I guess I kinda get why people hate AI
I’m sitting on a lānai in a hotel in Waikiki beach, writing this article, and wondering if the job I am starting nine days from now will be my last.
This is a unique situation for me in a few ways—I’ve never been to Hawaii before, I think the five minutes it’s taken me to come up with that opening sentence is the somehow the most time I’ve ever spent on a hotel balcony, and this is the first time I’ve actually followed through on the “I should delay my start date to take a vacation” idea I’ve had every time I’ve switched jobs. There’s one difference, however, that looms larger in my mind. It’s not the “wondering if the new job will be my last” thing. I’ve worked exclusively in startups, and while the primary reason I’ve done so has been because I enjoy the agency and impact you can have at early-stage companies, I’d be lying if the idea of cashing in cheap ISOs into early retirement wasn’t a factor in each job offer I accepted. The difference here is why I’m wondering that. Previously, it was wondering if I would need a job after this one.
Now, it’s wondering if I’ll be able to acquire a job after this one, or if AI is going to completely take over my profession and ruin my career.
Not the first time
I’m not the first human to have anxiety about technological development. Change is scary, and technology changes a lot of stuff. In my opinion, these changes are mostly for the better—but that’s not an opinion everybody shares.
The classical cultural example is the Luddites, a social movement that failed so utterly that its name because a common metaphor for stubborn morons who are terrified of technological innovation that helps everybody. Deservedly so, to be clear—while it’s true that textile experts did suffer from the advent of mechanical weaving, their loss was far outweighed by the gains the rest of the human race received from being able to afford more than two shirts over the average lifespan.
The other example that comes to mind is the (possibly apocryphal) stories around the rollout of ATMs, where many supposedly predicted that the number of bankers in the US would collapse now that you could withdraw $20 in singles to leave tips without talking to a person. The exact opposite happened, of course. Being able to easily interact with banks, without waiting in a line that’s too long for the dum-dum you get at the end to be a real consolation, made people use banks more. And suddenly tellers became loan managers, and account advisors, and the machine that was supposed to destroy banking employment wound up supercharging it.
I could go on, but somebody else already has, so there’s not much point in it. Technology changes things, and sometimes it hurts people in the short-term, but every invention from fire to mRNA vaccines has wound up generally increasing human welfare. I’ve long taken the view that this trend will continue. I remember arguing with people who would link GCP Gray’s “Humans need not apply” video (which has apparently been retitled “humans are becoming horses”) about how wrong they were about AI. In that era, nearly a decade before “Attention is all you need” would be published and usher in the LLM age, I was so confident that any developments in AI would be for the better.
I am now a little less confident than I was.
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