Thoughts
The point that this article makes, which hits home for me, is that society doesn’t care about having skilled programmers.
Society doesn’t even care about having human programmers. Companies just want the computers to do what they want as cheaply as possible.
That sucks because I’m someone who wants to be a skilled programmer. Right now I’m being paid for that, but I’m not primarily concerned about the logistical difficulty of losing my job or having to change industries. Even if you offered me 500k to be a security guard tomorrow, I would be still be sad to not be programming. I’ve invested into practicing and learning computer science, getting a degree in it. Writing good code is something I care about and something I’m proud of. And so if society values that less, it bothers me even beyond the amount that it affects me.
Some comments are unsympathetic because this has happened to other jobs before. Society used to value skilled weavers and skilled carpenters and skilled cobblers, and we don’t anymore. The skills still exist, but they’re not seen as important: most people don’t care.
In other careers we still value skill. We still value skilled lawyers and doctors, or at least pretend to until robots get better at surgery than human doctors, and it’s revealed that we don’t actually care about having skilled doctors at all, we actually care about getting the best treatment possible. Skilled sports players will probably be valued longer than skill in any other area because it’s impressive not to get the ball to the other side of the field, but to do it as a human within the rules. Jon Bois in his sci-fi story 17776 predicts that in the future, after all problems are solved, we will do nothing but play and watch football.
We’re watching AI move several fields—programming, writing, art—from the realm where skill is valued to the realm where it is not. And that hurts to watch. Again, not because people might lose their jobs, but because I care about humans being experienced and having the opportunity to care about their work.
And perhaps that’s irrational. Perhaps human skill has no inherent value when arguing from first principles, and perhaps we should let machines do the work.
And perhaps it’s hypocritical that I lament the lack of value for programmings skills that I have, but I don’t lament the lack of value for carpentry. I buy flat pack furniture and I’m glad that we have power tools and factories.
But when they come for programmers I can imagine a world where no skilled labor is valued and everyone either oversees the factories or works in the factories or plays sports. (And that obviously won’t happen to “everyone”, because today there’s still a man in a trailer park who makes his living fixing wooden chairs and in the future there will still be programmers.)
But it’s weird and uncomfortable to realize that, even as a skilled programmer, my work is not important. Now, after the invention of LLMs, even if no one on the planet wrote another line of code ever again, civilization would be fine because we could prompt AI to write it for us.
In conclusion, even the “best case scenario” where AI ushers in a post scarcity society, I’ve still lost something because my skill set would no longer be important to that society. And that would suck.