This is very interesting. As someone who thinks AI is an amazing tool, I am very well interested in seeing how will people refusing to use AI fare both in professional settings and day-to-day life.
A new Amish-like lifestyle may be developing before our eyes in real-time and that's very interesting to follow and observe (from a distance).
One thing I've seen with AI is AI as used by software developers is quickly diverging from AI that's used by knowledge workers.
Knowledge workers use it primarily to "augment" their work, answer questions with AI, get it to create documents, etc. But it's usually 1 individual to 1-2 conversation threads.
Meanwhile in software development were running fleets of agents. At work we have it setup where firing off one agent request will eventually lead to like 10-20 AI calls at different parts of the process.
I make this distinctions because it changes how each group thinks about AI. For software devs it just feels like "moving up the stack". Yeah you're not writing code anymore but there is still plenty of work to do and problems to solve within your "software factory". Contrast that with knowledge workers that feel like the AI is making all of their decisions for them.
I almost think of this as a factory worker versus an artisan. The software devs are "factory workers" where we used to be on the floor but now we're managing the machines that took over the work. There are still tons of interesting problems at that stage and you still feel like you have worth. Contrast that with a knowledge worker that's more of an artisan in this analogy. For them they aren't running a factory but instead watching a robot do the work they used to do while they sit idle and watch it.
Language is a tool for abstraction, and AI is just an imperfect tool for working with language.
In the sense that "down the stack" is well-captured by existing language, AI is absolutely moving programmers up the stack. I can describe my goals using high-level abstractions, and the low-level implementation is somewhat constrained by that.
How well constrained it is depends on how well I described the problem and the quality of the model - much like how good human-written code is depends on how clearly the authors were thinking when they designed the structure.
I use the AI in the "knowledge worker" way you described. However I still feel it's augmenting my work, because I don't ask or expect it to make decisions for me. I use it to gather sources, to criticize my ideas, to generate summaries targeted to people expectations, and so on. Yes of course it's gonna influence my work with their own biases, but I don't think it is that important - my own biases are otherwise still there...
I think you are onto something. I think most agents I have up is two and even that I am not super comfortable not carefully managing. Otoh, buddy has agents galore running his network and everything giving him updates in near real time. I just.. don't have that much .. I want to say faith, but that suggests unshakeable religious belief.. confidence. I don't have that kind of confidence. There is too much stuff connected now ( taxes, projects, work, fun ). I am slowly starting to separate everything even that takes some careful planning.
"Contrast that with a knowledge worker that's more of an artisan in this analogy. For them they aren't running a factory but instead watching a robot do the work they used to do while they sit idle and watch it".
I think your general thesis about how AI is used of agents vs. the general chat interface is true, but not the rest.
Your knowledge worker example is where people fail when using AI, and it is usually very obvious.
Knowledge workers who know what they're doing recognized very quickly that AI often goes down very bad rabbit holes, often cites incorrect sources, makes up sources, or will use a random Facebook source or Reddit post as an authority on some topic. In legal circles you have to fight it to understand what venue(s) apply and to get it to stick to the right ones, in medical research it will sometimes pull in crackpot papers from left field and intermix them with well defined research.
People in the knowledge realm caught on very quickly that you have to use AI iteratively and constantly back check what you get and correct it. Let it run on its own and it will give you a legal theory based on some weird case in Kentucky that has no bearing to your issue with a court in Vermont.
This is not that much different in programming, it just takes longer to find out.
Using AI is like using adaptive cruise control: you're still in charge of where the vehicle will ultimately end up and if you decide to go take a nap you will wake up in the hospital or end up in the morgue.
It's true though that the 'time between interventions' is lengthening steadily.
The major difference is that people routinely ship shoddy, broken products in the world of software with few consequences, beyond needing to patch it later. Try the same thing with a court filing and you’re out on your ass.
Well hang on, "just work" implies an objective standard of correct vs incorrect. No such standard exists. I'm sure that there will be legal AIs that reliably do... something... but the whole point of the legal system is to allow space for humans to argue their case. If an AI "does legal" deterministically, without human intervention, how can it be said to be "working" if its very use defeats the purpose of the system it has learned to navigate so expertly?
>This is not that much different in programming, it just takes longer to find out.
The primary difference is that it's much easier for the AI to figure out itself if it's wrong on the programming side. Knowledge workers don't have automated testing for example.
The end result is the knowledge worker needs to be more heavily involved in the process and be more mindful of mistakes which makes it a worse experience for the user and generally less productive than it is for programmers.
It is more that knowledge workers are less sophisticated at using AI. It is not that hard to check whether sources are real, using AI or other tools, for example. Something like functional testing will come to non programming tasks.
"People in the knowledge realm caught on very quickly that you have to use AI iteratively and constantly back check what you get and correct it."
If lawyers and article writers are in the knowledge realm. Then your thesis has plenty of counter-examples of people who just use AI to create stuff and don't correct it.
I usually have a high-level agent drafting plans, then spawning sub-agents to build parts of the plan, other sub-agents to check the work of those agents. Then the PRs have different code review agents looking at the code, on top of the agents for people on my team also reviewing my code.
And I'm probably on the more amateurish end of AI development. As I learned these techniques from YouTube.
When you hear about the work Anthropic researchers are doing, they seem to be using hundreds or thousands of agents to solve problems.
They are doing that because they are running into hardware limits with single agents. If one agent made correct decisions and explored spaces efficiently, they would not need hundreds of thousands of agents. It's is the luxury of great wealth that they can produce a large number of possibly defective samples and then select the ones that are not defective.
> When you hear about the work Anthropic researchers are doing, they seem to be using hundreds or thousands of agents to solve problems.
There's a reason they're Anthropic researchers. The value proposition tanks when you actually have to foot the bill for the tokens you use.
Subagent flows can improve overall performance, but it generally also comes with disproportionately high token use. That gets worse with parallel subagents that are often doing the same things at the same time and cannot share a cache.
Yeah, I very much dispute the characterization GP made as to how software devs are working. I know some are. But I do not believe it's the majority of people in the field, not by a long shot.
That's because current AI models are incapable of doing knowledge workers' jobs. At least for me as an attorney, Harvey is only actually useful when it comes to helping me sort through large amounts of data. Even then, I can't trust its judgment (it has shown to be very poor) so it's only so useful
This looks like the classic "AI can do everybody else's job but mine still needs me".
I know knowledge workers who throw what you give them into the slop machine and return the slop, but I don't need them, I can feed the slop machine myself. I still need those who have experience and taste that the machine hasn't got yet.
We have 5 star restaurants, fast food and street meat yet we still have kitchens. We can go to the super market to buy eggs, and produce yet I know people who have gardens to grow their own food and a scant few have chickens for eggs.
I don't actually use AI much at all simply because in my line of work the knowledge is industry specific and niche - an AI can't tell you how to fix a proprietary machine. I have used it a few times but to do dumb things like write some Excel script or some other piece of software I have no interest or need for learning.
> A new Amish-like lifestyle may be developing before our eyes in real-time and that's very interesting to follow and observe (from a distance).
I’m just old enough to remember some older adults in my life who refused to use email. They would only talk to coworkers in person or on the phone.
It did not work out very well, unless they could afford to retire at that point. When your career evolves, the only way to keep participating is to evolve with it.
The job is to automate the enterprise, keep things safe and reliable, and make money for the company.
It was never about software. That was just the means.
Even in the software era, fads developed and tech stacks changed frequently. Now it's just moving a hundred times faster.
You need smart systems thinkers to do this. That's the role. Be smart in managing processes and complexity.
I'm not going to give coding interviews anymore, but I am going to give architecture, systems design, and SRE interviews. People still need to know how not to fuck up a database and how to design scalable and resilient systems.
The number of people who never seem to have understood what software and IT is in most companies is eye opening to me. Your job was never really to "write code" - you were always automating things.
That the field got somewhat stuck for a couple decades seems to have made many people forget this.
The vast majority of programmers who started in the 80's and 90's are basically directly responsible for massive waves of job losses in certain categories. Lots of cases of entire departments of secretarial level paper-pushing work being replaced with a small team of programmers. Same will happen with AI tooling. The difference is programmers are no longer the "winning" party here.
Computers and software in the end are the most configurable and complex automation system society has ever created. They are simply a continuation of industrial automation, and AI is a continuation upon that.
What unique selling point do individuals operating AI still have if it's AI doing the heavy lifting and specialized work? I mean I don't believe that people in general will need to work less (no automation has done that), but I'm convinced many people will need to find new employment at lower wages in a society where cost of living only increases.
I can't afford a pay cut, and AI isn't making my job worth more.
" will need to find new employment at lower wages "
Why at lower wages? Most automation has led to people transitioning to higher wages. Utility works get paid 10x more than lamplighters. Why would that change here? Your job will have a bigger impact, affect more people, and you'll be doing more with less.
I am not saying all employers will immediately start paying people more, but economically it doesn't make sense that pay will go down.
>>What about artisanal cobblers vs Southeast Asia Nike sweatshop workers?
No technology involved? Other than I guess tangentially, containerized shipping. I don't see how that analogy applies here at all, every AI workflow I've seen has been either:
a) Totally new thing that was never done before that is possible now and is therefore creating a new class of work
b) Worst case scenario: a whole spate of jobs being consolidated under one person, but its still a human in the end.
So everything I'm seeing is pointing to this being a lamplighter/utility worker situation.
Well, for example, a metric ass-ton of shoes and shoe components are made in Bosnia. But hardly anyone still makes the traditional opanci in the traditional way; there's one guy left in the whole Hercegovina that does. And they are required for the national costume, so they are still important. But the economics just don't work out.
To me this just reads like how I imagine people and the Luddites thought about automated looms. At first they were excited, thinking about the cheap and abundant cloth they put in plenty of work to make automated looms work flawlessly, until they start getting replaced. But they made excuses that they always need someone who knows more than "put cloth on spool, press button" to run these factories and that skilled people will always be needed. But slowly and surely the factory went towards quantity and not quality, and since quantity was done regardless why pay for the skilled and knowledgeable workers? And soon nobody made good money making cloth except the factory owner, the cloth was shit, and the people who built it all left with nothing but memories of once being valuable.
>>people who built it all left with nothing but memories of once being valuable.
But, the story doesn't end there does it? Most loom workers left their jobs and became factory workers (part of the same technology revolution) and critically: made MORE money. They were wealthier. And the loom machine operators left had a better job. There are very good sources for this, not just vibes [1].
I don't deny that the transition process is traumatic, and there is much we should be doing this time around to assuage the process. But all the evidence points to a general rise in pay, material conditions and standard of living.
people who spout the trite “everything will be better at some nondescript future point in time” are essentially screaming “the ends justify the means and screw everyone else, i’m going to get my bag / be ok”.
As anyone in the Rust Belt can tell you, the average worker might experience higher wages over time, but the average worker is a statistical fiction, not a flesh and blood person.
Individuals and entire communities can live out the rest of their lives destitute and hopeless in the wake of changes that leave them behind. Things might be brighter for those who come after, but let's not pretend we're not doing real violence to those left behind.
The "average worker" ends up getting more wealthy because younger, newer employees who grow up native to the new technology often capture its upsides at the expense of older workers who were unable to. The Rust Belt is a great example of this because most kids ended up migrating out to cities for work while their parents or the less successful ones end up stuck.
There's a lot of questions right now.
1. Will there be a net-new creation of jobs? Is positive-sum knowledge work a real thing, or have we run out of new jobs to create?
2. How quickly will workers transition to an AI version of their jobs?
3. Will AI even succeed in a broad way across knowledge work or will the frontier of AI remain jagged and only impact some jobs (coding) while leaving others alone?
4. For workers left behind in this transition, what will their lives be like? We know from looking at previous technology transitions (industrial revolution, factory automation, computer revolution, now maybe AI revolution) that many workers really do end up in bad places. It's perfectly reasonable to demand that in today's world in our advanced societies that even if those workers are unable to adapt that they are able to lead lives with dignity.
There's a lot of interesting conversations and investigations to be had but my biggest fear is just that nobody is really willing to listen to the other side with empathy. This entire conversation thread is just people snipping at each other, hitting the vote buttons based on where they want to steer their favorite opinion. If you want to do social and economic science in this space but people are so polarized, the work will be thwarted. In general offline spaces are less polarized (not to be mistaken for pro or anti AI disruption) than online spaces, but my fear is that we continue to polarize, making understanding the fabric of our social change challenging and letting down everyone in the process.
From what I've been able to find, that book does not make the argument that the people actually displaced from their jobs ended up better off. It is certainly possible for some workers to end up better off while those who were displaced do not.
I don't think the analogy holds. AI isn't automating one job, it's automating _knowledge work_. There's no factory work to flee to, literally and figuratively.
Try to come up with a job that both doesn't produce anything physical, and can't be done by AI.
This is vague marketing speak and simply not the reality on the ground. As someone implementing all new workflows, most of the time I’m create new product classes wholesale. sometimes I see people upskilling tasks so the same human can do more.
I can’t think of a single knowledge job where they are removing humans from the loop completely.
Random news headlines of struggling companies doing “AI layoffs” don’t count. No amount of AI can save bad leadership.
Easy. Name one profession within the North American context that makes less money (inflation adjusted) now than say a farmer, loom weaver or laborer of yore.
A grub hub delivery man is wealthier today than a farmer 100 years ago and that's purely because of two reasons: Technology and Unions :)
This argument only works if you have a career (and lifespan) that spans 100+ years. I'd venture a guess that 0% of Grubhub delivery drivers were farmers a hundred years ago.
Have you talked to a delivery driver in most large cities? Most of them come from countries where they would be a farmer or day laborer.
This ball is going through even your ever-moving goal posts. My statement never claimed people's careers would stay the same and they'd just make more money.
But you didn't provide any support for saying that the specific people who were automated away would make more money. That's what people are objecting to.
> Most automation has led to people transitioning to higher wages.
No, what you mean to say is that automation has eventually (decades later) led to higher purchasing power in the system as a whole. The outlook for people that were directly automated away was pretty bleak, actually. The hundreds of thousands of lamplighters did not largely become the thousands of electricians that were needed in this new industry.
This tracks for all industries. Automation literally means far fewer people will be employed to do the same job (otherwise what's the point of it?). That dumps these workers out at the low end of the general job market, where they have to compete with an increasing number of people. Because of the desperation to get any job, the wages fall. It's only decades later that societies settled into a new place and created enough brand new jobs to make up the shortfall, or applied regulation to reign in the crazy power imbalance. That's the stuff you miss out on if you only look at statistics that span centuries and treat the population as one homogeneous mass. The people who are directly targeted by automation are very likely to have their lives messed up for a very long time.
Recent news from China about how better AI capabilities changed what Chinese specialists can earn with microdramas are not confirming this point. Some historical analogies to reassure people things will turn out nice in the end are nice but are not very convincing if you have so many more recent counterexamples with the gig economy and the huge inflation that was not a problem in the early 20th century.
The economy now is very different, no gold or silver standard, less isolation and more globalised product chains and processes, and 7-times as many people.
There is a good chance that a large enough number of people will suffer from this transformation, and they will have to fight with whatever they have, because if they don't, they will risk being left on the roadside and not getting any raise.
People having some direction over how jobs are automated should keep that in mind, otherwise it will be too late to convince the masses of people fearing automation that it is their fault not seeing the positive angles of automation.
I knew a guy early in my career who has a secretary (for starters!) who printed out his email and put them on his desk every morning with the rest of the mail. He would then dictate his response to her and she would type it in. It was pure ego. Nothing else.
Yes, and because typists and secretaries were predominately women, it was not as uncommon as one might imagine for male executives to eschew personal computers based on their perception of gender roles.
There's a great anecdote about that in the book _Dealers of Lightning_, where the Xerox execs were indifferent to a demo of the Star personal computer but their wives were ecstatic about it.
And I've read somewhere that quite a fraction of young people nowadays can't type (effectively) on a physical keyboard - no wonder, their main interaction with computing being via phones and tablets. Could be that typing won't be useful/practiced anymore (like already cursive writing in some parts of the world).
Yes, he doesn't really know how to use a computer. He was born in the 1940s, computer skills are not super common for people from that generation. He was already in his mid-50s when computers started to become common in the workplace.
I’m in my mid forties. If VR/ar devices like the Apple Vision Pro were to go mainstream, I can’t imagine myself learning how to use it effectively as a daily driver device to get work done. Heck, even the Internet, I’m pretty sure my relationship with it is more of wary scepticism than most people in their thirties.
I can see why someone who never used email until their fifties would never get fully comfortable with it.
Out of roughly 400 billion emails sent daily worldwide, estimates pin actual human written messages at around 10%. In personal inboxes, human correspondence is essentially extinct. Checking my own personal email inbox right now, the entire first page is 2FA, Amazon, some shit from my climbing gym, my car, my employer health insurance, my bank... My spam filters are aggressive and there are literally thousands of unread emails in there waiting for me to click select all -> delete. Even at work the overwhelming majority is automated Jira noise, CI/CD noise, calendar shit, compliance blasts... I have received maybe 2 or 3 actual human typed messages in the last 2-3 weeks.
For personal correspondence? Yes. Most of what email was used for, for actual humans in their personal lives, has transitioned to SMS and other apps like WhatsApp, WeeChat, Signal, Discord, and that happened a decade ago.
You see that 90% of the daily volume is sludge and think this is a healthy communication network for humans?
i have 4 email accounts, and I check them maybe once a week. nobody sends me emails any more, everybody uses "messaging"
(actually, i forgot i have 2 or 3 others, I check them even less, perhaps a few times a year, really only when i need to reset a password associated with them)
I don't like that comparison. Email was an improvement to snail mail, and the people who you claim refused to use it just didn't understand it and didn't want to understand it.
Lots of people, myself included, understand llms and can and do use them at work because we have to, but we might choose to not use them outside of work because they rot our brains, are unethical, funnel even more money into the hands of a few billionaires (selling a service trained on stolen property) and haven't actually been proven to make the world better. Unlike email!
Email stopped me having to walk to the post box or spend a lunch hour in the post office. Before WhatsApp etc it let me communicate instantly with relatives in other countries for free. Email made my website accounts harder to crack. So many things.
What the fuck have LLMs done yet? Nothing! We would be no worse off without them so far and no one has anything to show to prove otherwise, except some vibe coded websites that all look the same (edgy dark theme and hacker vibes)
I think there’s a wide space between refusing any AI use, and refusing AI use requirements imposed by an employer. For example, one might find AI valuable for search, research, and getting a second opinion, but refuse it for primary generation of content.
AI is new but this phenomenon isn't. Every new wave of tech has sizable opposition.
People refused phone calls, refused to watch TV, refused to buy computers, refused to move their workflows to software, refused emails or browing the web, refused online shopping, refused smartphones, refused social media.
And there's nothing wrong with any of this. Ultimately everyone decides which stage of technology they are comfortable with. Everything until then is comfortable and convenient, and everything newer is corrupting society and rotting our brains.
I came of age with the personal PC revolution and developed my career during the internet revolution, and was well into my career when the mobile computing smartphone revolution occurred. I did not see or feel even a fraction of the amount of social dread with those technologies that I see with AI, and I think that's justified given the circumstances.
Saying that this revolution is another one of those is true in a general sense, but misleading in the specific sense. Just as saying that adding 1c heat to some body of water is "more of the same" can be true in a general sense, but misleading when the water's basis temperature is 99.5c.
That is to say, periodic or gradual change induces large changes at inflection points.
It feels similar to the progression from post-WW2 technological utopianism that arose with the adoption and deployment of massive advancements in materials and mechanical, and electrical technology, to the cold-war dread of nuclear and ballistic technology.
I think the 90s saw the end of the cold war which lifted a bunch of that dread. The optimism of those days has been worn down over time.
What I remember back then is at least the pretense being sold that the technology would improve people's lives by giving them more leisure and enjoyment. That the productivity gains would be reflected in some improvement in quality of life. I think the main difference now is that this expectation has been lost by most people.
I have the feeling this expectation loss is what triggered the current riots in Western Europe. I'm not talking about the platforms and actors which might be fanning and fueling them, but the trigger which I have seen at work at my kids or nephews - they don't see much hope they can rely on some income, on getting their own house, on feeding their own children. Of course they are young and easier influenced, and I might be biased myself, but I really believe they have less chances than what I had at their age. I won't tell them that though.
I’m unaware of other technological revolutions where the largest group of opposition was among young people[0]. Was there a great youth revolt against the telephone, the television, and the computer? I don’t recall anything of the sort.
From conversations with my young kids the problem they have is with the billionaires. They are fine with the technology they just don’t trust the billionaires and who can blame them.
I don't think the underlying numbers support the thesis. My understanding (from e.g. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/06/17/how-opinions...) is that the age skew is not that high and largely driven by how much more likely young people are to be familiar with the technology at all.
> People refused phone calls, refused to watch TV, refused to buy computers, refused to move their workflows to software, refused emails or browing the web, refused online shopping, refused smartphones, refused social media.
You really think this is an apt comparison? I don't think the creators of any of those technologies were warning society that their own creations might wipe out humanity.
> I don't think the creators of any of those technologies were warning society that their own creations might wipe out humanity.
They are only doing this now IMO so that they can be the ones writing the regulations to keep us all "safe", just like we need identity verification to "save the children". They want to keep competition at bay so they can have a $2T IPO, and unregulated, "unsafe", Chinese, open-weight, and local AI threatens that IPO.
You might only be hearing about it now but the warnings have been coming (including by those who are now leading the top labs) for a long time, since before any of those “incentives” were in place.
Some of those people in the early days were just letting their imagination run away with them, like that google engineer who thought a chatbot was self-aware, being enslaved, and was in need of rescue. Much of the time they weren't talking about "AI" as it exists, but what AI might maybe one day become. Other times it was purely marketing to make headlines and put the idea in people's (investors) heads that the chatbots were vastly more powerful than they are.
I disagree with "sizable". We haven't seen near this level of opposition in the past (I'm old enough to know), mostly because moving from say landlines to mobile phones, or postal mail to email, or radio to TV, didn't threaten the jobs of large segments of the population. Past opposition tended to be more rooted in culture or even religion (TV as a vehicle for "ungodly" programming, etc.)
Software is an employment rather than a profession. That distinction is important. Here is a definition of profession:
Traditional professions share essential characteristics. They provide a vital service to society, requiring expertise and skill developed through years of training, education, and experience. Professions establish standards of practice and certify that their members are qualified to serve the needs of society.
--US Army, ADP 6-22, Army Leadership and the Profession
Software does not have explicit standards of practice or a required body of certifications for its practitioners. Software, as an employment, is whatever an employer wants or is willing to accept at any given moment.
Be careful with military definitions. One near-universal aspect of a "profession" is that it be self-regulating. Lawyers have Bar Associations that dictate who can or cannot practice. Doctors have Medical Associations. So too accountants and engineers. These entities are granted monopolies but remain independent from government and set their own standards.
But by that definition, soldiering can never be a "profession" as a soldier is always regulated by the government they serve, and there is no professional association regulating mercenaries. But I would be very hesitant to suggest that the US Marines are not professional soldiers. They are. The definitions are messy.
> These entities are independent from government and set their own standards.
As they should. Industries should be self regulating. While these industries form their own standards of practice they do so with the blessing of government, typically under state government supervision/authorization in the US, and are held to account by government. A lawyer or doctor who violates their standards of practice could very likely be guilty of criminal law and find themselves in prison depending upon the violation even when no other criminal actions occurred.
Even bus drivers are held to higher standards of practice than software developers.
There are certainly things where you need to have an officially licensed engineer actually stamp the plans. That doesn't mean everything about the plans was done by someone who holds that stamp, just that they were reviewed and signed off by the person holding the license. Lots of people may work on those plans. They're still doing engineering work. And that's just for the kinds of things which actually require a licensed "engineer".
There's still tons of jobs which is often still called "engineering" which often don't involve anyone who has a stamp. Few electrical engineers, chemical engineers, mechanical engineers, or lots of others actually have any kind of engineering license. They still get degrees in things like "Bachelor of Science of Electrical Engineering" or "Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering". Their job roles usually have "engineer" in it. And yet it seems like the job people only really criticize as "you're not an engineer, engineers are licensed" is SWE.
In most (all?) US states, you need a license to be a _Professional_ Engineer. This is a legal distinction that carries weight _and_ legal liability. It doesn't mean that you cannot "engineer" without a license. There's legal distinctions on what work a licensed engineer can and cannot do, and what work must be done by or under the supervision of a licensed engineer. e.g. a junior's work has to be signed off by a supervising PE. To become a PE, a licensed Engineering Intern must have first passed a preliminary exam issued by the state and worked under a PE for a minimum amount of time with satisfactory performance (think apprenticeship).
It's the legal liability that SWEs don't want. e.g. You wouldn't be able to just slap "This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE." on your software and walk away from it when lives are at stake. A so-called Profession Software Engineer would have to accept liability for their work product, and those of the juniors working under them.
I started down the road to becoming a Professional Engineer while I was in college as I studied Electrical Engineering and was more interested in hardware/power engineering. I took, and passed, the Engineering Intern Test in my state (which is the preliminary exam you take before you can start your journey to become a PE). Then life happened and job/career opportunities took me in a different direction/industry, and I've been doing software instead. So, I never became a licensed Professional Engineer. I'm still a licensed engineering intern, though. I'm still bound by the legal and ethical standards that it entails and could lose my license for violations.
Think about it like this: What makes software any more or less of a profession than working at your favorite burger joint in terms of industry wide criteria?
Those percentage of SWE working on critical infrastructure should be licensed and legally liable, yes. You shouldn't need a license to build a CRUD app, just like nobody needs a license to build a treehouse in their backyard. You should need a license to work on a car's braking system (https://safetyresearch.net/toyota-unintended-acceleration-an...) or radiation therapy machines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25), just like you need a license to engineer a highway bridge.
People do things based on motivation. People motivated by pride and passion know that their work reflects upon them, so they have an incentive to care about quality. People motivated by money know that their paychecks will keep arriving as long as they keep meeting a minimum bar, so they're not incentivized to care about quality, but they are incentivized to care about responsiveness and consistency. For critical software, adding in legal liability for one's work creates the quality incentive that's lacking in most professional roles, while retaining the accountability that we can't expect of volunteers.
I agree completely — the lack of proper professional licensing around working on what has become critical infrastructure astounds me. But even more so is the pushback I feel from within the field! It isn’t that the pushback isn’t understandable; its more that its disappointing.
>> Even bus drivers are held to higher standards of practice than software developers.
Because while there are some software developers that might be in a place to cause people physical harm, ALL bus drivers are ALWAYS in a position to cause great and immediate harm to others on the road.
What do you find important about this distinction? To me it's a description of the normative relationship between practitioners and broader society but I don't really see the significance you do.
Hillel Wayne wrote a really excellent well researched article about software engineering compared to other forms of engineering a few years ago. It necessarily goes into a lot of this stuff but what emerges is that these definitions are regulatory and historical debris.
You don't need medical board or a bar to certify or constrain professional behavior and those organizations may not constrain as much as you assume anyway. The reasons we do have those institutions is as much a matter of historical accident as any modern need for it, and the reasons we don't have it for other high impact fields is pretty much an accident too.
And in a lot of the world software engineering does have professional certification and standards of practice. They still ship adware and racist loan denial algorithms too.
If they do, they're behind the curve. They don't matter anymore.
Systems design, architecture, database fundamentals, a bit of SRE. That matters. Not coding and syntax and toy problem solving with data structures and algorithms.
I think this is something where definitions and static roles might serve as a useful reference point. Is it really the case that the trillion-dollar frontier AI labs are behind the curve, and only some other group of people knows how to really leverage AI? It's not impossible - Nvidia employees aren't the best in the world at using their chips - but the hypothesis practically demands some analysis of who these clever curve-setters are and why we're hearing so much less about them than about Anthropic.
My own experience is that coding, syntax, and some kinds of toy problem solving are important skills to use AI coding tools most effectively. I routinely get PRs these days whose descriptions seem plausible but are clearly wrong from a glance at the code, and I've had times when I'm unable to communicate to someone why a PR is wrong because they're not able to form a sufficiently detailed mental model of what it's doing.
This makes sense, though. They have to be exceptionally confident in the performance of the product and work to continually improve its quality and efficiency. Many other companies can get by more just as consumers of it, but the makers of the product need some of the best coding skills available.
I just finished several months of interviewing and think that you must be projecting a bit. Every one of them included a coding interview with no AI use allowed.
If you have ever worked in almost any other industry your first question quickly answers itself. If you have never worked in an industry principally governed by ethical standards it would be challenging for me to describe it to you. I cannot give you what your perspective has never before imagined.
The IEEE has made some efforts to turn software engineering from an occupation into a profession — on par with civil engineering, architecture, law, medicine, military science, etc. A true profession requires a recognized body of knowledge, formal qualification criteria, and a code of ethics. So far most working software developers haven't shown much interest in this, nor is there much demand from employers or government authorities. I don't think we need to professionalize software engineering in the general case but it is an option for those who want it.
Not to sound insane (because those who know, know), but CRT's actually resolve very well and are league better than most non OLED displays for non-text based media consumption.
I run a wide-screen 1080i Sony Display as my main TV. Power consumption sucks, though.
Lol, what a slave mindset. Just because a technology exists, and most of the human cattle use it, does not mean that it's necessary for someone to use it.
Sure, be less productive, see how that works out for you. Your attitude in 2026 is crazy to me. Maybe you're just using chat, I don't know, but it saves me hours daily and saves my brainpower for situations that truly need it. Work smarter, not harder.
What I see a lot of in my own industry (games) is that people that don't like AI either 1) see something that changes how they think of it and start the slow path of adoption or 2) continually dig their heels in and/or refuse to update their priors.
As technical qualms were solved and many other capability issues with AI have been solved, the continual heel digging and goal posting by group 2 has started to just feel more akin to a religious stance than something based on any specific fact. There is no version of AI that they want to see, they will oppose it on moral(-ish) grounds on sight, etc.
AI has real issues, but like you, observing this re-adjustment in realtime has been really interesting, especially as it seems to come from people I share 99% overlap in interest and politics with, but who hate AI like they do.
It also feels akin to de-radicalizing MAGA or something. The rejection or idea that they are wrong causes a whole worldview to collapse in something akin to ego death, so instead of facing that possibility they just insist they are right.
I've been reading articles suggesting that AI use alters ways of thinking. Humans certainly adapt to the tools they use. If this is true, and what a huge caveat that is, then the divergence in ways humans think: AI using and non-AI using will be interesting to watch. Although it will probably be decades before any significant conclusions are reached.
I find your Amish example is striking and accurate.
I haven't read TFA yet, but having studied academically and then spent years implementing ML techniques for industrial applications (in the areas of machine vision and signals processing), I think that the premise of "AI exemption" is just nonsensical, by nature of being ill-defined. AI isn't a singular product or technology, it's an abstract family of computational techniques, some more complex or mathematically involved than others. Finding function parameters to fit data points using a least squares method is ML, therefore AI, and you would find that in every thermostat, ABS system or electric bike. Too simple? Here is a gradient of increasingly sophisticated ML techniques, with LLMs not even being on the top of the list. Where do you place the cursors of "what's too much AI"?
I am all in on (local and sovereign) AI, but people still call me Amish because I do not use a smartphone which has greatly increased my attention span and happiness. I imagine there will be plenty of people that are more productive at some tasks by choosing to abstain from one or more almost universally used technologies.
My new analogy for AI is that it produces an elaborate lunch buffet containing so many floral arrangements that considerable effort must be expended to find the food being served.
It's not an either or, really. I can concede it has utility authoring code while being repulsed by its use in creative works. I might operate Claude Code while actively avoiding any significant use of it in movies, books and music.
This is exactly where I'm at. I also avoid using AI for the more creative parts of programming too, while finding utility in it for the more tedious parts.
They've stopped technological progress. I tell you since AI started taking over, my experience is that nearly all forward progress (in software at least) has come to a halt. We've been standing in place, maybe sliding backwards a bit.
Here's the thing about AI: intelligence isn't a new thing, and it isn't a tool. The Amish can tell you that having a brain doesn't meant that you don't need a plow. In some ways they're much smarter than the AI crowd, all of who loudly keep insisting that brains will make plows and tractors and combine harvesters obsolete. You're so convinced that intelligence is the ultimate replacement for tools that you've stopped climbing the tech tree of tools...
It's like the tech industry itself no longer believes in technology.
I'm glad I'm not the only one noticing that. It feels that aside from the regular new LLM releases, there has been no serious innovation for the past four years.
I'm not even talking about holographic game consoles or FTL travel. Why can't we finally have a good container orchestrator that's not kubernetes for example?
> Why can't we finally have a good container orchestrator that's not kubernetes for example?
What's the market demand? I'm confident there are plenty of alternatives being churned out today but nobody's looking or asking for any. If only because they settled on k8s, they have it on their CV, they have certifications, and switching is a huge investment and risk.
Right now to me it feels like the innovation is in using LLMs to (finally?) clean up existing code, find vulnerabilities, do maintenance, optimize, and if necessary rewrite.
Perhaps because the tools that we have already are already good enough.
"Why don't we have any new programming languages" or "Why don't we have any new web frameworks" or "Why don't we have any new operating systems" or "Why don't we have any new container orchestrators" might be the same kinds of questions as "why is the design for washing machines still basically the same as it was 50 years ago?" or "why are we still using English, where are all the new conlangs to replace it?" "why are we still using email/SMTP instead of inventing a better system" "why haven't we invented a new calendar?"
You're saying there's nothing left to invent. I think that explains a lot of the complacency around considering AI to be the last ever frontier for progress. I obviously don't agree. I've gone looking into "why don't we have better version control" and the answer is definitely not that we already have all we could want.
> Why can't we finally have a good container orchestrator that's not kubernetes for example?
Easy, we can't because the LLMs know a lot about kubernetes but wouldn't know anything about a new orchestrator, so they'll always suggest k8s, and the button-pushers will just say "yes, do it, no mistakes". Maybe if Anthropic decides they need to create a new orchestrator, they would bias Claude heavily enough for it to actually get used, but that's about the only way I see.
It might not count as innovation in the last four years because the groundwork was laid decades ago, but in the last four years Waymo evolved to the point where it can drive on the highways.
All it will lead to is yet more people that are out of a job. Right now at least a driving license (more so if it is a commercial license) is a source of income to many.
And then what? Once the economy no longer depends on human input (labor), why do we expect it to keep producing outputs that humans need (food, shelter, medical care)?
Roughly 36k people died on US roads last year. Waymo's own numbers over 271M driverless miles show about 95% fewer serious injury crashes than the human benchmark in the cities it runs in. Discount that however much you want for methodology, it's still progress.
It is progressing, yes, but it subsumed the productivity of humans.
Where before humans learned and built better tools, now you keep paying forever to get re-trained models. What makes it a regressive feedback loop is that the people who used to learn and push the frontier are now using AI to repackage others' work as their own. Eventually what will be left to train on but copies of copies of copies?
AI is amazing, but it is not a tool anymore. Humans are the tools (agents) for AI to do things in real world. All the decision makers in business and polity are no longer able to rule out a direction provided by AI, making the AI the decision maker for humans. Even Fed is using "Sim Fed" to make rate decisions for the economy. The era of human-decision is over.
Also, you might think that you are observing Amish (or AImish) from a distance. It is same for them. They watch the modern world rot with uncontrolled and out-of-sync evolution. You are being observed.
Small thing: many/most of the people outsiders identify as Amish actually aren't. There are a variety of group living similar lifestyles, give or take. Collectively they are now described as the "Plain People", which links to both their apparently simple ways and mode of dress.
I find this man's ostrich response to be quite different from my world view, but agree that it is fascinating to confront. Given that so many of us consume the world via tiny handheld screens and vote the way they do, I think it is definitely worth considering an artificial intelligence hedge. AI Maternalism would be a wildly unpopular counter proposition at the moment, but you have to admit humans aren't succeeding at governance right now either. Some of the parody AI movements are pretty amazing to behold: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DI2fSgssIW2/. I know, I know, but I had points to spare.
Technologists as a professional group are beyond weird. You usually expect rational critique (either positive or negative) from professionals, but the good technologists are supposed to just uncritically accept whatever supposed technological progress as an unalloyed good. Employer or Silicon Valley says it’s good, therefore think it is good. No, that’s a bit on the nose: Silicon Valley says it is good which means that it would be “good for my career”, therefore it is good. But are there any ill effects for society? Those are Luddite questions.[1]
But in this case Amish is not really an insult of course. I guess they are a hard-working people. Self-sufficient. And allow their young to take a sabbatical from the primitive life to see if it’s really something that they want to dedicate their life to.
On the other hand, of course there won’t be some Amish split. You can’t just pick and choose modernity. You can’t form a subculture of No AI. That’s why people are critical of AI; we live in a society.
[1] Being ahistorical and using Luddite as an insult also helps.
I'm not sure if terrorism is the right word (how can you do bad things to software?), but I am sure that sabotage on datacenters will become a thing. But that's not a direct response to AI, but one to building more datacenters, using power (and potable water, but I'm not convinced that's as big of a thing as people make it out to be compared to other industries / wastes), and corporate greed which does not improve the lives of the common people.
"If our world survives, the next great challenge to watch out for will come - you heard it here first - when the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge. Oboy. It will be amazing and unpredictable, and even the biggest of brass, let us devoutly hope, are going to be caught flat-footed. It is certainly something for all good Luddites to look forward to if, God willing, we should live so long."
I just looked it up and Thomas Pynchon remains alive.... how wonderful.
> Comparing people to Amish that dont want to use LLMs is wild.
What makes the comparison wild? The Amish are thoughtful and deliberate about what technologies they reject, adopt, and accept with constraints. Many of the people I know who have concerns about relying on LLMs are similarly thoughtful and deliberate.
Why would I read an entire essay when you can't even be bothered to tell me what it's supposed to prove? I couldn’t care less whether it was by Pynchon, Marx, Friedman, Amodei, or anyone else.
Yes, though from legal standpoint, this particular case isn't that interesting because its a religious exemption for religious work, where considering the moral and ethical boundaries is the main job?
But if someone was say, working on housing approvals and refused to use AI because of religious exemptions to do their jobs faster, I would hope any court would strike it down.
My right to housing supersedes their right to work a certain (slower) way? "You can just wait longer" is an unacceptable answer.
It's easy to find egregious corner cases of philosophical workflows where an LLM was inappropriately used to replace thinking, where the whole goal was thinking (which is the case here).
But we know most token use is software development + back office paperwork. A big chunk of it is productivity improvements for things we all need (housing, medical paperwork, insurance etc.), so to me, that's where my argument lies.
For most of the things that people really care about, I don't think that the bottleneck is the sort of thing that AI is automating.
The bottleneck for housing is construction and landlords. The bottleneck for medicine is the number of doctors and the inelasticity of demand. The bottleneck for education is the number of teachers. Etc.
I read it as: faring well in a work/industry/employment situation where expectations for velocity and quality pivot on the fact that 99% of your peers use AI, and 90% of those use it to do poor quality work quickly.
Now your boss is surprised your email took more than 10s to produce, and wonders why you are concerned about what it contains. None of your teammates are.
A new Amish-like lifestyle may be developing before our eyes in real-time and that's very interesting to follow and observe (from a distance).