Surplus. We are dooooomed.
Because I was home and bored a lot and I don’t really do twitter and facebook anymore, I was doomscrolling linkedin. I am not going to increase traffic by linking the posts. But the vibe (pun intended) is clear:
Programmers will get extinct because of AI!
I don’t need the expensive engineers anymore, I can build myself what I want in a jiffy!
We can now create so much software in record time!
Well, apparently software engineering is fucked. Except it isn’t. And also the problem we should be talking about is something completely, but completely different.
Mankind does not need more software. Mankind does not need more.
Western civilization is bored, doomed and bound to destroy itself. The capitalistic run for more, more, more and more growth is how mankind will get itself extinct. Or at least collapsed. And we are speeding it up.
The promotion of self-centered culture, the emancipated person (I am intentionally not saying feminism here), the gig economy, the hustle economy, the content creator economy… This is killing our civilization. It’s the only civilization I know and I kind of like it. It seems better than orwellian totality.
Civilization is a group effort. Everything that the western world is currently promoting is not a group effort. Thanks to the internet, social media and instant online communication platforms, we forgot how to talk to each other in real life. We forgot that if we are rude, we may get punched in the face. Or get yelled at. If somebody doesn’t agree with us, we are triggered. Or we just block them.
We are creating our own echo chambers. All of our anxieties, disbeliefs, small-mindedness… It is echoed back to us and amplified. Nothing else than our own little world exists anymore. We forgot to be controversial, we forgot to get our opinions confronted, we forgot how to lead a dialogue, we forgot that being humiliated is sometimes absolutely required.
We forgot that our choices and actions have consequences. We learned to hide our true opinions and feelings. We forgot how to apologize. So we are being more alone. Alone and bored.
A human that is alone and bored wants to get entertained. A lot of humans get entertained by creating. Just take legos or poetry. Software used to be so complicated that not a lot of humans could contribute. Now that has changed.
Everybody can now create a computer program. Should they? Hell no.
One of the greatest post from linkedin that stuck with me compared this to a wide adoption of writing and reading. Nowadays, almost everyone can read and write. Is everybody a poet or a published author? No.
Even in the world of published authors, there’s so much junk. Does it have it’s market? Yes. Does that market justify it’s existence? Probably. Is it contributing to mankind’s future? I doubt that.
Creating software is now much easier than ever before. Much more accessible. Much more available. Is that a good thing? Absolutely.
Is the path we took to get here the right one? I am doubtful. The generative LLM market is controlled by a small number of players. It consumes a ton of resources, it’s greedy, it’s circular. The bubble will burst in a year or two. And the output… is it worth it? I don’t know. I don’t think it is.
General population loves the chatbot use case. It is built on top of a lot of information. A lot of the information that is junk. The AI these days is a statistical model only as good as the information you train it on. If you feed it junk, it will produce junk.
What is the solution? Add protection layers. Add control layers. Add filters. Add a manual feedback loop. Add more. What do you get in return? Hallucinations.
Now take this to creating software. You get some output. Is it a hallucination? Is it good software? How do you know? I don’t. I don’t know a good software that was written by humans when I see it. I need to run it and observe what it does.
Code and software are tools. Tools are supposed to solve problems. Not create them. The first question everybody should ask themselves is: Do I really need to have this problem?
The AI world is creating problems that don’t need to exist. Mankind is keeping itself occupied with stupidly expensive toys. At the same time, western superpower is blatantly ignoring international law.
There will be a huge war soon. And linkedin will be full of posts about vibe coding a drone detection software.