The problem with this outlook (not with you personally) is that the increase in accessibility for you comes at a cost, but the way things work these days the cost is not paid by you but by someone else — someone you'll probably never even meet. The cost has been abstracted away from you and foisted onto somebody else against their will. This shows up as people adversely affected by local data centers (increased pollution, higher electricity prices), people displaced in the workforce (author of the article), people of the future who will not understand things because it's easier to skip understanding for now (students, early learners), and so many more.
It's very liberating — so long as you are given the ability to not think about the consequences for these other people, and the abstraction process by which AI companies are providing their services gives you that freedom by design. At the very least, it is something about which you perhaps ought to be wary.
There are many things about our modern world which make less intuitive sense than the lives of hunter gatherers. People are trying to figure out how to survive in the conditions they are placed in.
Physical labour was weakened and then had to compete with machines, till we got lights out factories.
We were left with the service economy to find roles that allowed us to thrive. Now that is being threatened as well. It is unlikely that LLMs are going to make us all into entrepreneurs and capital owners.
Not to mention, the service sector required far fewer workers than manufacturing.
This isn't quite the same kind of moment we see over and over. It's not simply cars taking out horse drawn carriages.
Your point about adapting to basic material conditions under industrialization is something else. I wouldn't agree with what you're saying. It may not be your analogy, horse drawn to motorized carriages- but this is the cotton gin all over again. The only difference is we're now out of new industries generated out of the new technology to employ people. No more network admins needed, no more programmers needed, no more cotton gin repairmen are needed.
I agree in that the conditions are different with this one. But the process is the same we've seen over and over. This time there's just no newly created jobs out of this new revolution, 100 million legal and illegal immigrants flooding developed nations and more coming, and 50 years ago women entering the workforce expanding it 50% overnight. You're correct in that it's not going to work, but I see different reasons for it than you do. Things are going to have to change or Europe, the US and Canada are going to become slums like the rest of the world. And that process is going to be even faster than it normally would, because the ~50% population expansion consists of people that are used to slums.
I saw a video today, talking about how this is really the end goal of what we've been working towards for 200 years. Automation and scale and convenience uber alles. As structured it's not a good idea and it seems that Dr. Kaczynski wasn't wrong in diagnosis, only in the treatment. But here we are and we're pretty pot-committed, so I guess we have to see for ourselves what's on the other side.
But there's no reason for us to be angry about it or resist it, of course
I'm not into it. Go ask Claude instead. It has more patience for this sort of ignorant attitude than I do.
Maybe "capitalism with more substantial taxes for large corporations and the wealthy and fewer loopholes"? Can we try either of those?
They at least have the notion that you've got a soul, and that it's a thing that should be tended to. A boss who has genuinely internalized the belief that the value of all human knowledge and expertise has gone to zero—such a man is unlikely to be similarly burdened in his assumptions about you.
Second, I think what is healthy for humans to yearn for is purpose and meaning, and convenience and idleness are almost counterproductive to that. Ok it's hard to argue with convenience, but nowhere in all of this has AI threatened to make my life more convenient by doing the chores for me, it just takes away fun creative tasks that I can get paid for.
And this is, of course, the bitter irony. As that meme goes, I don't want it to write my prose so I can do the dishes, I want it to do the dishes so I can write prose.
They will share just enough so people are content enough not to riot. Keeping the masses at bay will mean they get to build even more wealth.
When enough people stop being able to buy food is when revolution happens.
That being said, I can't see this entire field existing in five years anymore. I'm hoping for at least two more years, but who knows?
This stuff is coming for all white collar, the barrier to entry is completely gone now. Maybe not the barrier to mastery (yet), but the bottom has fallen out.
I think you might be viewing AI and humanity as a zero sum experiment. It's really not. Go read some David Brin (Existence is a good start). We don't know all the positive and negative aspects to come, but we aren't in a dark forest situation. Existentially, AI is here, what are we going to do with it?
And I’m wondering if this isn’t the enormous amount of organizational debt from having security second to everything finally coming calling.
I’ll give you an example of one that was written recently actually.
The initial compromise happened because the app explicitly did not verify auth claims when a specific string was in the ISS field. Well, fuzzers exist and are common.
The next issue was that once you’re in, there was no delineation between admin and regular users. Everyone had all privileges if they just made the calls.
Anyway, we did the usual post-remediation investigation and write up. The devs were of course using the latest models, as they were instructed, and the issue stemmed from a problem they’d been having integrating a specific company into their auth scheme.
Eventually, after many enumerations, the model opted to just skip auth altogether if that companies ISS was present. The devs, being in the habit of just accepting the changes did so and because of the nature of the code implemented nothing caught it in the pipeline.
This is sadly an incredibly common story and it won’t be fixed by models improving I don’t believe.
How long it'll last, I can't say, only that before LLMs, the industry entered a phase of consolidation and quiescence that had me seriously worried about a fade into irrelevance. The delusions of businesspeople and the managerial class about what LLMs can do has fueled a very nice business renaissance, as they run into the limits but have committed to contracts, business models, etc.
I don't care whether I'm writing code or reviewing LLM generated stuff, but the prospect of losing my job and having to survive on welfare for the rest of my life isn't nice.
What seems to happen though is it always gets pulled into a discussion of "But they can't X" or "but ma taste!" or the old generic canard "can't replicate what's not in the training data"
All I want is for people to see that yes, this is happening, accept it, then figure out what a good response would be to it. Instead we get everything from stochastic parrot parrots to "Dario is just marketing when he tries to warn us" to the old an thoughtless "But if you think it's bad, why are you doing it?"
Please.
Change doesn't happen until we are at the absolute brink of IMMEDIATE catastrophe.
Why? Why are jobs necessary? Who needs to have them? Should we pay people to be stopgaps/just in case jobs in case the machine fails (probably?) -- who organizes that? Do we have a human economy and AI economy? How to keep them decoupled? Does this mean stamping provenance (who made what onto what?) should be a core of the future? Right now? What does that look like? Are there other things we can do to ensure we get the Banks future and not a shittier one? Is the Banks future a good one? Is disempowerment a real concern? If so what do we do about it? Human reserves? Zoos?
I do not have answers, but I know the questions are vastly more interesting than "what job will the AI not be able to do" wtf PLEASE
The problem is that income tax by workers is by far the largest contribution to the total tax intake of any country. To match the missing tax from replaced workers (including the highest paid) in the US, you'd have to increase tax on corporations by 3-4x, which would kill many businesses. On top of that you'd have far more people taking from the tax pot via welfare.
In the worse case scenario, mass replacement of workers by AI would essentially amount to the destruction of the economy.
And yeah, I agree, there is no bottom anymore.
I _am_ a craftsman - software, wood, and a few more domains. There is a lot of personal satisfaction I find in woodcraft through the motion and the exercise. I love that this is a luxury hobby instead of a personal necessity. The difference there is that if I take my time on personal necessity where the market isn't paying for it, I may take food out of my kids' mouths or lose the roof over their head. Luxury craft hobbies face only self-imposed pressures.
AI is letting me build similarly. I can continue to craft my Rust and my Python and my Typescript and my Fortran to my heart's content - and those skills help in the day to day - yet I'm also able to compete in the market and build things that were really infeasible before.
How are you keeping your “human” addition to the loop valuable, is it through the time spent on the software craftsman hobby?
Im in my early 30’s, and trying to stay ahead. I feel it was easier prior to LLM’s, and now its tough to even know where to focus skill building.
Yes, and, integrating it into my normal tasks and delivery. Some principles:
(1) I wouldn't worry so much about staying _ahead_ of the technology, rather, focus on the outcomes for yourself and the people you serve. That gives a more holistic and natural boundary when you research and adopt the technologies that help you get there.
(2) I'd also focus on adopting what works best, not what is latest and greatest. Tech regressions definitely happen[1], and you know your need the best.
(3) When quantifying, cost-benefit is typically focused on Benefit / Costs - 1 to give incremental lift. Unsurprisingly, if benefit is high and costs are higher, it might not be worthwhile to adopt!
[1] https://roderick.dev/writing/2026-08-28-obsessing-harnesses/ forgive a small bit of self promotion, but I'm researching this exact problem with my research group, about how to quantify solum benchmaxxing, tradefoff adoption, regression, and improvement for harnesses.