AI job grief: A psychological crisis hitting tech workers
jackmaguire.org
jackmaguire.org
'Work as Identity: The Foundation'
Knowledge workers hold a different relationship to their labor than manufacturing workers did. For a cognitive professional, expertise is not only an activity. It is a large part of the self. A data scientist who has spent a decade building statistical judgment does not experience that judgment as a detachable tool. It is closer to a personality trait. When automation threatens the work, it reaches past the income and touches the identity.'
Excerpt from the article above. It heavily leans on Reddit quotes, articles posted on Reddit and the number of upvotes to backup or sustain certain arguments. But I found the article informative, and publishing a message and a feeling I've been struggling to describe, write or externalise. Hope it's helpful or at least interesting to us here.
Apparently my feelings of disillusionment, confusion, anxiety, failing self esteem and occasionally anger or frustration from AI has a name that's starting to be written and formalised. Though not yet accepted either informally or formally, but it's starting a conversation which I'm thankful for, _Artificial Intelligence Replacement Dysfunction_. From the article:
"In September 2025, two psychiatrists at the University of Florida College of Medicine, Stephanie McNamara and Joseph E. Thornton, published a paper in the journal Cureus proposing a new construct they call Artificial Intelligence Replacement Dysfunction, or AIRD."
I'll be sharing this article with my psychologist when we meet in a few weeks.
The quote is talking about manufacturing labor. This is the guy on the assembly line who lowers the press, makes his thousandth widget for a day, and then lifts it up. Rinse and repeat.
Now that is happening to many kinds of knowledge workers. Assembly lines mechanized the work of artisans. LLMs are in the process of mechanizing knowledge and creative work, of certain kinds.
Andrew Yang actually made a strong point when he was talking about automation-driven job losses way back in 2019. He said you can offer the best and most expensive retraining programs imaginable to help people displaced from their jobs move to fields like healthcare - but most truck drivers, even if out of work, will never even consider retaining to work as a nurse. Identities are not as malleable to the whims of supply and demand as some might want to believe.
And nursing also require a lot more study then people assume, 40 years old trucker will have hard time spending that much time in school even if it was his lifelong dream.
In your head maybe?
In the US, 87.3% of nurses are female and 92.3% of truckers are male.
A “computer” used to be a job mostly done by female. Now it’s the opposite.
How do you mean? Trucking doesn’t mostly attract men and gp made it up?
(Of course there are manual jobs that people have as their identity.)
However there are people in the workforce who don’t identify with their work. Those are likely not in professions that Marx thought of when he wrote about alienation, but instead are Uber Eats delivery drivers, call centre workers, flight attendants on low-cost airlines, nurses in mediocre hospitals, and so on.
They’re low effort takes from terminally online weirdos. The number of upvotes something gets is meaningless. Using it as some kind of appeal to authority or credibility on a topic is a joke.
Like those SEO slop gaming articles about “controversies” because some anonymous account on Reddit complained that a character got race swapped or something.
This crap gets pulled into Google search results and gets repeated as truth by Gemini when it does a web search.
It’s gross.
I take issue with calling it a dysfunction when the symptoms are a completely natural and appropriate response to an irritation. To me, it has a whiff of blaming the victim.
I think the idea that coal miners or factory laborers or whoever else in blue-collar work did not identify with their work is just wrong, and there's evidence going back as far as the Tomb of Eurysaces the Baker of people deeply identifying with work we might otherwise be tempted to view as lowly.
> > Not all articles in this AI category are outright positive. They range from the euphoric to the slightly depressed. But they share the same premise of inevitability; even the most negative will say that, of course I use AI, I’m not some Luddite[3]! It is integral to my work now. But I don’t just let it run the whole game. I copy–paste with judicious care. blah blah blah
This looks very similar.
Because what is happening? People are getting laid off. Because of AI. They say. There are many doubters here on this board at least. But what is the first premise of Inevitability? In my book it is to take AI as a given, as the unstoppable force; don’t necessarily praise AI, in fact you can write as if it is hitting us like a merciless meteor. But you have to use that as the premise.
Next find a topic to write about. (It’s really about AI but you need a topic that is about the “externalities”.) Well here you have Reddit Comments. Which you seem to imply to have similar thoughts about as me; Reddit posts can be astroturfed to all hell for all you know. Certainly now that they can hide their comment history.
So, Depression. How human. How thoughtful. What a soft subject. What a Trojan Horse? That someone cares about this Definitely a Thing? Like here[2]:
> > If you're an engineer who uses AI daily - for design reviews, code generation, debugging, documentation, architecture decisions - and you've noticed that you're somehow more tired than before AI existed, this post is for you. You're not imagining it. You're not weak. You're experiencing something real that the industry is aggressively pretending doesn't exist. And if someone who builds agent infrastructure full-time can burn out on AI, it can happen to anyone.
It is very real and we feel your emotions. Right. The meteor has struck us all.
So what’s the point of Inevitabilism? (This is all speculation anyway.) Fear is certainly a factor. Because only investors need to feel good about AI. Workers need discipline more than positivism.[3]
But does that mean this is false? Of course not. But how much of this Shared Depression is because of Interesting Pieces like this one? Just think. You can ruminate yourself into a state of depression (at least lower-d) without anyone giving you even one bad “performance review”.
> > Knowledge workers hold a different relationship to their labor than manufacturing workers did. For a cognitive professional, expertise is not only an activity. It is a large part of the self. A data scientist who has spent a decade building statistical judgment does not experience that judgment as a detachable tool. It is closer to a personality trait. When automation threatens the work, it reaches past the income and touches the identity.'
No, it’s a fucking paycheck my guy.
To the extent that it’s an identity though. Uh what? Never met a pre-computer, non-office worker male put into disability or retirement? A homemaker with no one to care for?
Really you went to Reddit and concluded that only office workers have an identity? Eat shit, TFA.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46935607
I lay none of the blame on AI the technology, and all the blame on AI as a mindset and excuse.
Layoffs are not due to AI, but it's a convenient excuse: "more productive, don't need people, we're firing on all cylinders and yeah, firing 20% of the workforce while we're at it". Everything else being equal, the "more productive so we earn 20%" counterfactual makes more sense - but of course, not everything else is equal.
Treadmill speed will increase, no doubt. We haven't lowered working hours from 40 to 20 when computers 2x'd us all, we for sure won't lower them now.
We'll manage the nondeterministic imperfections, but boy, will there be bumps on the road.
What I fear most: AI will give us all more power. This includes profitmaxxing no-holds-barred corpos, from preseed startups hustling 996-style to big multinacionals. Even now, with locked-down devices and subscriptions for everything and owning things replaced with "owning a limited nontransferrable revokable end-user license", it's not good. AI is going to multiply that.
Damn, now I need a drink.
You know how? Because AI is forbidden in tournaments and there are plenty of idle rich sponsors in Chess (it is popular among autocrats).
So you are envisioning a future of software development where we have coding competitions sponsored by MBS where AI is forbidden?
Like your Pelican meme, which is designed to cutify AI, this is propaganda of the highest order.
In a closed, static pool only.
One of the main reasons I do the pelican thing is that it's making fun of the industry:
1. The smartest model in the world still draws pelicans riding bicycles worse than a five year old.
2. It highlights how absurd the task of comparing these models is. Oh, so it scored 78 on Terminal Bench 2.1? It also drew a crap pelican.
> So you are saying in the end of that piece that chess players came out stronger?
That was an off-the-cuff remark on the podcast which I included in the transcript. It's not my overall thesis.
> The smartest model in the world still draws pelicans riding bicycles worse than a five year old.
The bicycle is something that humans are famously bad at drawing: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/04/18/the-h...
The job has changed from a craft to operating an unreliable machine.
Instead of satisfaction of solving challenging problems with your own skill and creativity, you babysit a text extruder and slog through mistakes in its generated output.
Arguably this may make software cheaper to make and accessible to non-programmers, but for people who liked their job it's like being demoted from a restaurant chef to a microwave button pusher.
I find it very difficult to learn a new thing by reading it, vs by doing it.
And indeed, most mathematicians, who do get paid to do math, work a lot with pencil and paper. If math is secondary to your job, you likely will not, but if it’s your primary job, you likely spend a lot of time working ideas out in the more primitive fashion.
The whole point of the discussion about LLMs in our field is exactly what you say. Yes, we do often find ourselves doing new things. They are exciting the first and the second time we do them. Later they become a chore.
When you’re doing something that requires a lot of typing for the 17th time… why! Like, how many times are you going to write that golang http server scaffold. Or, how many times are you going to create that new terraform project with those same modules. I hear people say “oh yeah, write a generator”. To which my answer is: do you have a budget for it, or do I need to invest my own time.
It’s possible to guard the model so that it acts according to your expectations. Just invest the time in that tooling. It’s as exciting as any other problem. You learn the domain by writing software guardrails, your effort results in a software analysis of the business domain problem. It’s a much more valuable and rewarding work than writing some code.
Instead of solving things yourself, you need to learn how to describe them in a way others can solve them. Otherwise you will just be fighting the instinct to just do it yourself.
Many tech/software people were completely unsympathetic if not downright arrogant when their products displaced people in other professions who felt the same way.
The lesson here is that ultimately, change comes for everyone.
Nah, they want to think beyond the superficial prompting level. A lot of real programmers feel exactly the same.
It is hard to notice this sometimes on HN because this site is rife with the very idea-man-VC-pilled-finance-bro-pseudo-hackers that over the past 15-20 years have turned the tech industry from one of optimism for a brighter future to one that most normal people now distrust and hate.
I'm terribly worried about my career as well. I built a large part of my identity around coding in my teens, and working in the industry when I got to my twenties were some of the happiest years of my life.
I was laid off from tech around the time that COVID hit, so this predates AI somewhat. I briefly became a contractor, but none of the contracts I was able to secure were renewed. I haven't worked in tech since 2023, right around the time I was introduced to AI.
They say that as you become more experienced in a domain, it should become easier and more lucrative... advancing in a career like tech should be a joy. With about seven years of experience, I can say that it hasn't been great. And aside from acquiring titles like junior and senior, there really isn't much advancement left after the 5-10 year mark.
I currently work in a grocery store and am giving that a shot, going to give it a good few years to see if I can advance through the different departments while I see how AI in the software industry pans out. The pay isn't nearly as good, and it's not something I'm passionate about; it's really quite mindless work. The positives are that I don't have to worry about outsourcing, or working from home, or massively disruptive technology like AI.
Throughout the latter half of my career, it almost felt as if every force was at play in killing what I was finally able to enjoy and also make a living from.
I wish I had something more positive to say, but as far as I'm concerned, I'm unfortunately stuck waiting this one out on the sidelines.
Here's wishing you the best for the future.
that’s because they were. They needed to kill the career because we were educated, well off, fulfilled, and becoming organized. Turns out not all of us were either easily manipulated marks or unscrupulous money goblins and that was a problem for them.
Remember when Google employees stood up for what is right against the company? That’s when the powers that be in the industry decided to go all in on AI. They need to destroy the career and industry because we had to much power and intelligence.
But you repeat yourself.
Here's the thing: after we took care of all the little overhead crap that "needed to get done," *we were allowed to go after the real work, the "illegible" "trim tab" work that doesn't really show up on your perf review but actually determines the course of the business over the next 10 years.*
What we've lost is our ability to secure a future for ourselves. The grief is the negative image of the bright future we once saw ourselves building: a vision now replaced with the specter of the wholesale destruction of the fabric of society. That apocalyptic vision is now touted as what we should labor towards since it is apparently THE bet to place that society will collapse. People will shower you with money so long as you make this exact bet.
Therefore we will need people who are skilled at creating apps with the help of AI. AI can not do that for us, someone is needed to figure out what apps we need. So AI will empower programmers, not replace them. Of course if you are unwilling to learn how to use AI as part of your tool-chain you might lose your job.
But of course if we automated those jobs with AI, we could direct AI produced value into universal basic income so people wouldn't lose their income.
Then the concern is of course, that the owners will not share the produced value.
But the answer to that in my view is that we should rather do work to be able reach a society where this value will be shared, and not rely on "jobs" being the key thing ultimately.
If I could choose, I would rather not work, and just do what I want to do all day, stress free, for the rest of my life. Also what is the point of doing the same jobs generation after generation? Most of the jobs in modern world aren't really what fit our evolutionary primitive desires in the first place, and it's forced stress.
Also, your comparison to other countries is confounded by the fact that Western countries (i.e. Europe) maintain a low level of defense spending because they have an explicit guarantee of defense under the North Atlantic treaty and a promise of being covered by the US’s nuclear umbrella. If the US were to cut defense spending, other Western countries would need to substantially increase their own.
This is all just my personal experience, obviously. I don't have any data to back it up. But I know that even though my job bugs me sometimes, I'm a lot happier when I'm busy than not, and I work remotely. I like the feeling of accomplishment. But do I like it enough to build things for free? Probably not. I'd probably just sit around and spiral, like I've seen friends do on extended unemployment.
Anyway, this all is a moot point imo because as long as one person still has to work, the billionaire class will turn the "lazy freeloaders" on UBI into scapegoats. See: current politics.
This would never get approved in the USA. Think of the backlash here against "Obamaphones" and "welfare queens" - we can't even get paid parental leave approved! Let alone disability, social security or SNAP/food benefits. UBI is not even an option. Even now we're taking away food benefits and tying it to mandatory work- ie moving in the opposite direction. https://ktla.com/news/local-news/stricter-work-requirements-...
American voters are far too resistant against any sort of welfare and/or social assistance for UBI to ever be feasible.
Even during the great depression FDR was only able to get work for pay programs approved that assigned jobs like Conservation Corps, Public Works and WPA rather than just handing out cash. And to get that passed we needed widespread bank collapses, failed farms, starving people and catastrophic unemployment there was STILL heavy opposition to any/all government assistance programs because there is a very deep fear entrenched in the American psyche that government aid creates dependency and weakens individual responsibility.
There is a widespread false narrative in the USA that any sort of government help, assistance programs and/or payments is leftist socialism and communism.
Knock, knock. Who's there? I ran.
Good point. So we should ask those people how the reliance on social assistance has really worked out for them. Do they generally feel respected and valued by the systems that pay them? Are they happy with the amount of assistance they receive?
I don't know if it's possible to replicate this though.
Why after that? AI hasn't even kicked in yet fully and we already have millions of engineers trembling in fear. Gone the golden days of techies demanding things, corpo is back with revenge.
Late 18th century France
In fact the only issue stopping a worker’s revolution in the US is the lack of organization. The technology factor is really small in comparison to the inherent asymmetry of the situation.
The fact that it isn’t routine is a testament to how accepting people are of the status quo.
Are the things that you want to do productive in any way? A sizeable portion of people have an innate drive to "produce" actual value.
Other things could be just satisfying own curiosity, sports, hobbies, video games, films, books, shows. Kind of like being able to be child again?
For me personally, having the right job is actually more interesting to me than doing whatever i want all day then given my conditioning. I think because without the job I wouldn't have the same opportunity to encounter the "problems" i enjoy "solving" at work with critical thinking. It's kinda like training for a sport? Sometimes having a competition or a game is a nice forcing function to make it all feel real?
Sports (in some aspects) needs facilities, gear, arenas, other people to participate with. Building things usually requires materials (unless you're bushcrafting) that requires a fully-functioning supply chain. Video games and shows and films (at the quality level we expect them to be) require herculean efforts from thousands of people each, and massive investments, to go from concept to completion. Travel in and of itself is predicated on the ideas that the hospitality industry exists, infrastructure for flight, rail, bus, car all exist (and are operational), that the very people that are the fabric and heartbeat of the culture you're traveling to experience exist, and are operating restaurants, businesses, etc.
Every leisure activity that we think of occupying our time with instead of a job requires the collective efforts of the rest of society to even exist, and kind of implies that your ability to lead a life of leisure is an anomaly. Some things can arguably be replaced with AI and robots, but the texture and tactility that we crave from most of these activities would be gone. Traveling to Scotland to get a plate of haggis and hang out in a pub just wouldn't be the same if your driverless taxi took you to the unmanned airport full of kiosks and humanoid sentries, to be loaded half-conscious into a metal tube and flown across the planet, ultimately driven to the ends of the Earth and dropped off at a 600 year old crumbling building where you're met by R2-D2 wearing a kilt and a tam o'shanter, talking like Groundskeeper Willie LOL
I'm not sure I follow the logic here. I would still see all of this existing and even more due to demand. The idea with automation would be that everything that people want would still be there and even more. I would think we build more football stadiums, more hobby facilities, replacing business offices and other things we don't need with those.
I would also see e.g. video games being even greater than they are now, because people would be able to follow their passion and creativity and build games that won't require monetization and are unaffected by outside pressure. I have massive amount of video game ideas that I think would be super awesome, but not really easily monetizable. I would probably build a lot of them, especially with being able to do those so much faster with AI. If AI can do all the games by itself and doesn't require my or anyone's creativity, then super, I will just play them, because by definition they have to be better than anything so far, and if they are not, then by definition human creativity still matters there and they can build, either way seems good to me.
As for travel, I think there would be people out there doing this out of hobby, having pubs as a hobby thing, hosting people as a hobby, spreading their existing culture out of passion, not because they need to make money. I would actually prefer that type of travel over feeling like they only act friendly to me because I will be paying to them. In this case it would be visiting people who want you to visit them with no exchange of anything, both sides would be doing it out of curiosity or desire.
I can tell you, freely, that if someone dropped $10m in my lap, I would not stop programming - I started before I was paid, and I will continue as long as my input methods, perception, and/or brain permit.
The difference is in the quality, texture, and structure of how you work, and of course what you work on. I almost certainly would be working in the structure of larger organizations.
There is some interesting post-scarcity fiction out there, speculative and otherwise, that tries to answer the question "what do we do when we are no longer required to work for pay". Manfred Macx would say that it's great fun to make other people incalculably wealthy. Or, you could simply be kind and generous with your time in service to causes you like.
Frankly, if someone dropped $10m in my lap, I'd almost certainly take 2-3 months sitting on the beach, but after that, I'd try something even more ambitious. Surely there are hard problems we could be solving that we're constrained by paid work from pursuing.
I'd probably also expand my hobby practices - there's lots I could do with better tooling and toys (my pottery studio could use a pugmill!), and discover new ones as well.
Some have that answer because they think it is entirely unrealistic to create or have the idealistic society you describe. I am part of this group. There are many things I have on my backlog that I'd like to accomplish, but too much of the required time and energy is taken up by my job. Yet, I still hold onto it desperately, because the alternative is much worse, and I have no way of fixing that.
In a saner society, jobs would be the measure of how we are mutually useful and bound to each other, and UBI would be there so that people are not coerced with freezing and starvation into doing things. But, when was the last time people got to negotiate the social contract at such a deep level? The French Revolution? Maybe the Bolsheviks? If we could, would we be able to do a good job of setting up something like that? When one remembers that the biggest democracy on the planet keeps electing Trump, one loses hope.
We have a few hundred years of tax policy and politics to draw on here.
> But of course if we automated those jobs with AI, we could direct AI produced value into universal basic income so people wouldn't lose their income.
There isn't the remotest possible chance that this would happen. Any surplus (if indeed one exists, which isn't certain) would be pocketed by the mega rich who own the corporations.
That would be very nice, but,
Will not happen in the US. For example in the US, minimum wage. That was suppose to be the minimum people needed to get by. Now with factoring in inflation, minimum wage does not pay for hardly anything now.
So in the US, if AI does what some people think it will do, we will end up with 2 classes. A small very rich class, probably segregated from everyone else, and a huge very poor class, maybe something like this:
I wish we lived in this reality. After what's happened in the last 10-12 years (in the USA, specifically) I think a significant enough number of people would rather watch their neighbors starve than give them or vote to give them anything they "didn't earn".
Not really? I guess you got your answer.
Perhaps in some societies, like France, where profit sharing is more culturally common.
Initially they would get it under some conditions that they might be studying something else or whatever else makes sense productivity wise. Ultimately not minimum wage.
Depending on how fast AI would automate things, the balance should change, but ultimately income should provide similar quality of life as was before, but increasing as time goes on for the less fortunate who were making less before.
So if someone who is making 3x median now, they might be getting 2.3x while doing nothing, and 2.7x while learning/doing something else productive. Someone who was making 1x median, would still get 1x median, but as AI produced value increases and more replacement happens, the 1x should climb and eventually e.g. in 10 years everyone's would equalize in such a way that no one's quality of life due to job displacement shouldn't suffer, but who previously had lower income would reach similar levels of income gradually as all jobs are replaced.
And you would be allowed to work or switch work if you wanted, but there would be some sort of formula for decreasing what you get, while still incentivising you to work if you want to. E.g. if you were making 3x being a software engineer and want to take up hand crafting something or construction, you could but, you might be maxed at getting total of what you were making before, so construction + bonus could make up to only 3x.
There is an alternate reality where the benefits of automation are shread with society so that we don't have to work as much, collectively. But in the US in particular, that's "communism".
We are (IMHO) bouldering a future that I can only describe as neo-feudalism where nobody owns anything and the only housing and jobs are working on the estates of trillionaires, a techno-serf if you will. The intermediate stage is probably fascist apartheid states with ever-shrinking in-groups where an increasingly militarized police force is used to enforce order as wealth inequality spirals out of control.
Google has ~190k employees (according to Google) and an annual profit of $133 billion. So despite a bunch of people being comparatively well-paid, the profit per employee is still ~$700k. There were times when that was well over $1 million. So by other measures, you're still being underpaid at ~$500k+/year.
Why would I ever believe that this would happen at all though? I don't trust the people making decisions to actually do this
And even if they do, what does that look like for me? I find it difficult to believe that we would live unchanged. Are we talking nice urban apartments, big suburban houses, or shitty cyberpunk megacity apartment habs?
My sense of worth is tied to the work I do because the work I do can provide the income to afford the life I want and choose to live. Which is probably very different from the lifestyle that will "be provided for me" under a UBI plan
We've seen this play out twice in history now (industrial revolution, then globalization/offshoring). Every time the pitch has been that automation would make life easier by trickling down the surplus productivity gains. And yet here we are still working 5 days a week with more intense competition than ever. Fool me once...
And also most of what AI can automate today is the "services" economy which was never really that crucial in terms of biological existence. ChatGPT will not build housing, raise livestock, or perform surgery.
I have a bad feeling that it's closer than you'd expect at all three of those things. Especially the last one. Robo-surgeons, remotely controlled by another surgeon somewhere else, already exist. Maybe it won't happen in the next 5 years, but do you really think AI capabilities won't get there in 20-25 years or so?
If AI does live up to the hype the surpluses might end up distributed to support basic needs for everyone, but there's no clean path to get there; it will take a long messy and likely violent fight to get there. Most people are currently comfortable enough to not want to go down that road, things will need to get a lot worse before they get better in this respect.
Would you just nicely walk up to the White House and ask them to pass a law for UBI? Would you politely knock on Jeff Bezos’s door and ask him to share his billions?
no disrespect intended, but your comment strikes me as one that a young child might say. what I mean by that is - it feels very naïve about the (political and greed) problems we face in the world. Reality is there is a small club of extremely powerful and wealthy people who run the show. It’s a small club and we ain’t in it. if we lived 500 years ago, we could just force them to share. But that’s not going to happen in 2026 with a military and a police force, etc.
ONE rich country doesn’t. The rest are great.
Tens of millions can’t pay for it, and virtually everyone else is chained to their job because of it.
Basically, buckle up and start socializing A LOT (iykyk), because to survive this one, you better be allied with one fraction ir another.
Slight correction, is that it's I want to pay bills now. And not deal with uncertainty for a decade while other people try to direct the economy or what ever.
I still want to code, because I enjoy coding. I like the puzzle and the reward when my solutions work. Sure I can code on my own, but there is a joy in working with multiple people of different backgrounds and skillsets. I liked being on a team.
As it currently sits, there is little place for me in the AI driven workplace. It feels like an enormous loss.
I snowboard over 100 days a year, spend tons of time with my daughter, walk, write, camp and cook lots of great food.
You’d be shocked how good life can be on ~$20k a year. And you really don’t have to work much to earn that!
Programmers are more impacted now than manufacturing were because they identify with work?
The better prior is when manufacturing or office workers had to take on the job of outsourcing or automating away the work of others, because it highlights the guilt of knowing that it's not good for others, but it's temporarily good for you. Normally we try to expand our concern to our neighbor, but sometimes we have to put on the blinders. It's not fun to pull up the ladder you climbed.
The sweet spot of delivering productivity enhancement is when something that was previously too costly now becomes economically feasible -- so you're helping new products/services. It's doubly good because you're not just working/extracting on a value stream, you're creating a new one. Best to aim for that.
We’re up in arms about AI. We’re asking what does a future where AI can do all the work look like. Where fantasizing about the end of capitalism or fearing the dark futures.
We believe that our jobs matter. That the destruction of our jobs will start a revolution. That we matter.
AI grief is our class realizing that our future is that of those grocery store clerks, and that we did nothing for grocery store clerks when we had money and influence, and no one will do anything for us.
Elysium is the future, not Star Trek.
In the case of jobs, we are already overly dependent on individual incomes just to get by. We've collectively outsourced nearly everything a person needs to actually survive, choosing to pay for everything rather than know how to do it ourselves or go without. A tiny fraction of people today are involved in food production, and most of us don't know how the food is produced, processed, or stored. We don't know how to make our own cloths, fix an electrical or plumbing issue in our own home, or maintain our own vehicles yet we depend on all of these.
Insurance programs are much the same, though when those leave you high and dry its generally much more impactful than when you can't get a toilet fixed in short order. To their credit, some Democrats tried to warn us of the risks of tying health care to jobs and many Democrats tried to design a better system even if they didn't or couldn't explain the risks necessitating it. Now the tech industry is feeling the pain of all this centralization and dependence.
The story this article begins with is tragic, though the fact that we collectively are okay with, and even feel entitled to, being so dependent on various insurance programs is similarly tragic in my opinion.
We need to change the core of what our systems are based on today for any meaning, long lasting change to happen. We can keep duct taping the tears along the edges but it will continue to fail, and usually the failures become more painful and more frequent when we just look for more quick fixes.
I don't agree that civilization demands dependence, by the way. We can choose to buy food from someone else while knowing how we would do it ourselves, ideally with some experience. We can buy our food from someone local, reducing our dependence by shrinking the loop is a huge improvement on what we have today.
I wasn't arguing that specialization is bad or evil, but I would argue that too much specialization can lead to a fragile system.
Total BS. Top-to-bottom offensive, elitist junk masquerading as logic. Written by someone who has never spent an afternoon with a farmer, with a cop, with a fisherman, a professional musician, a pilot or any manner of soldier. Some professions dictate one's entire life. Software engineer is not one of them.
You can be a software engineer 9 to 5 and be something else on weekends. Ask a farmer what they do on weekends. 99 time out of 100 it will be something on a farm. Ask a pilot and they will ask which hotel they are staying in and when thier next flight is schedualed. Ask a soldier and the will ask whether they are on recall. Some professions have days off, others do not. Those are the ones that define a person's life and personality.
Lol. "Déformation professionnelle" is an elitist junk these days. It's a defect, and I would gladly get rid my brain of all this programming bullshit if my life didn't depend on it and I wouldn't hear from every fucking corner how:
1) During 2010-2015 Indians/Eastern Europeans/Outsource agencies are going to replace me
2) During 2015-2022 Bootcampers/kids working for a bowl of rice/laid off journalists are going to replace me
3) 2024+ AI is going put me on the street
You seriously think living in a perpetual fear and constant arms race with Leetcode/System Design/other devs/AI is elitist? Fuck off.
The part about existing outside of work - that's just reality though. A lot of coders are just doing it to support their families, and a lot of them aren't doing a side hustle or side projects when they're off the 9-5. That stuff gets normalized and glamorized in the highly-compensated-engineering-for-cool-tech-company scene, but there really are working coders who don't do any of that and get by fine all the same. They just tend to live in uncool cities and work in uncool industries.
If you've ever used IBM software, you'd know this is nowhere near reality.
The article does push back occasionally, but ends with the students booing Schmidt interpreted as expressing "their grief".
No! That is harmful propaganda. They were expressing their agency and anger at someone who worked 6 years as a programmer, screwed up the Lex rewrite, went straight into management at Sun in 1983 and later moved on to Google.
Now he is rich, can escape to Cyprus any time and lectures the young about where programming is going. How would Schmidt with his buggy Lex know what being a programmer is?
You need more anger, not this grief nonsense that is just designed to weaken you.
Great read.
Really? The way a knowledge worker feels about their labor is different than a manufacturing worker? They don't or can't have similar pride in their labor? In their skills?
This is some seriously self-aggrandizing bullshit. Touch some grass.
It comes through even worse in this later sentence, which at the very least tells you the writer has never met a welder.
Artists feel the same about AI, it is probably much worse for them. Computer was a job before becoming a machine. And IT has been automating jobs out of existence ever since.
This has been going for centuries.
AI slop posing as “commentary” on the AI crisis.
What would make it less pointless in your opinion?
> A profession does not need to be eliminated to be mourned. It is enough for its center to fall out, leaving the people who built careers in that center with credentials that no longer map to a stable role. When AI threatens the work, it threatens the self, which is why the response looks less like ordinary job-loss fear and more like a form of bereavement.
I'm certain that section was mostly constructed by an LLM. It reads well, but when you actually focus on what it's saying there's nothing there.
I was not enlightened by reading that. No human sat thinking deeply about the situation, constructed their own mental model of what was happening, then put effort into transferring that mental model into my brain so I could be similarly enlightened. They had Claude (probably) express a conclusion that was attached to nothing more than what would statistically sound "deep".
Hacker News is surprisingly tolerant of slop these days. I expect to be downvoted for this, because comments highlighting slop are usually downvoted. So it goes.
I'm meta-complaining if you like, but it's a point that I'll stand by.
However, to your point directly: Simon has a pretty valid argument. There’s a lot of slop posted on jere these days.
Personally I’m reading far less stuff from HN than I used to. That’s a shame because up unto the past six months or so I’ve found it a great place to expand my reading.
Now I increasingly click something open, realise it’s more AI slop and close it.
What I don’t understand is why these people do not realise how utterly, unmistakably, glaringly obvious their awful AI crap is.
I recently said elsewhere on here: I partly work with words. I find AI-“authored” content absolutely and unmistakably obvious.
The fact that people publish crap like this shows that they don’t know what good writing is, or what good expression of ideas is. Because if they did they would proof what their AI had written and realise how awful it is.
And that by extension means that the content is almost certainly worthless, because whoever prompted it read it and said “this is fine! I’m happy to publish it under my own byline!”
And in reality it just makes them look idiotic. No discrimination. No original thought.
So I don’t think my comment, - or Simon’s comment - was moaning about “Things These Days”.
It was a point about the erosion of the community this creates.
And if nothing else that erosion is silly arguments about the value - or otherwise - of AI slop.
I don't intentionally use LLMs for anything, but perhaps I should have run my post through one to optimise for clarity.
But, too late: my delete rights have expired. We're stuck with my comment forever now. May this be a lesson to everybody involved.
That said, slop is going to be a massive, natural, and utterly predictable consequence of AI. I think if you are generally AI positive then you definitely don't get to complain about slop.
I'm up to 40 posts on my blog tagged "slop" now: https://simonwillison.net/tags/slop/
I consider covering AI misuse as part of my "beat" that I write about - there are so many bad ways to apply this stuff, and shining a light on those and explaining why they're bad seems like an important thing to spend time on.
I don't currently share that belief. I expect AI misuse to be the overwhelming majority of AI usage so personally I'm pretty much against it outright.
I know that's a losing battle though. Your approach is probably the more productive way forward.
With no jobs left, most people will probably sign up for military (need bodies when run out of robots+EMT weapons+kessler syndrom yadayada) or/and start organizing massive revolutions in areas most affected (if they got the guts).
If not this, the other path leads to starvation, mesninglessness, getting permamogged my tech elite shareholders and eventual DEATH and end of your bloodline (no money = no family). And now tell me, is life like that worth living?
There is no shortage of medical professionals attempting to design a new medical condition that they are 'certified' to treat and which some government agency 'needs to fund'. This is an interesting mechanism by which these people extract greater rents from productive capacity of this country.