Technology

It's already happening. I'm looking to "retire" this year (which essentially means I'm just quitting this bullshit, I can't deal with it anymore.) I've been doing consultation/contracting dev work for the past several years and about 2 years ago I pivoted from that to essentially doing code review for AI slop for my various clients. It's always the same song and dance of "this is why your new fancy AI produced crap doesn't scale, this is why there are exploits, this is how you fix it with real devs, yadda yadda yadda". I was naive and hoped I could make a difference by hoping these startups and small tech houses would get the picture and pivot back to utilizing actual devs. hire people back and what have you. But none of them have. So I'm getting paid and wasting my time talking to CTOs and upper managers and I might as well be talking to a brick wall. they're all going to continue to ride this AI train until the wheels come off and even when the carriage is missing all the wheels they'll try to push it along down the tracks.

it's hopeless. I've given up. I know it's not something unemployed or under-employed devs want to hear but this is the conclusion I've come to within the past couple months. I hate this industry now. absolutely hate it. I might just focus on FOSS stuff, contribute to random projects or start maintaining some and call it a day. but the passion for coding and anything tech related has been sucked dry from me thanks to LLM's and AI.

Also there's a "thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters" effect going on, but what people neglect to notice is that each of the thousand AI monkeys is (either out of necessity or mere curiosity) currently being supervised and edited by a brilliant mathematician who would otherwise be working on their own proofs and discoveries right now. And sure enough, one team might actually come up with a genuine shakespeare-quality draft eventually, but even if that is the case, you also have to consider the opportunity cost of having 1,000 brilliant mathematicians focusing on reviewing monkey-typewriter output instead of each working on their own groundbreaking work much more slowly and "traditionally". The work being delegated to AI isn't replacing human work, it's overriding it.

I don't know if all this AI work is a completely net-unproductive and worthless endeavour or not, but I do know we're not doing an honest accounting and AI companies have a huge incentive to cook the books to make it look way more productive than it actually is.

Lol, capitalism & CEO rule 1: only think about the next quarter profits, fuck the future, I've already made my money

Not just that the next generation of experts will hypothetically be employed as baristas, but I don't think people take the risk of deskilling enough. The next generation of would-be experts won't be as good at whatever because they've learned to rely on AI. We risk effectively transferring valuable skills from humans to Musk- or Altman-owned chatbots. That should horrify everyone.

Why didn't they just ask ChatGPT to summarize it for them? /s

My grandpa said using a calculator would spoil my math abilities.

Actually it spoiled my arithmetic tricks. Instead I had more time to learn things like vector calculus.