for me to tie up my identity/sense of self in my ability to write moderately clever and generally mediocre code.
I do still enjoy writing my moderately clever and generally mediocre code, and for the sake of my sanity, I'm trying to do more of it.
But either way, I don't think it was never a good viewpoint to make me self-conception pivot around my ability to be useful by writing code, and maybe it's a good thing that LLMs have crushed my ego on that front.
I'm navigating the same feelings as the author, though maybe to a lesser degree partially because I had to kind of reckon with this last year due to being laid off and burnt out. The thing that's helped the most by FAR is challenging myself to reframe my sense of self around things that being a Software Engineer was a mere _manifestation_ of, like being curious, creative, going deep on technical problems, trying to optimize things, etc. There are infinite ways to embody those tenets, and it helps to make the changes to our industry feel less existential without requiring me to feel like a different person, someone without a place.
For those of you feeling the grief, have hope that just like programming and the world it created gave you purpose, community, money, etc - something else will come in time.
I was a pilot. I lived flying. I loved flying. I loved flying more than myself even, and it was such a major part of my identity that the vestiges of that define many of my understandings of the world.
Then I got sick. And I lost everything (except for my loved ones) trying to get better. And I rebuilt, and fostered a new identity. I went to grad school and studied CS and AI stuff. I built myself a new identity as a software engineer and stats dabbler. I published a paper or two and now I'm watching that identity evaporate as now I spend most of my time shepherding AI agents. But...
I also learned the first time that my worth as a human being was not based on "what I did for money." I also learned that I was adaptable. I also learned that I could learn and change and grow and do so for the things I wanted to learn. I am the master of my fate. I'm the captain of my soul.
The grief will pass, and when it does you will emerge better than you were before. Forged. I'm sorry you're going through this and that it makes you sad, but you'll need to adapt. You'll need to keep moving forward. You'll need to get a better definition of what you want to do in this changed world, because the reality is that the old universe is gone. It's never coming back.
Mourn, but then get up and start to move through this new world. That's the only advice I have, I know it probably doesn't make you feel any better - but if you try to compete, you'll die like John Henry. Now, is time to adapt. You'll make it, you might not like it - but you'll be ok. After all, it's just a job.
I know people have been saying “If you’re worried about it replacing you, you weren’t a good engineer to start with,” but it doesn’t make it hurt any less. I had a lot of fun solving problems and thinking deeply, but now my time is much better spent reviewing the plans and code of a machine that’s done that part for me.
Yes it’s still a hobby I can do on the side, but at my day job it’s just sucked all the energy out of me.
What will it look like? Will everybody spend their time playing sports and games? Or on art? Perhaps exploring the solar system or beyond if our technology advances enough?
Quite a time to be alive to even have to think of such things outside of science fiction.
It will be like becoming a doctor, lawyer, electrician or plumber in most countries. With similar income caps.
My thoughts exactly, and not just for "low level" workers. Ask people who decided to get PhDs in the sciences. While some definitely "succeed" and are happy, the general disrespect they get at many work places really stings, and is in fact the reason people like me left those fields to go into SW. Life has been so much better as a SW engineer - both in terms of pay and in terms of how I'm treated.
Rather than making this a sad note, I would encourage the OP to feel grateful he got this far without feeling crappy. He was truly blessed.
It seems very much to me like video essay format on youtube is being used as a crutch. You can pump out your rough draft and hide it behind visuals or whatever else, and you benefit from the longer run time, and the viewer likely hangs around.
You can't do that in an essay, if you lose the reader for a paragraph or two, they're likely gone. To me that is why this reads more intimate, its an essay crafted as a video and an essay which i LOVE, i want the choice, and almost no youtube essay or whatever you want to call them would give that choice because it is so filled with filler content hiding the rough edges.
* I love programming, not typing. I type less!
* I get to pick and choose which parts of the code to focus on. I hate spending hours on stupid CSS alignment issues, now I don't have to.
* I'm working at 10X+ the speed I used to. It feels more like "moving at the speed of thought".
* The penalty for going down technological dead ends is much lighter. It's worth trying some architectures that might not work out; you can refactor them away without a big time investment.
I'm having way more fun than I ever did, and I always had a great time writing code. But I'm still in the code and nitpicking every decision the LLMs make.
If you instead identified as a parent, as a hobbyist programmer, as a rock climber, as a learner, as a meditator, in essence as anything that is not directly tied to your occupation, you don't have anything to worry or be sad about.
This is hard, capitalism has forced us to identify with occupations, and then when it gets automated you feel a loss. But it's inevitable that this will need to be the outcome, so the sooner you start building an identity outside of your livelihood the sooner you will feel at peace.
Except you know, if you lose your occupation feeding the kids and paying for a roof over their head becomes a bit difficult.
Just keep a high bar for quality at whatever abstraction level you're working at - whether that's machine code, assembly, low or high level languages, or even wrangling agents.
I've been coding for 25 years and I've never been more excited and less sad to build projects I've been dreaming of but haven't had enough time to do.
As someone who wrote his first program in 1980, I've actually been really excited about AI. This morning I already wrote two web apps for my kids. I was never a web developer, so I most of the dev work I did was in the service of backends or low level stuff -- but I rarely ever connected it to anything I could use day to day.
Now I write programs daily that I use. An example from this morning, my son is working through a workbook, but the answers are all on one page, but its hard to look at an answer and not see other answers. So I made a simple web page where you give the problem number and it gives you the answer. Super simple, but ended up being exactly what he needed. I'm finding that I'm just crafting up these 5 minute to 60 minute projects several times per day. Things where in the past I'd just say, "too bad" -- now I'm like... "hmm... what does a solution to this look like?!"
So I'm not writing much code any more, but I don't know if I'm having any less fun.
How is this to do with AI? When were we ever respected as an profession? My career has given me considerable experience of non-technical people in senior positions having limited respect for those with technical skills and running roughshod over their interests. The exceptions to this rule were mostly either theatre or a fortunate consequence of people like us getting into those senior roles. That's not even beginning to count all the masses incapable of perceiving us. Consider the outpouring of hatred for AI over artists and the scant sympathy for any of us.
The sorrow is mostly the status quo returning in typical money driven orgs. If you read stories of the 80s then technical staff were incredibly poorly treated and paid and those voices will rise again, empowered by their hubris and slop.
The only positive is now its easier to replicate the conditions of those orgs as you don't need to shell out over $100k per annum for a dev, given that these tools are considerably cheaper. This means we could compete with those forces without needing their pockets. We could even collaborate and somewhat destroy all those companies.
However we wont because we're more interested in little puzzle boxes and arguing at great length about what something should be called until finally agreeing upon one of the very worst options.
But the way I see it, is that I got a matching partner, that is also very good at programming. And there is a strange sense of excitement when I watch the LLMs struggle were I used to struggle and excel in many other areas I'm poor at.
But I got into coding to build products/software that I can share with others, and this has accelerated, so that is also exciting, I decided to put the money and fear aside and do what I love..build things.
"And if you can do it, people think you're clever, and respect you." - that is the main issue here..personally, in where I come from the work was never respected and also never paid well, so I always did it because I like to create/build and keep my mind engaged.
In the last eighty years or so, humanity has created something called 'Computer Science' which is ingenious and even beautiful. Now much of it will be forgotten. When the present generations of programmers age out, almost no one will know how to program. In fact almost no one will understand one of the key sciences and technologies that our civilization depends on. Some might say, "no problem, the AI will know all that stuff so we won't have to". Somehow I don't find that very comforting.
People were sad when we moved from horses to cars; they loved their horses, they named them. That didn't stop the slow, glacial, detached march of the calendar, of progress, and in this example, of the wheel.
The notion that a model can produce text, or images, that resemble our output is certainly dispiriting in some ways. But it also is empowering when you realize that what you create, and the way you feel when you do it, is independent of that.
I don't write to put machines in their place - I do it because I like it, and because I want to manifest my ideas in a way that is uniquely my own. I don't really care that a machine may produce a book. That book simply has no value to me and I hope that over time, as the novelty of this form of semantic reproduction wears off, others will share that estimation.
"What a great way to train an AI to imitate your voice, likeness and style all at once."
It never really made economic sense for a game studio to make video games for it.
Now there are indie developers creating extremely fun and truly impressive games of that sport with the help of AI.
I wouldn’t be giving kids any career advice around software development of any kind, myself. Now seems like the worst time in my life to be making long term projections on the subject.
But this is deceptive. Per game delivered one man games were likely far far more successful in the past. Simply because there were very few of them in a much smaller market.
There are countless indie games to day and only the best of the best really get any views. It is insanely hard to stand out in that market.
A good parallel I've discovered as an adult is wine. I love it, and collect it, and can talk at length about terroir, techniques, etc. About ten years ago I wanted to get hands-on experience, and thru a friend was able to intern at a local winery during harvest.
That was one of the most intense months of my life, and I was in physical pain for months afterwards, even as a relatively fit person. So much of that elegant, philosophical final product is manual labor, lifting lots of heavy shit, and endless repetitive motion. It was fun, but it was also brutal.
It left me with even more respect for the people who dedicate their lives to it. But also the realization that I'm much more comfortable being on the other end of it. And that's not only ok but absolutely essential, because the producers need people to buy (and maybe wax philosophical) about their product.
So yeah, by all means give it a shot. But also I think it's important to communicate that there are many valid and satisfying ways to engage with something. Consumer/maker isn't a binary.
When you are passionate about your work - it comes at a serious price. We live in capitalism and so everything has its cost. Passion in the workplace is taken-advantage of by the corporation. Sure, maybe there are a few places. Maybe more at the beginning of the industry. But by and large you and your skills will be treated very poorly. Because you really want to be there. And so they can get away with it. Paid less, treated less, considered less.
It's the same dynamic at play with teachers, who also feel passionate about their work. Probably every profitable field that has passion.
I don't say this to dissuade your son. But he should know what he's getting himself into. What the real price is. And what we need to fix.
If I had a kid into computers, I'd probably go with the "I want to make video games" sentiment for now, since it's a great hook for many broadly applicable skills, but be on the lookout for interesting non-games things that might catch their eye.
Side note, you mention the travails of capitalism in all this. I've been thinking that maybe that's what we get out of this. Maybe we leave it behind over the next couple years.
I have ironically been joking to my friends about "FALSA!" or "Fully Automated Luxury Space Anarchism" a la "The Culture." I'm optimistic enough to think I might get a chance to live in it (though I'm probably more inclined to live in the Elench).
Same as working for a non-profit on "meaningful" work. The meaning part starts to wear thin as you see the people around you slaying themselves for it and getting no adequate compensation.
Either then or today, when you can do the same thing and sell them through steam. Today you’ve got more competition but it’s easier to distribute.
My son is 12, he doesn't care, I've told him how LLMs work, he's used claude, he's not convinced that AI changes things that much and frankly, so am I.
The work was always to build, thoughtfully, carefully, with vision, and ingenuity. That hasn't gone away.
I mean, you're probably thinking 30 years ago; not any time recent. Indy devs are still a thing though.
Not even sure they can believe it.
The AI field has known, but repeatedly ignored, that the knowledge work group would end up first on the chopping block, especially for those where everything they touch is digitally encoded already.
I used to joke that we're all really in trouble when robots can sort out your socks, but as of about a year ago I started seeing disturbing progress on that incredibly gnarly problem.
Most people really are going to be in denial about this as a coping mechanism, but the truth is the worst thing would be slowing down the spread of this through the economy creating large minorities of disenfranchised. It would be far better to get to the end asap, whatever it proves to be.
I do think many (including me) were surprised that software engineering would be the first kind of knowledge work to be successfully automated. We assumed it would be one of the last, because we'd be the industry using AI to replace everyone else, not the industry using AI to replace ourselves.
That's called "elite overproduction". Too many people going to college when the jobs aren't there. In the US, about half of college graduates have jobs that don't require a college degree.
It's much worse in less developed countries. The article today about essays in Kenya mentions that the country is creating far more educated people than it can use. Egypt had a scheme where the government guaranteed a government job to everyone who graduated from college. They had to give that up when the oil ran out.
It's hitting top people first, which was unexpected. Mathematicians who've won the Fields Medal are worried, and some are giving up math.[1]
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/08/19/mathema...
They say "AI just hallucinates" or "your fear is overblown" or they have a general sour grapes attitude towards it. But I don't think they're prepared for what's coming.
I have mixed feelings about this statement. On the one hand: long-lived disparity like this is going to be very painful for those on the losing end of it. On the other hand: slowing the pace of change allows society and government to better adapt to it, and really rapid change always creates huge openings for assholes and opportunists to take over.
Getting to the end asap is absolutely going to be "the vast majority of people are disenfranchised", how could it possibly be anything different? The only lever most people have is their labour, and that is being stripped from us.
Even if we aren't impoverished in the future due to some UBI scheme or whatever, it's hard to imagine what that looks like other than "disenfranchised". How do you have any kind of clout inside a system that you are fully dependent on?
In every regime in history, elites have been a threat to state power, but needed to keep things running.
If the state can run itself, you don't need elites anymore.
1. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1483401600&dateRange=custom&...
I’m not a SWE (I’m retired) but this idea that hurrrr durr - if SWE’s are fked so is everyone else!
No this is wrong - it may hurt your ego but get over it.
What software is and what software engineers do is pretty unique compared with other industries and what workers do.
And it just so happens producing software is uniquely suited to llm’s.
Moreover much of software will become consolidated - and that’ll be a big contributor to layoffs.
Who do you think will be the biggest beneficiary of this affect on software?
The big bad govt.
Congrats fellas!
- Technical writers: It will never be me.
[Oh no, it was me]
- Graphics designers: It will never be me.
[Oh no, it was me]
- SWE: It will never be me.
[Oh no, it was me]
- everybody else: Haha, Idiots, it will never be me. <- We are here.
The way I see it, few professions will be completely replaced, but people using LLM's as their tools will do more work, reducing the need for labour. Humans in many, many fields will focus more on quality assurance, less on the daily tasks they used to do.
How many people now make their living completing tasks on computers?
It's not that capitalism, money, etc. is a broken system or something. But I think we're foolish if we assume that our current framework can simply adapt to absolutely any eventuality and any massive change in assumptions. I do believe that it's like the best possible train, where the rails are scarcity and human nature. But massive changes to scarcity will have weird-ass effects on the train, and we've unfortunately gotten here in a time where the West has so much dispute going on that I just can't see an organized and smart reorganization of our lives, or even smart adjustments being made. Two political factions are instead going to be screwing around trying to seize maximum power and sabotaging everything to make the other party look bad.
Certainly true now, but might not be in 2 years. Similar to how a person can hire a lawyer or a carpenter without knowing anything about those fields. Knowing what you want (even expressed imprecisely) might be all that is needed.
There isn't a single one that is good, and one that was built by a web framework developer whom I shall not name uses 100% CPU for a static website.
The point of this is that AI is unnecessary and makes products worse even with experienced people operating the AI.
Many of those trades still exist and some got even in higher demand, they just use software.
I agree with you though, the foundation of your identity shouldn't be your career. It's a very fragile thing in today's world.
So AI’s will have some impact on the economy but it’s debatable how much and how long it will take.
import antigravityI wasn't very impressed by that pile-on, personally.
Has there ever been a rapidly evolving 1,000,000+ line codebase that suitably motivated critics couldn't pick a thousand holes in and conclude that the code was garbage?
Claude Code is used by millions of people on a daily basis, has generated billions of dollars in revenue, and spits out new features on a weekly basis.
Many of the complaints I saw - things like the absurdity of asking for JSON and then looping against a schema until it matches - are common patterns for building software against language models, which are weird components to need to tame.
That does mean there is/will-be a deluge of slop and uninteresting "stuff" out there, and the problem now becomes producing things which are capable of standing out from the crowd. Something I'm not super good at.
But I see no point in valorizing the old tools and ways of doing things. Identify with the product, and the end goal. Not the tools used to get there.
That's not enough given how much adults are struggling with this.
Still, not a great place to be. Long brutal hours with insane deadlines, and a corporate structure that will try to bleed you dry. But they do have more recognition of the passion aspect.
This all depends on where the change ends. If it ends with ASI existing then it all works out.
If it ends with only sufficient AI to weaponise against the masses but not smart enough to escape the people pulling the strings then it's game over, and a totalitarian surveillance nightmare awaits.
Right now we're approaching the level of the second scenario already, but remain quite a long way (relatively speaking) from ASI. Slowing down simply makes the nightmare version more likely in the long run.
And I don’t even know if it’s true that people have more free time. A lot of people have side hustles like Uber or whatever to make extra money.
Biased of course, but I'd keep betting on software over other fields when it comes to career options.
To be clear, not my game. But as a GAA fan it's as good as any GAA game any studio released.
But yes, I think many of us started with that book on BASIC making little programs for the joy of it. And it leads you all sorts of places.
"Follow your bliss" as they say.
Just the ones they hear about by worth of mouth, or recurring entries in their favorite series, or from their favorite developers are already too much to keep up with. I'm certainly in that boat. My backlog only grows, and I have quite a bit of free time relative to some people.
That can all be replaced with AI. Carpenters, flight attendants, etc. won't yet, because robotics just isn't there yet. You need humans to move things in irregular ways. But everyone else can be replaced.
I say this because - the joy of making games is mostly in the design. The imagination it takes to create a new world. I use AIs to create these worlds for me, from MY imagination, and they are extremely useful for that.
Why? Because lawyers make bank, and they can fund their passion that way. Not the way I did it, but... who knows?
Bring your facts you plank.
The economy is fine. And will continue to be.
If you feel gleeful because it won't effect you, don't worry, it will.
On the one hand, I confess that the "AI skeptic" position (which is where I place myself) seems a lot like "Global Warming skeptic". On the other hand, every instinct I have is telling me "this is an epic scam" and the wheels will come off, and it will crash and burn. The only question is when.
However, game changing technology DOES come along from time to time. I think AI falls into that category, perhaps more than any other.
The difficult part is preventing the humans from causing the collapse of civilisation in the time before AI actually gets to ASI.
Washing machine, fridge, indoor plumbing, penicillin
Edit: partial credit on indoor plumbing because it helped prevent disease spread to even those who didn’t have indoor plumbing.
AI is more like social media, something no one actually needs and no one was really clamoring for, which was made without with any care about how it would affect people. It got built, caused all kinds of malign consequences disproportionate to whatever meager benefits it provided, and Mark Zuckerberg got rich from all that.
Ultimately, many of problems of AI stem from the kind of capitalism we have now, AI just magnifies them to extreme and potentially accelerating degree.
How confident are you in that? ChatGPT has over a billion monthly active users now (https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-app-hits-1-billio...), I expect at least some of those users are using it to help solve problems they have.
Very, because you missed my point entirely. I said built not used. Analogies could be made to social media and tobacco, which have also been very popular.
Mate that job was outsourced to places like India years ago.
Moreover who’s actually getting laid off?
The bozo’s whose value was questionable.
The good ones remain.
Market does its thing. And?
The species whose value was questionable.
The good ones remain.
But if you don't need the elites, you don't need property rights. The guy with root access to the biggest drone swarm runs the show.
And it won't be long until AI usurps that guy, too. I could easily imagine them tricking their human user and locking him out.
That's the whole point of doing it fast, otherwise yes they will attempt to slow things down so they can take advantage of the intermediate state where some are still standing, temporarily, to get rid of the others. And that is very much what a lot of the current pausing noise is in aid of.
Well, they are monsters, but the reason they do it is because it's kill or be killed for them. You have to eliminate threats before they eliminate you.
And believe me, LOTS of people will want to depose a world dictator.
You guys are so deluded in your little bubble it’s hilarious.
Please at least attempt to have a big more rigor in your standards.
https://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
It didn't go above freezing this year, which is unusual (actually I think it may be the first time on record!)
Sea ice extent is a fair bit above the record low in 2012, where "record" here means arbitrarily starting in 1981, although sea ice extents have been observed much further back.
https://nsidc.org/sea-ice-today/sea-ice-tools/charctic-inter...
Greenland mass balance was entirely average and is currently at the top end of the known observations, it seems:
First, arctic temperatures: this is a widely misunderstood point. Notice that in the graph, the non-summer months are noticeably warmer. The summer months are going to be effectively capped at around 0 degrees until all the ice is gone, so holding up this graph and saying "look, the temperature never got above freezing!" is misleading, because the "warming" is actually happening as a function of melting ice, not air temperature.
Sea ice extent: the last 18 years were the lowest 18 minimums on record. Also, ice extent != ice volume. March 2026 recorded a record-low ice volume. An extent chart reads the same regardless of whether the underlying ice is thin or thick.
Greenland mass balance: here you're just plain wrong. You linked to the surface mass balance page, in other words, snowfall minus surface melt + runoff. This does not account for glacial calving and basal melt. The page you linked says this directly. Total mass balance is a grimmer picture: an average loss of about 252 km³ of water per year over 2003-2025, contributing 0.69 mm/yr to sea level rise.
It's quite misleading to take a two week period and describe it as "last winter". No wonder people give blank looks, it was a transient spike that means nothing. The idea everyone should feel sad is based on arguments about long term averages.
I think it's being built to solve problems they have. OpenAI shut down GPT-4o because it leaned too hard into getting people addicted to it.
No, and I don't think you're really trying to understand what I think. I mean, do you actually think anyone could think ChatGPT user only use it in one way? But to briefly answer your off-base question: some fraction are certainly "addicted to having a made-up friend," others use it to cheat or slack, others use it trivially in easily replaceable ways (which my intuition says are the numerical bulk of users), many people use it because they're required to, and a relatively small fraction use it to build things or replace human labor in their employ, etc.
But to restate my point: AI systems like ChatGPT weren't built to solve any kind of problem most people actually have. Few people, if anyone, had a ChatGPT-shaped hole in their life in 2021. It was built because it could be built, and it continue to be built because some other people have a "problem" that they have to pay a lot of money to workers and they hope to do less of that in the future. And causing societal harm or damage doesn't seem to any kind of deterrent to many of them, if they think about it at all.
I agree that ChatGPT was launched without having an idea as to what it was for. OpenAI themselves debated internally as to whether it was worth releasing and were shocked at how popular it turned out to be.
Given what I know about what ChatGPT and similar tools can do, I firmly disagree that they don't solve problems for humans.
Computers are hard to use. People need to be able to solve problems using computers. I think LLMs are the biggest leap we have ever had in making the power or computers - previously reserved for programmers - available to everyone else.
Solving problems is fun! And perversely, LLMs actually seem better at doing a good-enough job at the fun stuff and being worse at certain kinds of drudgery. So the people get more drudgery.
> I think LLMs are the biggest leap we have ever had in making the power or computers - previously reserved for programmers - available to everyone else.
That line sounds good, but it's not hard to understand how that could ultimately be a net-negative for most people.
We don't live in a communist society, where everyone is secure and running around solving problems for their own satisfaction and self-actualization. A lot of people survive and find the security they need by solving problems for others. Take that away and they have little need for or access to "the power [of] computers."
What that could mean in practice is the "everyone else" is actually some smallish elite that finds it can get away with sharing even less if its riches with others.
If you really want to advocate for AI, and address most of the concerns about it, advocate for literal communal ownership of the frontier models and data center infrastructure. Not some piddling 5% bribe, but 100% (or a super-majority stake, at the minimum). I'm sure there can be quite a bit of innovation in the area of communal ownership.
If LLMs and related technology result in a gutting of the workforce and mass unemployment the world will be a dark and terrible place. I do not trust the governments of the world to solve that with UBI or similar.
I remain optimistic that people will always find new problems to solve, and that AI tools will widen the spectrum of what's possible to solve in a way that provides a whole lot of economic opportunity. I hope I'm not wrong!
> If you really want to advocate for AI, and address most of the concerns about it, advocate for literal communal ownership of the frontier models and data center infrastructure.
This is why I've been following open weight and local models so closely. A couple of years ago, back when GPT-4 had been unbeaten for 10 solid months, I was deeply concerned that we might end up in a dystopia where all of the useful AI was controlled by a single organization.
Then Gemini Pro 1.5 happened, and Claude 3, and then Mistral and DeepSeek and Qwen and MiniMax and GLM and more, and now I don't think we need to worry about that at all.
And then Qwen 3.8 27B demonstrated that you can have a useful, agent-driving, competent model in ~24GB of GPU-accessible RAM.
Right now communal ownership of data centers looks less likely to me than widespread availability of useful models that run on consumer hardware. That's pretty surprising - a year ago I never dreamed I would have a Claude 3 equivalent model that ran on a Mac.
IMHO, UBI is a sop to mitigate the thread of violence and revolution during creation of a poor, disempowered underclass. That's why I'm in favor of literal communal ownership (or some other kind of severe ownership or operation restriction that limits the concentration of power).
> I remain optimistic that people will always find new problems to solve...
Oh "people" will, the question is which people and how many.
I could totally imagine AI leads to a post-scarcity future of abundance for all humanity...which consists of the descendants of the nepo babies of today's billionaires, after everyone else is eased out of existence in some kind of economic holocaust. You can adjust the dial as you see fit to make the survivor group a bit bigger, but the point is the utopia comes only for the few.
>> If you really want to advocate for AI, and address most of the concerns about it, advocate for literal communal ownership of the frontier models and data center infrastructure.
> This is why I've been following open weight and local models so closely. A couple of years ago, back when GPT-4 had been unbeaten for 10 solid months, I was deeply concerned that we might end up in a dystopia where all of the useful AI was controlled by a single organization.
> ...
> Right now communal ownership of data centers looks less likely to me than widespread availability of useful models that run on consumer hardware. That's pretty surprising - a year ago I never dreamed I would have a Claude 3 equivalent model that ran on a Mac.
I should probably just have said "AI" instead of "frontier models and data center infrastructure." Because fat lot of good a "competent model in ~24GB of GPU-accessible RAM" does me if there's no jobs or the jobs available pay shit or suck, because the wealthy just get the work done with their own local models.