Comment by soulofmischief

As a software engineer, I feel like I'm facing an existential crisis on two fronts. But the way I see it is, the technology itself is a beautiful marriage of art and algorithm. Exploring and dissecting the possibility space, doing architectural research, creating expressive agents, there are so many interesting and things to still capture my interest and leave me creatively fulfilled.

As someone whose job has always been to automate away tedious human labor, like all software engineers, I've long made peace with the fact that I may sometimes ride the front of a disruptive wave. But from my perspective, this was an inevitability, and the moment I saw this current wave of machine learning picking up steam back in 2015, I started dedicating myself to learning the field and building neural networks and agentic systems.

I weep for what is happening right now to junior engineers in my industry, but I have hope that the industry will adapt and the kind of work I like to do will remain. Artistically, I deeply struggle with the fact that my creative work will increasingly be drowned out by an AI-accelerated long tail. I haven't yet figured out what it will mean to be an artist in the future, but I remain open-minded and hopeful that I will continue to find creative fulfillment within communities and collectives. I also hope that traditional art remains economically viable, but the cat is out of the bag and a lot of art is going to get commodified and outsourced, and people are going to lose professional employment, just like whenever the automated loom became popular and caused unemployment among weavers.