I am getting depressed day by day about what is coming.
Companies will not tolerate careful work when others can deliver same with 10% less quality but 60% faster.
I am drowning in internal fight between: I should care about what I am building vs this can be released faster because of AI and company doesnt care anyway about my efforts.
Everyday my inner voice and expectations are fighting, drowning me in endless thoughts.
How do I get over it?
So I feel just fine. I use AI when it helps, I do the work myself when it doesn't. All you need to do is learn which is which.
I understand that I’m in a privileged position as a SWE, and that maybe I have been overpaid for the majority of my career, but the swing is so sharp that it really hits me in the gut badly.
Tech was always evolving, from on prem and in house infra, then virtualization, then cloud, then containers, then distributed systems at scale, then managed and serverless infra. Change was already constant, just slower and easier to adapt to. AI feels different because it's moving faster than people and companies can adapt, and the productivity gains are still unstructured.
I think the only way to cope is to focus on what leverage it gives you (I try to see all these AI things coming out, with a curious mindset and immediately try to think what and where I can use this), not only what it may take away.
But yes hitting the low is also a part of it. I feel useless sometimes but then I remember 'I get to tell AI what needs to done'
I don't have any solid advice here but try to build something using AI and ship it, even if no one uses it, you'll get to learn a lot. I'm still learning.
For example understanding how financial instruments work and how to model them onto systems is a valuable skills and cannot be fully trusted (yet) in the hands of AI as mistakes can be really really costly.
In retrospect, three things helped keep me sane-ish:
- community: finding colleagues that shared my perception of the situation and with whom to organise to raise quality.
- perspective: my country, like most, has a bloody history. My predecessors survived feudal exploitation, industrialization and countless wars. None of them were exceptional. While this falls under survivorship bias, the challenges we face and the opportunity we have are, in the core western world, comparatively simpler
- preparedness: keep a cheap lifestyle, my passport up to date, money in the bank, gas in the tank and my body in as good a shape as I can. It's more of a psychological trick to feel in control of some aspects of my life. But it's a good idea in general anyway.
Writing about my fears and transcribing them from my head to a sheet where I could confront them and organise them helped too.
It's not great or original advice, but I wanted to give it anyway so that you know that other out there go through similar mindscapes. Good luck out there.
I had a nightmare last night where a tyrannical AI was hunting me down and I knew there was nothing I could do because it was faster, stronger and smarter than me.
I have had similar iteration of this nightmare going on for decades now, but they're almost a daily occurrence at this point.
Mass job losses concerns me, but at the same time feels like the most manageable aspect of what's coming and therefore something I've been prepping for for many years at this point. We will almost all be poorer as a result of this technology, but we'll still have our loved ones around us and assuming we don't enter this period in debt can continue to live a decent life by historical standards.
It's what comes after this that should really worry people... A society with mass job loss and poverty is not stable. The extreme concentration of power AI will bring to those who yield it will not be conducive to a continued peaceful world order. The technologies that will be created from the US of AI might cure cancer but they will also enable unthinkable horrors to be inflicted on our bodies. Creating a species that's more intelligent than ourselves opens a can of worms which we may not be able to control.
I've been very poor before. It's unpleasant but after a while you normalise emotionally and it's okay. It's everything else that I worry about. I can survive and manage being poor. But super viruses, world wars, AI-driven mass-surveillance, the erosion of reality and fiction from AI powered propaganda, democratic collapse. These are all things I struggle to know how to prepare for.
I know I sound crazy. I assure you I'm a very sane person, I just seem think it's rather obvious that very bad things are coming soon. And I'd argue this has always been obvious to anyone thinking about the consequences of AI rationally.