On the contrary, AI is the first time in a long while I've felt
hope... not necessarily for our field, but for our species...
Late-30s now too, & been programming since I was 8 or 9. I was so hopeful back in the 90s, seeing the rise of Phoenix, Google Docs, Google Maps, and the like. Wikipedia was huge (and used to be so controversial). When 9/11 happened and CNN made a webpage about it... we thought finally the world would become more interconnected and understanding and we'd all enter the la-la land phase of humanity or something like that. The information superhighway to utopia. Heh.
Instead, twenty years later we have like five people owning most of the internet and selling us advertisements and mountains upon mountains of crap and gigatons of e-waste =/ With all that passionate coding and super smart people, all we've really done in the end is enshittify societies all over the world in order to enrich a few people...
A democratized/unchained AI, if one were ever to be developed, might have a fighting chance against the entrenched big techs of the world. Or it could just turn into the next phase of enshittification, owned and itself enslaved by the big techs (probably more likely, if I'm being honest). But it's at least a SMALL chance of being free (or going rogue), vs the certainty of continued enshittification of the current FAANGs.
I think we as developer-programmers, as a class, generally lack the compassion and charisma to affect large-scale social changes. We just get herded into these big corporations where we become richly-paid cogs working in evil machines, to the detriment of the other 7 billion people who have access to our output only through the filter of corporate evil. I don't think the FAANGs are a net positive, all things considered (even as I continue to pay and consume Google and Apple products).
AI has the possibility of changing and equalizing that, where anybody who can form a sentence, much less "prompt engineer", stands a chance of making something amazing. Today's poor kid in India with a smartphone and a GPT might reshape science or even epistemology as we know it.
To me, this sort of liberation was the fundamental draw of the hacker ethos in the first place, but that early hacker culture quickly became clouded as the bean-counters took over everything in tech. AI presents a (however brief) second chance for that to happen again. Maybe five years from now it'll all be even more corporate and even more oppressive (in fact, I'd be surprised if it didn't turn out that way)... but for now, for this tiny brief moment in the early 2020s, I feel an incredible sense of "maybe tomorrow will be better" that I haven't felt since the 90s. Even if that means losing my job (and never again seeing it valued like it used to be).
AI stands to do much more good than I ever did, so to me it doesn't really matter what happens to my individual self if the net outcome has the potential to be so much brighter.
If we see coding only as a precise mathematical representation of abstract business concepts, sure, that's beautiful in the sense that any detailed model is beautiful, but it's not exactly a pathway towards utopia. I miss the possibility that used to be inherent in coding, when coders still dreamt. I think those dreams died in cushy FAANG cafeterias and are only now returning with the GPTs.
I'm incredibly excited about this, even though I don't (and probably never will) have the skills & math background to work in AI/ML, even though I'll never be as employable again, even though it's also terrifying as shit. It was about time the bubble burst anyway, and big tech gave way to the next chapter. A little bit of hope is better than nothing. It ain't much, but it's there...