Comment by chrisfosterelli
5 hours ago
This is well put and something I think a lot of us struggle with.
The internet itself seems filled with the AI maximalists who have no end of hype for the latest prompt 'technique' or AI doomers that would skin you alive if you mention you used AI to make a photo once.
Quietly among peers I talk to there seems to be a very different group that exists: those that recognize AI is super valuable for getting a lot of work done but also feel that suddenly the work is so much less exciting than it was before.
Sure, there's the obvious "I enjoy the mechanics of programming" component that's gone but then there's also this general feeling that is hard to shake which feels a little deeper. I've wondered about it. Is it all the layoffs? The suddenly shaky economics for a lot of our companies? The uncertainty of the career's future in general?
I think the author has put their thumb on it well to describe it as a lack of intellectual community. That feels like at least part of it.
> then there's also this general feeling that is hard to shake which feels a little deeper. I've wondered about it.
I had an instance of the feeling (and also what the OP is describing) when writing a post about a technical question recently.
Previously, I'd have posted the question to HN or Stack Overflow - and, in addition to hopefully getting a solution, it might also become a resource for other people who had the same question. Finally, maybe there would have been some interesting discussion around the question.
Now: Ask the AI. Instant answer, question solved, but also, nothing else.
It's very easy to just not ask the Artificial Stupidity machine.
There was also a period before google where people would discuss questions and topics. You know what most often response I got after the ubiquity of google? “Idk, google it, it’s not that hard, why are you asking me?” I just think AI is the new version of Google. At least at work, I have now started to hear more often than not “just use ChatGPT, it’ll do it for you, we don’t need to talk about it.”
I may be able to stop asking AI, doesn’t mean those around me want me to.
Genuine and good faith question: why can't you find intellectual community anywhere else?
A bit harsh, I know, but it seems like rather a waste if we consider ourselves software people and make that our whole. If AI has replaced the need for intellectual community in software, can't we just fulfill that same need elsewhere?
Why not join a book club, or find some other outlet which serves your intellectual curiosity? May this not turn out to be an opportunity?
In my defense I didn't suggest I cannot :)
I have not been attending as many tech meetups or keeping tabs on tech news like I used to. I've been spending more direct time with friends (tech and not). I've also found enjoyment spending a lot of time in more niche internet communities that are not actually about software dev but tend to attract a lot of software dev people. I've definitely noticed I'm spending far more time on other, non-tech hobbies of mine. It has been a while since I've done any OSS stuff or organized a tech meetup.
There's the whole component of identity you mentioned. I've considered myself a 'computer guy' since elementary school and it's been a bit odd to think what I would be if not that. I'd never have even entertained that idea until recently, but in the short term I think I have developed enough of a product mindset and business skills to stay useful in tech. Maybe I need to think of myself as a 'product guy' or 'entrepreneurial guy' instead.
If AI is soon able to replace everything we bring to the table as the maximalists are claiming then honestly all knowledge work go out the window pretty quickly. If that happens then that is its own scary thought and I don't think we're really ready for that economically / socially. I pay a lot of attention to my retirement funds lately.
So frankly, I think I'm instinctively doing what you suggest... But I think it's also natural to feel some weird feelings about it all!
Not the OP. But a few things:
Firstly, in 25 years as a SWE, and 30 years as a musician and artist, I've always found conversations about tooling to be pretty boring. I'm much more interested in conversations about intentional logic and design. As in why something was implemented the way it was implemented, as opposed to how.
Intellectual communities rely on a combination of hobbyists and professionals. They discuss their tools and their results, but they also discuss the rationale for why they crafted something a certain way.
I don't define myself as only a SWE, but that's not necessary to have appreciated that intellectual community. I hate that it's disappearing.
At the same time, other intellectual communities are also disappearing down the same vast, cannibalistic maw of AI, as people stop intentionally crafting strategies, software, music, and images for themselves.
So my own answer to this would be that these communities evolved out of necessity, not because someone needed to make new friends. Join a book club, etc. just sounds like a sort of secondhand way to "find community" as if that were the original goal. There is nothing urgent about a book club, nothing that pertains to your job or your life or even your interests; it's just to make new friends and read a book. "Join a book club" is like "go to the gym". A book club is not an intellectual community in any sense resembling those which were composed of individuals creating their own things and bouncing their ideas off each other. In fact, a book club is simply a way of consuming things together.
When the creative process itself becomes pointless, all you have left are consumption-driven hobbies and clubs. It's just not the same.
Not the same as me having to tackle a really hard logic problem and asking people I respect as very smart coders for their input on how to handle it. Not the same as me spending all night for months recording an album and asking other musicians I respect for their input before I release it. Not the same as me writing a novel and giving it to other novelists before I submit it for publication.
That's what we're losing. Or, effectively, what has been stolen from us (all my code, all my novels, all my music) and re-sold by people who don't care to other people who don't care.
In an Ayn Rand sense, I'll just stop creating anything for the public, and so will everyone else who has creative ideas. The world can drown in a cesspool of regenerated slop that they stole from the people who had ideas; it's all a tower of babylon, owned by a few companies now, so you won't get very far in making any slop apps/music/writing profitable. There's no barrier to entry involving the brain now, just how much money you have (and no one will make any more money now who doesn't already have it; there will be no further upward mobility from education or effort).
No, just go join a gym, and run on a treadmill. Your input in the shape of the world is no longer needed. That's the general idea.
Thanks, I am not a musician so I found your comparison to it very interesting. I otherwise agree with everything you've said and I think the creative aspect is something that is absent from my alternate communities
> "Is it all the layoffs? The suddenly shaky economics for a lot of our companies? The uncertainty of the career's future in general?"
I'd say that those make up the majority of it. During the dotcom bust, there were waves of bankruptcies and layoffs, tech stock valuations crashing and staying stagnant, and people struggling to find jobs for months, etc. too and there was industry-wide doom and gloom and pundits proclaiming that software was no longer worth getting into. So all this angst seems very familiar. People would probably not be as bothered about AI if the the career outlook was positive.
Maybe it's that to some people, earning something or creating something is more satisfying than stealing it, while to many other people it doesn't matter where it comes from. This is true in all walks of life. I never cheated on a test, but plenty of kids I knew did. Those people have no problem taking shortcuts because they don't understand the satisfaction of doing something right.
When a whole civilization falls victim to that mentality, we end up with zero responsibility and intellectual collapse.
Did you invent the alphabet? If not, then everything you've ever written or coded was theft.
The alphabet is everyone's to use freely. If the alphabet were distributed under a GPL, and I used it without attribution, that would be theft.
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> a lack of intellectual community.
The issue may be simpler than that. The technical cohort that's on the chopping block of automation right now uses seemingly sophisticated words to basically describe what the coal miners and human calculators felt in the past. When you compound this with the general struggle on the social skills dimension that defines the majority of this group, you can see why the idea of stepping out of their respective narrow field and getting a hobby would seem ludicrous.
There's always some anxiety around job security, that's nothing new. I've been around enough rounds of that to know it well. This isn't that.
We're talking about a fundamental disruption of knowledge work, to know that you might not even be able to pivot to something else. It's kind of like when people would callously tell the coal miners to "learn to code", except it's now "learn to be an electrician".
But I don't feel you're really acting in good faith here, with your negative stereotypes and derisive language.
So: the anxiety is real and not new, but this phase of automation is really unique and different, because of "fundamental" "disruption" of "knowledge work". Consider me convinced, since this line of reasoning is original and not accounted for in the comment you're replying to.
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Yea it’s probably deep seated horror at slowly being replaced. I’m not sure what I feel but ordering a clanker around everyday is exhausting both emotionally and intellectually. I would rather not even talk to the thing, but they fucking suck at software architecture no matter what anyone says. You can’t just leave them alone with a task because you get the worst designs 7/10 times. The other 3/10 scare me enough that I’ve started learning how to install solar and battery systems online.
I should probably read something about past instances of this; you mentioned coal miners and maybe hearing their stories will help us.
> I should probably read something about past instances of this; you mentioned coal miners and maybe hearing their stories will help us.
IMO it probably won't make you feel any better, for the following reasons:
1) The AI disruption is going to be far wider than any previous disruption, people will have much less chance to pivot to something else while continuing to do economically productive work, because not just one field is in danger, every field based on cognitive work is in danger (and all the manual labor isn't too far behind with robotics advances).
2) Even despite the more limited blast radius of prior work disruptions, they were still generally awful for the people who got disrupted. People love to cheerily talk about how the industrial revolution lead to a world of more, different, better, safer jobs and while that did happen, the newer world wasn't really for the people who were displaced, but rather people of the next generations. The people who were actively displaced were mostly hard fucked... economically destitute and emotionally damaged from loss of purpose.
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> Sure, there's the obvious "I enjoy the mechanics of programming" component that's gone but then there's also this general feeling that is hard to shake which feels a little deeper. I've wondered about it. Is it all the layoffs? The suddenly shaky economics for a lot of our companies? The uncertainty of the career's future in general?
Internet town squares have polarized. Not just by capital P politics, but just according to the poles that inhabit them. The highly energized maximalists and doomers spend all of their time posting online about it, not really caring about whether the community or even reality conforms with their thoughts. The rest of us roll our eyes and leave the town squares. We laugh at them in our group chats, sneer at them at our parties, but we don't talk in the town squares about the absurdity anymore.
I don't really know what to do about this. When the SaaS boom was happening in the late 2000s/early 2010s, there was a tranche of cautiously optimistic and cautiously pessimistic bloggers, along with the highly motivated zealots. The middle is hollowed out now.