First, if someone's profession has been vastly transformed, and not necessarily in pleasant ways, they're allowed to have feeling about that. If nothing else, I find talking to AIs to be exhausting.
But more importantly, sure, we were always paid for results. And yes, sometimes professions transform or die. The buggy whip manufacturers aren't doing that great these days. But people are also allowed to have feelings about this.
My real concern is that the stated goal of the AI companies is to do this to every human job. They want to replace programmers and artists and movie-makers and—as soon as they get robotics figured out—physical laborers. They measure the ability of their models to run entire retail businesses with Vending Bench, so management isn't safe, either. They sell their AIs to the military for use in weapons. No job is safe, anywhere: They want everything, if they can figure out how to take it.
If the current rate of AI advance stops really soon, then eventually we'll figure out some kind of liveable future. Probably one with fewer programmers. But the labs have zero intention of stopping. Anthropic is a cult, and they hope to build a machine god that will have power over humanity forever. So I'm not going to them for answers. OpenAI used to have non-profit oversight that encouraged them to serve society, and Sam Altman gutted it like a fish. So I don't think I trust them to design a machine that replaces all human jobs, either.
Personally, I don't mind current coding models, at least not the local-sized ones that exist now. They make nice sounding boards and can be trusted with the grunt work. We could adapt to these, given time.
But so far, AI technology shows no sign of stopping. And the labs are focused heavily on coding and math, because the next step in their plan is to let their models do AI research so that they can advance their technology even faster into new fields.
We could, like, decide that we don't need to do this. There is no need to try to replace every single human job with a super human machine. Because if you thought the enshittification of the Internet was bad, wait until you see the enshittification of a machine that can do almost every human job. No thanks.
I don't like AI coding, but I can't say it's not useful. Most of the arguments in this article can be disarmed by taking the abstraction "one step up". LLM generated modules and software, microservices, whatever your level of abstraction... now need to be composited together. You go and deal with higher order problems, factories, generation, etc.
Is it a way to develop critical bits of code, depths of your business logic? Absolutely not. Can it solve a lot of boilerplate and support logic? Absolutely yes.
Seeing "AI Companies as Bad Actors"... can't fully disagree there. There's far too many far too dodgy things about these businesses, and I trust them as far as I can audit them (not very far). And the missing argument's the cognitive decline of using these things to think for us. I try to keep myself sharp by still manually doing a fair amount of things in my life. I refuse to automate _everything_ - especially the stuff I do for fun. Having an LLM manage hobby-adjacent stuff is a quick trip to burnout land, especially once fixing the thing becomes "the hobby"... and it does.
I don't understand the point of this article. It is written poorly. It doesn't state a purpose or line of thought, you can infer it from how he counters the dislike reasons, but then was the point of the article just to list a handful of reasons you don't believe to be true? Because he's leaving so much stuff behind
I am not sure if I am more tired of people building with AI or people complaining about people building with AI. If you really that bothered, there is nothing stoping anybody from keep doing things the good old way... What's the big deal?
I think the employment thief point is always misstated.
We invented compilers, word processors, templated document generation, code generators, DSLs and things like that which were all labour reduction technologies for describing systems and information. These were net positives for society but wiped out full administrative and technical professions.
The issue is the impact that technology has on society. It should used to free up more time for enriching humanity with art, music, sciences, mathematics etc. But what really happens is they are used entirely for concentrating wealth by taking revenue and reducing employment, leaving functional people unemployed, destitute and in debt to the people who have the wealth concentration.
At this point it's morally objectionable on all grounds.
A second point, which should be considered an addition to the article is that AI coding shapes thinking based on its capabilities, not the user's intent. I see this a lot. If the objective is to do thing X because it aligns with a well-researched strategic analysis, it may not align with that. People are happy to be pushed to do thing Y which is a totally different thing because they are being slowly gaslit into accepting the mediocrity that the model promotes. This leads to poor business outcomes. And all this is hidden and written off because everyone needs to be seen as AI thought leaders at a high level because that's what keeps the stock going up and engineers are being rated on delivery, not on ROI.
> We invented compilers, word processors, templated document generation, code generators, DSLs and things like that which were all labour reduction technologies for describing systems and information. These were net positives for society but wiped out full administrative and technical professions.
Asking seriously and not in a provocative way: are you then implying that without those inventions we would have much more people employed as white collars? Employed people that would live a better life in economical and life/work balance terms.
> The issue is the impact that technology has on society. It should used to free up more time for enriching humanity with art, music, sciences, mathematics etc. But what really happens is they are used entirely for concentrating wealth by taking revenue and reducing employment, leaving functional people unemployed, destitute and in debt to the people who have the wealth concentration.
False, Karl Marx himself says that technology improves wealth for all the masses and doesn't leave people destitute.
It seems like a very lazy attempt to rebut the reasons. In particular:
"In this situation it isn’t the technology that takes the job, it’s the mode of production. And given that programming is intellectual work, the means of production is literally our heads, we ought to be able to seize those."
The word 'ought' is doing so much heavy lifting here...
But more importantly, sure, we were always paid for results. And yes, sometimes professions transform or die. The buggy whip manufacturers aren't doing that great these days. But people are also allowed to have feelings about this.
My real concern is that the stated goal of the AI companies is to do this to every human job. They want to replace programmers and artists and movie-makers and—as soon as they get robotics figured out—physical laborers. They measure the ability of their models to run entire retail businesses with Vending Bench, so management isn't safe, either. They sell their AIs to the military for use in weapons. No job is safe, anywhere: They want everything, if they can figure out how to take it.
If the current rate of AI advance stops really soon, then eventually we'll figure out some kind of liveable future. Probably one with fewer programmers. But the labs have zero intention of stopping. Anthropic is a cult, and they hope to build a machine god that will have power over humanity forever. So I'm not going to them for answers. OpenAI used to have non-profit oversight that encouraged them to serve society, and Sam Altman gutted it like a fish. So I don't think I trust them to design a machine that replaces all human jobs, either.
Personally, I don't mind current coding models, at least not the local-sized ones that exist now. They make nice sounding boards and can be trusted with the grunt work. We could adapt to these, given time.
But so far, AI technology shows no sign of stopping. And the labs are focused heavily on coding and math, because the next step in their plan is to let their models do AI research so that they can advance their technology even faster into new fields.
We could, like, decide that we don't need to do this. There is no need to try to replace every single human job with a super human machine. Because if you thought the enshittification of the Internet was bad, wait until you see the enshittification of a machine that can do almost every human job. No thanks.
Is it a way to develop critical bits of code, depths of your business logic? Absolutely not. Can it solve a lot of boilerplate and support logic? Absolutely yes.
Seeing "AI Companies as Bad Actors"... can't fully disagree there. There's far too many far too dodgy things about these businesses, and I trust them as far as I can audit them (not very far). And the missing argument's the cognitive decline of using these things to think for us. I try to keep myself sharp by still manually doing a fair amount of things in my life. I refuse to automate _everything_ - especially the stuff I do for fun. Having an LLM manage hobby-adjacent stuff is a quick trip to burnout land, especially once fixing the thing becomes "the hobby"... and it does.
We invented compilers, word processors, templated document generation, code generators, DSLs and things like that which were all labour reduction technologies for describing systems and information. These were net positives for society but wiped out full administrative and technical professions.
The issue is the impact that technology has on society. It should used to free up more time for enriching humanity with art, music, sciences, mathematics etc. But what really happens is they are used entirely for concentrating wealth by taking revenue and reducing employment, leaving functional people unemployed, destitute and in debt to the people who have the wealth concentration.
At this point it's morally objectionable on all grounds.
A second point, which should be considered an addition to the article is that AI coding shapes thinking based on its capabilities, not the user's intent. I see this a lot. If the objective is to do thing X because it aligns with a well-researched strategic analysis, it may not align with that. People are happy to be pushed to do thing Y which is a totally different thing because they are being slowly gaslit into accepting the mediocrity that the model promotes. This leads to poor business outcomes. And all this is hidden and written off because everyone needs to be seen as AI thought leaders at a high level because that's what keeps the stock going up and engineers are being rated on delivery, not on ROI.
Everthing is fucking broken.
Asking seriously and not in a provocative way: are you then implying that without those inventions we would have much more people employed as white collars? Employed people that would live a better life in economical and life/work balance terms.
False, Karl Marx himself says that technology improves wealth for all the masses and doesn't leave people destitute.
"In this situation it isn’t the technology that takes the job, it’s the mode of production. And given that programming is intellectual work, the means of production is literally our heads, we ought to be able to seize those."
The word 'ought' is doing so much heavy lifting here...
Demand food, shelter, leisure, purpose. Jobs are one (honestly pretty bad) implementation of that
If you oppose AI, you basically stop future such progressive ideas from permeating.
Why would you, as a progressive, reject AI if you are interested in progress?