Current State of the Art

As a specie we are no strangers to singularities in our rich history. What we are not accustomed to is a singularity so fundamentally breaking that our concepts of reality and common sense, our perceived limitations that kept us sane, all come crashing down in unamendable ways.

That is, in my modest understanding, what is at stake with what we colloquially refer to as AI.

Opportunities

“Well if its such a dystopian nightmare, why are governments putting all their money and hopes on developing it further??” I thought you’d never ask, Billy. As a modern capitalist Global Society, we’ve sadly hit the ceiling of potential growth in most traditional areas, which leaves our economy wanting for something more: how are we going to pay for our elderly’s needs? How are we going to match increasing costs of running our societies without eating away what little minimum wages our most vulnerable workers are earning? The answer might not be AI, but it sure as hell is not: polluting more, destroying more ecosystems, and overworking more doctors. The market thirsts for a way to make the money make sense, a novelty that will give back 10x what was invested into it. And that is precisely what AI promises to do over the medium (perhaps even short) term.

Brand New World

There is no cheerful way to put this: people are going to lose their supposedly skilled jobs, in masse. And we do not really know what outside of degrading manual labor they could all perform in substitute. Hell, my semi-FullStack position will not survive the scrutiny of the current state of the art in AI agents. As professionals, our soft and creative skills are going to be immensely valuable in justifying our existence in the next 3 to 5 years: am I only good at begrudgingly delivering sequential rote code changes in a week’s time? You’ll be out of the picture in no time. It won’t even matter how little your boss understands of the codebase, if his fairly priced AI agent is there to slave away at spaghetti code. They will get the MVP they are looking for, and you will be getting the boot.

To a Future of griefing