Comment by jongjong

I believe that AI is very useful in software development but I don't buy the narrative that AI is responsible for layoffs over the past few years (at least not most of them). I think that narrative is a convenient cover for systemic misallocation which created a need to contain inflation. I think big tech execs understood that, beyond increasing their company stock prices, they also need to work together to keep the monetary system itself under control. This is why they've been firing people whilst having record profits. They've reached such scale and the system has reached such fragility that they have to think and act like economists to keep the thing going. The economy itself has become the responsibility of big tech.

But who knows, maybe AI will accelerate so rapidly that it will fix the economy. Maybe we'll have robots everywhere doing all the work. But I worry about the lack of market incentives for people to adapt AI to real world use cases.

For example, I'm an open source developer who likes to tinker but I've been booted out of the opportunity economy. I can't afford to program robots. People like me are too busy using AI to parse spreadsheets and send targeted ads to even think about automating stuff. We work for companies and have no autonomy in the markets.

If things had worked out differently for me, I'd probably own a farm now and I'd be programming robots to do my harvest and selling the robots or licensing the schematics (or maybe I'd have made them open source, if open source had worked out so well for me). I don't have access to such opportunity unfortunately. The developers who worked for big tech are good at politics but often disconnected from value-creation. Few of them have the skills or interest to do the work that needs to be done now... They will just continue leveraging system flaws to make money, so long as those flaws exist.