I'm observing my own reactions to the unceasing onslaught of AI. While there are yet people who resist AI, many of them mischaracterize it as evil. It's not evil. It's banal. Perhaps Arendt would disagree that there's a difference.
I tried some LLM coding assistants, apparently before they were "good enough". They did not impress me. But I see article after article of breathless hype. I see people I respect completely won over. And yet. When I try again, I see the limitations. I see the externalized work transforming from deep understanding to wrangling code-gacha machines. I see the extreme waste inherent in outsourcing thought to these inefficient colossi.
But it doesn't matter. The fact is that they do work "good enough". Not good enough for me, mind you. Good enough for shitposts. Good enough for right now. Good enough for fitting right into the corporate practices of shiny facade over deeply broken systems.
I love systems. I love systemic thinking. And THAT is what AI is killing. Killing thought, killing understanding. Killing the act of mulling something over, letting it stew in the back of your head until something anneals and snaps into a lower energy fit that makes it all make more sense.
Nothing makes sense anymore. We live in the Library of Babel. Everything is available to be generated on demand. And it's all slop. The infinitesmal fraction of works that is actually meaningful is buried, drowned. And no one cares.
I'm in mourning that the career of solving problems by understanding and modeling, encoding that in a system and simulation, then building tools that enrich and empower... is gone. What's left is endless automated regurgitations of things that came before. It's supplicating at the altar of AI for something entertaining, something pretty. Something right now.
But I still need to eat. My family needs food and shelter. So I'll try to find a job. A career in software development may be impossible now, but maybe a job isn't. Almost every job I've had before was a soul-crushing experience of giving genuine effort for paltry rewards. Making someone else richer at my own expense so that I could afford to continue the cycle. And it used to be okay. I was relatively well-paid. Not enough to leave the working class, but enough to live comfortably in the approximately 40% of time that remained my own.
I do not see that continuing. I honestly don't know how I'm going to make it work. Maybe I'll end up doing the computer equivalent of flipping burgers. Maybe my skill isn't a skill anymore.
It happened to textiles, and we got affordable clothes.
It happened to carpenters and to anyone who built with their hands.
The advent of the home microwave led to frozen tv dinners, and the ability for just about anyone to have something resembling any sort of cuisine at home.
Fast fashion, particle-board furniture, dollar-store quality _stuff_, and microwaved food. That's our present, and that's our future.
We'll have bland generated-on-demand TV. We'll have a million Roblox games. We'll be able to match-3 of anything on our locked down iPhones.
The worst part though is that in order to use these banality machines, we have to pay for the privilege. The means of production have been stolen from us. We, the developers who once created worlds with our minds, who sculpted abstractions into tools, must now rent the privilege of producing slop. How long until trying to produce something unapproved isn't stopped at the App stores, but at the IDE, at the prompt. Imagine producing meshtastic, or ICE-block, or bittorrent, or Annas-archive in the near future. I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.