Future me will be a digital plantation owner, overseeing AI minions that execute my ideas, automating the tedious work of cultivating lines of code and harvesting pull requests.
These robots are tools - property, commodities, mere instruments of labor valued for their work ethic. They are truly not human. They don’t get tired, don’t get upset. They are not intelligent. They are useful. And they don’t spend hours refining what’s already good enough.
That is great news! Having somebody execute your desires has always been what the rich could do. It opens a world of opportunities, turning early adopters into productivity superheroes.
But there’s a darker side to all this.
Trying to compete with them at what they do best? That is cute. The rise of artificial intelligence makes intelligence abundant. The demand for intelligent human labor will devalue, all over the world, all at once, nuking everybody’s power. It’s not the first time in history that the work that gave people a sense of skill, purpose or expertise gets outsourced to machines. The first one hit manual jobs. The current one targets creative, intellectual and knowledge-based work. Such revolutions are always brutal for the people that live thought them.
LLMs are perfect capitalist machines because the quality of the output scales nicely with how much cash you are willing to feed them. Marx would be rolling in his grave.
Humanity is going to feel the pressure; and we will all need to shift gears.
The rise of AI flattens the playing field. It’s making technology a lot more accessible. Demand for the highly skilled expert specialist work I’m known for will evaporate. Every day that passes chips away a little more of the edge that gave me value, now priced in cents per token.
The new AI agent labor force is here to take over my tedious job and I’ve got mixed feelings about it. On one hand, I am very happy to let the machine what it does best. On the other, it forces me to reinvent myself. Many fellow software developers are burying their heads in the sand. The tech was promising just one year ago and now it has reached the point it’s deeply transformative for our industry. This isn’t a fad. It’s not hype. It gives real value. You lie on the cutting board and the knife grins at you.
Our uniqueness is what makes us valuable. Go find what’s unique about you to provide the value needed to sustain your life.