The future feels bleak

I find it incredibly hard to keep up with recent skill requirements in the Software Engineering space. Most recently it is leveraging AI in software development.

While I do use the assistance of AI in my day-to-day development tasks (whether professionally or just for fun), I can never really reconcile with the idea of letting AI do most of the work while I read and review its output.

I’m sure as developers and engineers we all have our reasons and personal stories on how we fell in love with programming and building software. For me, it is more learning how to build the software and the act of building the software myself that give me joy.

Much of that gets taken away with AI. I understand the advantage. It can churn out full websites and applications in mere seconds, while I would take days or weeks to produce the same. It is an unfortunate side effect of capitalistic greed for things to be done extremely fast.

I’ve read a few articles saying our new role as software engineers is to become AI orchestrators, managing and directing AI agents and then reviewing its output. And although that is quite different with managing people, the transition from primarily writing code to only reading code (and lots of it) is also quite a hurdle. (Is there research somewhere about people losing the skill when they don’t actively practice it?)

In creative spaces, I imagine it’s much worse. Art is a different discipline. I don’t consider myself an artist but I believe the process of creating art describes art more than the output does. And AI completely obliterates that process from weeks to mere seconds. (Luckily, I think a lot of people agree that AI art sucks.)

It’s a very weird time in history where businesses are having massive layoffs and we’re all just supposed to be fine with that. I think radical changes in our working habits and our wages need to accompany the radical change that AI brings. Do we still need to be working 8 hours a day, and do I still need to work more than 3 months to afford an iPhone? (On a Filipino minimum wage, a little over 5 months of work provided they don’t spend a single cent of their salary towards anything else. Hey, what value does AI bring again?)

I don’t have enough confidence in companies and businesses to put more value in humans than on AI. And I think they’re all just racing towards some goal post just to say they’re the first to do it. Companies don’t even have the confidence in other companies to trust that they would do the right thing, so why would I?

But maybe it’s not all bad.

Maybe AI will become a public good, and maybe (just maybe?) those big tech companies won’t hoard all the resources to sell it at a premium so that only businesses and individuals with abundant capital can take advantage of the radical change that AI brings, and maybe it will instead be available to all (like electricity, like they say; where the only setting is on and off—there’s no premium electricity, is there?).

Maybe if human labor loses most of its value there will be some other way to earn a living.

Maybe.