Foreward: When I mention ‘AI’ in this article, I’m referencing generative AI of today.

First off, big props to the real ones, the researchers. Everyone else is just benefiting / suffering from the trickle down effects of their monumental efforts. I am still so blown away at the creativity of solutions and tenacity of the researchers to use raw math for such an incredible effect. People are now literally falling in love with something that’s just a mathmatical formula. I’m still very curious to know if the original researchers anticipated the emergent effects of preceived ‘intelligence’ from their transformer attention architecture or if they simply thought that this was just a minor advancement in text generation.

The conversation around AI is muddied by voices of multiple competing interests. The loudest stakeholders always seem to be the CEOs of the leading AI companies themselves. Other supporting voices are those that see the promise in AI. With how quickly and impressively AI has advanced, its easy for any person to see the promise and join in on the pro-AI crowd. The fact that it also is easy to adopt in your professional or personal life further drives the point.

The consequence to all this support is that the voices of the dissenters are drowned out. Skilled creators in writing, arts, music, and programming are all slowly having their livelihoods taken by this monumental force. The technological advancements of AI on its own are good enough to adopt as a tool through organic means, but the people with the largest stakes in AI are constantly yapping about its progress and its potential. The CEO class are blatantly speedrunning the obsolescence of the creator.

It upsets me that the software engineering world readily adopted AI without thinking of the implications against their own job security. Meta and Microsoft are now forcing their employees to use AI, it doesn’t matter in what context, or what application, just that they have to use it. Large tech giants have a huge interest stake in the AI field taking off so that they can continue to flaunt how their research and partnerships with AI will make them massive amounts of money.

I recognize that software engineers in this case don’t have much choice to say no to the AI wave. Every engineer stands to improve our effectiveness by some multiple whether through knowledge gained or output delivered so why wouldn’t we adopt it. Unfortunately by playing into the system, we are actively reducing the availability of jobs for new hires and eventually one day for ourselves. In a fantasy world, software engineers could stand in together to reject AI in their workplace to protect their future interests but in this day and age, with the prevailing idea being that software engineering is a meritocracy and its every man for themselves, it is highly unlikely that engineers would ever agree to forming a union at least in the next five years.

It dissapoints me that engineers are not more antagonistic against AI. It also dissapoints me that the profit motive forces engineers to use it to survive. If you want to stay at the top it would be in your best interest to adopt it. But the more we adopt it, the less workers we’ll need. It is a cycle of job destruction and the billionaires are speedrunning the course to its final end.