I can't pinpoint exactly when it happened, but in the last decade or so, the message coming from the tech industry has been less "technology will improve your life and help you be a better human being" and more "technology will replace you as a human being and make you obsolete."
I think this is a big, big mistake and a large reason why AI specifically and the tech industry in general is being perceived negatively. SV seems less interested in making "cyborgs" that enhance human abilities, and more interested in godlike AIs that aren't human at all.
Or alternatively, "*technology will be used to extract profit, or preferably rent, from you and constrain your agency even further than it already is."
This matches my feelings. It seems that I used to believe there would be cool and powerful tools for more and more things, but now I'm expecting recurring subscriptions on ever simpler stuff until I'm paying by the character (plus a monthly sub) to type into notepad.
Most likely this was always the case, just a bit bigger and obvious now. I comfort myself with the belief that the number of cool and powerful tools released under properly free licenses can only grow, even if they proportion shrinks.
> I can't pinpoint exactly when it happened, but in the last decade or so,
It's not really the last decade or so. You can go back 20 years or more and find people really quite dissatisfied with tech companies like IBM and Oracle and Microsoft.
What really happened is that "you either die the hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain" came for Google and Apple and what we need is to recognize that they're now IBM and Microsoft and we need a new Google and Apple.
Google leaned into it by removing their motto "Don't be evil" when they realized it was holding them back from heretofore unseen levels of extraction^h^h^h profit.
Removing "don't be evil" was an unforced PR blunder but things like that have only symbolic effect. Nobody would care if they weren't doing actually evil things like putting their DRM in web standards and pretending that Android is open while doing whatever they can to thwart competing services from becoming popular.
Notice how Apple never had a "don't be evil" to begin with. Does that mean they were always evil or that they aren't now?
Most of it isn't even made to improve human life, it was just a matter of time until people wake up they're getting a downgraded experience to please shareholders and business owners.
I'm not that cynical, and I do think that a lot of tech has done good things for people. Even something like Facebook was useful at the beginning, even if that is obviously no longer the case.
Facebook can still be useful. I'm using it as a centralized portal for all local events (concerts, festivals...). Smaller events are very hard or impossible to discover or track any other way. But you have to train fb a bit, and ignore irrelevant stuff you'll still see. But there is a value in it, at least for me.
Yeah I meant more that when it started, it was simply useful in a straightforward sense, whereas today it's been optimized for extracting ad revenue and engagement.
Ask truckers about this with the nearly decade long plus narrative that the second self driving is mastered they will be laid off, combined simultaneously with complaints about how no one is entering the lucrative trucking industry.
I’ve had non tech family and friends who are currently dealing with the result of American cutthroat capitalism and barely able to cover living expenses despite having two people working full time, ask me how I felt about the risk of AI to my job.
My answer has consistently been that I’m not afraid because one of these results happens. A: AI hits a peak soon and can’t replace any work I do, so it doesn’t matter. B: AI does get sophisticated enough to replace the work I do at which point we’ve basically reached almost star trek level tech where machines can do most of the work and we’ve allocated resources through society in a way that everyone benefits. And lastly the one I think is most likely C: AI automates all this knowledge work for the benefit of company owners and we end up either accepting it as a group and falling back to pre industrial serf like social structures or every rises up in a social revolution.
To be honest I’d expect that going back to serfdom style rules would be the most expected and stable but the current group of western oligarchs don’t seem to care to make sure that their burgeoning serf class have their basic needs met and instead want to antagonize them for not being rich. It’s a really odd juxtaposition of rabidly independent culture where people believe they accomplished everything by the sweat of their own brow crossing with the results of of a society that lets an individual run a company of 10s to 100s of thousands of employees at the same time
Having your serfs' basic needs met was very rarely a care of the ruling classes in any state form that deserves the name "serfdom". Serfs dying in a famine was just one of those things that happened. There was perhaps a brief reversal after the Black Death, when so many serfs had died there was almost a competition for the labor of the survivors.
My counter-argument to C: (I almost typed C:\> there, sorry) is that money in tech, in the end, still comes from people. Even if your business is using AI to optimise ad targeting, those ads still get paid for because the advertisers expect humans to hand over money at some point to buy products or play games or something.
With the exception of Switzerland, this didn't tend to go too well in the middle ages - the early modern age was the first time this became viable "at scale", hence the French Revolution.
There were plenty of earlier cases of one family of minor nobility killing another family of minor nobility and taking over their farmland and serfs, but successful peasant revolts that led to a change in the hierarchy were really rare (outside of Switzerland). Even the 1381 "Great Revolt" in England, which called for the abolition of serfdom among other things, is evaluated by the World History Encyclopaedia [1] as "largely unsuccessful" despite having many factors in its favour: a rise in the bargaining power of surviving peasants after the Black Death, and peasants armed and trained with knight-killing longbows. And yet Wat Tyler's head ended up on a pike, and despite the poll tax being rolled back, serfdom as an institution remained.
> peasants armed and trained with knight-killing longbows
The longbow's reputation as a hard-counter to heavy cavalry is, I think, a little context dependent. The famous set pieces like Poitiers, Agincourt, Crecy all featured favorable terrain - and in the case of Agincourt, favorable weather - ideal for massed fire into predictable funnels (where, strictly speaking, the longbow served first and foremost as a horse killer).
All this to say, it's IMO a mischaracterization to imply the peasants in the aforementioned peasants revolt held the military edge relative to the crown and its allies. After the initial shock of the uprising, they were a clear underdog matched against a well resourced and ruthless opponent.
I agree entirely. Even with the longbow (or crossbow), a peasant uprising could maybe kill a few local lords and knights, but most of the time they would then find themselves very much the underdog against the forces that would be mobilized in response. We have to wait until gunpowder (for example Jan Zizka's Hussites - and even that was more an exception that proves the rule) for peasants, on average, to have a decent chance.
>> And lastly the one I think is most likely C: AI automates all this knowledge work for the benefit of company owners and we end up either accepting it as a group and falling back to pre industrial serf like social structures or every rises up in a social revolution.
> My counter-argument to C: (I almost typed C:\> there, sorry) is that money in tech, in the end, still comes from people. Even if your business is using AI to optimise ad targeting, those ads still get paid for because the advertisers expect humans to hand over money at some point to buy products or play games or something.
I think the real risk of C is that the economy changes to something radically different, where everything is capital and labor is (basically) no longer required. The whole B2C economy just withers and dies, and is replaced by an economy centered on elite fantasy fulfillment (e.g. Elon Musks monopolizing resources to build mega-projects for themselves, perhaps with a smallish community of human pets kept as an audience).
There wouldn't be any serfs, because serfs had economic value to the medieval elites. But there may be a population of marginal people scraping by squatting and subsistence farming at the margins, hoping a mega-project doesn't displace them.
> My bartender and ski instructors’ careers are secure.
Both of these jobs - particularly the latter but where I live also the former - rely on a heavy surplus of disposable income sloshing around the economy. Once the money stops flowing the home stills start and the ski trips stop.
> My friend whose ten year old stayed indoors for a few years to play around on REPL, less surely.
The broad point you're conveying is reasonably clear, but I'm not even sure whether you're implying your friend is a SWE by virtue of their child tinkering with a REPL, or if you're referring to the future job prospects of said 10 year old.
> broad point you're conveying is reasonably clear
Let me further clarify it: winemakers, lobbyists, charismatic artists and anyone else whose job is based on relationships will also be fine. (Or folks like plumbers and electricians.)
The roles being automated away look like the quiet, tinkering alone genius types. First at the commodity level. But increasingly at the highest ones. The preserved jobs will be both high and low, and exist in the context of a more-productive society.
> The preserved jobs will be both high and low, and exist in the context of a more-productive society.
A more productive society is not incompatible with extreme inequality. Unless the middle is preserved, it's hard to see how all these winemakers and charismatic artists will find a market for their labor.
> more productive society is not incompatible with extreme inequality
Sure. And I don’t see why in the trades and service industry solid middle-class jobs won’t survive. I’m just commenting that, ironically, coding is turning out to be the 21st century’s auto line worker.
Just because software engineering is being done by AI does not apply most other jobs can, too—it’s just the impersonal ones.
I don't think ski instructors are safe from AI over the next ten years. It already seems quite feasable on indoor skiing treadmills (which are getting pretty popular for lessons), and would be enabled on actual slopes with some heads-up display and body sensors/cameras.
Are you asking me what I personally believe, or what the GP meant? I don't want to put words in their mouth, but stating that bartending is future-proof while white collar work isn't paints the picture of a future with more inequality and concentration of wealth rather than less.
Maybe I'm being overly broad in my interpretation, because they did specifically single out "coding" - but having personally worked both in and out of tech I don't really see non-dev "desk jobs" as having any particular moat against automation (and potentially even less than devs, which admittedly means I disagree with the likes of Jensen Huang).
So, when programmers go - they won't go alone. At that point it's reasonable to ask what kind of human labor will be marketable enough to command upward-mobility salary tiers, or if the 99.9% are perpetually relegated to pouring Bezos & co drinks while teaching them how to telemark [1]
[1] dystopia aside it would be entertaining to watch
What’s different from the Middle Ages is that raw food is cheap. A prepper can get a couple years of food for like $10k. It’s not going to be lavish eating, but it’s better than starving. So if you’re smart and you lose your job and are in the pre-singularity, but have some savings, you can stock up a few years worth of food, and ride things out. If you blow it all on DoorDash, that’s on you.
Where to live, now that’s another problem. Buy an RV and head out to the desert? The food won’t fit into the RV though so, uh, I dunno.
This is not the tech industries fault, but the media's: "There was a top-down decision that tech could not be covered positively, even when there was a true, newsworthy and positive story." [0]
One of the other things is that all the automation appears to be extracting all the joy out of life.
Why paint a picture or take a photograph when AI will do it for you?
Why design and build an application that will solve creative problems when an AI will do it? You should just review automated PRs.
Rather than, why go into the asbestos removal business and destroy your lungs when we have AI to do it and you can spend your time learning the guitar?
> One of the other things is that all the automation appears to be extracting all the joy out of life.
> Why paint a picture or take a photograph when AI will do it for you?
Yeah the tech fetishists think everyone should be awed and happy with the "beautiful" pictures the "AI" they made can generate, and reward them with copious back-pats (nevermind the output is crap and the tech boosters like them because they have no taste), but all they actually accomplish is to turn once-enjoyable things to ash. It's like how you can't even buy good quality basic clothes anymore, even if you want to, because everything is either flimsy cost-reduced crap or a Veblen good.
For instance, I'm starting to actively loathe header images, because they're getting replaced with "AI" generated garbage that (if it grabs my attention) always disappoints. People used to either not not have one or at least search around for a good photo or art image or something, but now many just throw up "AI" generated botshit to check a box one some "increase engagement" guide.
I'll break out one of my favorite Douglas Adams excerpts:
"The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe."
You've articulated a subtle point that few (so far) are amplifying -- many of these "creative things" that we're having "GenAI" generate for us are the sort of things we want to do, for our own pleasure, even (especially?) when nobody pays us to do it. Supplanting those activities via "GenAI" is not a "win".
There is a french expression that kind of describes the feeling: "une fuite en avant", which can be translated as "a headlong flight forward", to describe an escape from the problem by blindly rushing ever forward.
It seems like the fear of missing out on a possible profit has every tech-related company and their dog rush into the latest trends, without thinking about the mid to long term consequences of their choices.
It doesn't matter if it is about subscription models for everything, abusive private data gathering, or, more worryingly, unrestricted AI-everything. Their competitors might be doing it, so they have to do it preemptively. Very much similar to the Cold-War arms race.
All in all, it goes nicely hand in hand with an other expression: "Après moi, le déluge", literally translating to "After me, the floods", or, as we say in English:
I think this is a big, big mistake and a large reason why AI specifically and the tech industry in general is being perceived negatively. SV seems less interested in making "cyborgs" that enhance human abilities, and more interested in godlike AIs that aren't human at all.