I love AI; I hate AI

I have a love hate relationship with tools like Cursor. On one hand, it can save me hours finding a type-o amidst 500 lines of yaml, that my sleep deprived, Monster fuelled brain may otherwise have been reduced almost to tears trying to find. It can churn out all the boring bits, and save me the effort of manually typing out each character. Leaving me to do the ‘bigger picture stuff’.

But on the other hand, I watch with a sense of resentment, as it shatters the years of self-delusion I’d fostered, that Software Engineering was some great ‘craft’, on which humanity would look back with a whimsical fondness. In five hundred years time, instead of family names like ‘Smith’, or ‘Carpenter’, perhaps ‘John Fullstack’ or ‘Sandra Salesforce-integration-engineer’ will be among the most common names.

The more I play forward this trend in my head, I see a situation where Software Engineers and ML Engineers alike, are all competing to see who can end their own careers the quickest. Congrats! Here’s your P45! 🥳🎉

Which leaves me wondering what all these Software Engineers and knowledge workers more broadly, will do once they’ve finally automated themselves out of a career. But also who stands to gain. I suspect I already know the answer. There’s a certain peanut headed, space spacefaring billionaire, currently ditching swathes of talented engineers and knowledge workers as we speak, in order to ‘seize the opportunity provided by AI’.

Amazon, which confirmed it plans to cut roughly 14,000 corporate roles, said it needs to be “organised more leanly” to seize the opportunity provided by AI. - BBC
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I fear for a future where a handful of multi-trillionaires (by that point) own vast swathes of data centers, whilst most of humanity are employed to solely serve giant warehouses full of nondescript flickering light adorned black boxes.

In the past few years, a nightmare inducing techno-feudalist vision has gone from sci-fi films, to something you can see the nascent signatures of (see Curtis Yarvin, and always beware of Programmers with political manifestos…). But at the same time, I still find myself desperately rooting for my local council to go the whole hog and hook up their entire parking planning process to some AI model. I still secretly (less so now) dream of a world where estate agents are packed up into tiny black boxes and shoved into a server rack (sorry for any estate agents reading this, you were simply the last group of people to annoy me).

It touches on the fact that most of us hoped that the many kafkaesque and painfully boring processes and frustrating chores we have to deal with, would be replaced by AI. Freeing up more time and mental energy to pursue the meaningful and the fulfilling. We wanted boring things gone, the boring bits of our job, the tedious parts of our daily lives.

What do most people find fulfilling and meaningful? It’s a nebulous question, but for many people, in relation to work, will say something along the lines of applying their knowledge and creativity to a problem in order to improve some aspect of life.

Well, some smart arses decided to apply their knowledge and creativity to a technology that can apply its own boundless knowledge and creativity, to just about everything. It transpired that, counter to the visions of the future✨ many of us held in the 90’s, of humanoid robots loading the dishwasher, and drones delivering food whilst we got cracking unimpeded with all the important creative ‘knowledge stuff’. The first bloody thing we use AI to automate away? Cracking on unimpeded with all the important creative ‘knowledge stuff’.

It transpired that out of the physically tedious tasks, and knowledge/creativity based tasks, the latter was actually the easier of the two to automate and replace with AI. So who delivers my food? A man in a refrigerated van (and more often than I’d like to admit, a man on a bike). By the way, no sexism intended here, for whatever reason, driving refrigerated vans seems to be an exclusively male dominated industry. And who loads the dishwasher? I do (inefficiently, so I’m often reminded).

Despite the fact AI has seemingly mastered the art of replacing things that I rather enjoyed doing, I’m still waiting for it to reduce the burden of boring life things. I’m still waiting for it to revolutionise local government services, or end estate agents.

AI seems set to disrupt entire sectors of the economy, but that little shit chat bot your phone company insists on you losing the will to live trying to use, still can’t update your billing address.

And of course, on top of that, there’s the looming danger of the whole thing being owned by about five people who just so happen to be building underground bunkers. Call me old fashioned, but some would say that seemed a bit… dodgy?

So whilst we get pushed out of the comfortable work we at some point enjoyed (you know, the jobs where you don’t even need to get dressed in the morning), and turned into podgy, inefficient humanoid bots. We have the idea of a shrinking number of mentally unstable bunker dwelling billionaires who own all the AI infrastructure to keep our creative minds occupied.

It’s quite hard to put into words, I’ve probably written these fears down about ten times by this point. If I could learn the art of being succinct, I’d probably condense my fears to: Billionaires are dictating what’s worth automating away. It’s not necessarily us, those with most to lose by all this, that sets the agenda. More and more of us will find it harder and harder to find work in our chosen careers, whilst getting planning permission for a loft conversion gets treated the same as if you were proposing a 500ft bronze statue of yourself in the local park.

We need to evaluate the balance of political and economic power when we see a recurring pattern emerge. And this is a recurring pattern. Monopolies around technologies and services that became vital have happened throughout modern post-industrial history. Electricity, internet, etc.

It’s also worth us stopping to think about what will bring us meaning in a world where knowledge work requires fewer and fewer people. When we reach a situation where the bulk of jobs that are left, are jobs that were deemed not worth the cost of automating (yet). Where, at any moment, your role could be replaced by a small plastic box on wheels, or simply by unseeable forces sat on a server rack somewhere.

I can almost hear the faint laughter of the down trodden coal miners of generations past, as we march towards the cobalt mines. A future akin to Dune, where the masses peck at the scorched earth, looking for shiny rocks to please our new overlords… Urgh. Anyway. If you started reading this hoping for my opinion on Cursor: yeah it’s alright sometimes.