Yes, AI will take your job, except for a small subset of people: plumbers, surgeons and the like. Oh, and politicians, executives, and board members.
You Stand in the Way of Profit
You might argue, “but AI can’t do my job as good as me!” Yeah, probably. Maybe it will one day, but AI will take your job tomorrow, not “one day,” not some mythical future when it’s AGI and actually can do a better job. AI doesn’t have to do your job better than you, it just has to generate a lot of bullshit, that’s good enough.
Frontend engineer example: we try to keep together a good, maintainable codebase. When a PM asks us to make a button flashing and wiggle around to draw attention, we bring our decades of straight-brow A11Y experience to solemnly say hmm no, that might give someone a seizure, and grandmas with poor motor skills will have trouble clicking it. Pat on the back, we did a good Frontend Engineering. Problem is, capitalism doesn’t need good frontend engineering, it needs things that select for high shareholder value, and for a great many reasons, bullshit selects for more shareholder value than good engineering. Dark pattern UX that targets the 80% percentile of user devices. “10% of users have vision problems!” Great, who cares, instead of spending a bunch of effort making the app work for them, better to find a way to extract 200% more money than before from the remaining 90% of users. More bugs? Who cares, it’s not like the users have an alternative platform. Data leak? Nobody in the government’s going to do anything about it. Game’s now fully rigged.
Capitalism is unnatural, and selects for unnatural things. It’s been kept semi-sane for the last hundred years because humans have been doing what they would have been doing anyway under any other system: organizing, creating, allocating resources. Keeping ourselves busy and alive. A conversation I had recently with a European friend: He was confused why the Americans in the office were so cynical, “keep your resume updated!” they’d tell him. His relationship with the company was long-term. He would retire there, in 20 years, and then live off his pension! To me that means some combination of two things: 1. Perhaps he’s right and the Europeans have genuinely successfully wrangled the profit-generating fauna (corporations) into good behavior by leveraging their socialist governments. 2. Most likely he’s naive: whatever protections he had, we once had in the States, and because Capital is Power, what happened to the Americans will inevitably happen to him, and he should prepare for that. The Europeans are still in the human mindset: people get together for a common cause, create greater than the sum of parts organizations, and take care of eachother when they are old or injured. This is the natural human state. Ancient humans would care for someone with a shattered hip long enough for them to die of other causes. The abomination is when we try to find a way to make the profits work around this. Capitalism’s perverse incentives lead to a cool photo sharing app getting turned into a nightmare hellscape of dark pattern UX that causes kids to kill themselves..
AI is a boon: finally, the stupid humans that are putting the brakes on profits are going to be out of the way, and the sociopathic profit-generating algorithm can be left to focus on what really matters. Forget an endless paperclip machine, the real AGI risk is apps that reprogram us into quivering blobs of extractable value.
Your Job Never Mattered, the Manager Did
Maybe you have one of those rare jobs where profit incentive aligns with human ones. The guy that programs the flaps on a plane, maybe. People don’t fly on airlines that crash, I suppose that’s an alignment. You’re not an obstacle to pure profit generation, however, you’re also not accurately measured neither on your true human-value contribution, nor your capitalist value. You’re measured by a manager somewhere, who inevitably has an incorrect idea both of what’s good for users but also what’s good for the business itself. Either because they’re stupid, or because they have their own personal incentives that don’t align with the well-being of the business. Example: Google. Remember Inbox? Beloved email tool used by I presume at least tens of thousands of people based on the uproar when it was unceremoniously shut down. Why does Google kill so many popular projects? Sometimes for the capitalism reasons: if it’s not making them a billion it’s not worth it. Also, though, because Google has a project manager problem. A project manager comes in and needs something for their resume, so that they when they start shopping their resume around after using Google as a career stepladder, they can say they managed an entire new chat product at Google; never mind that to do so, they had to kill the previous chat app. Google Talk -> Google Voice -> Google Messenger -> Hangouts -> Allo/Duo? -> Google Voice? I can’t even keep track anymore. Another example would be when private equity comes in and start stripping a business for parts.
Point is, managers might have their own reasons to replace you: an AI directive from above leading to layoffs so someone can say they replaced 200 jobs with AI, or because their golf buddy convinced them that AI really can do your job better, or because claude shat out a localhost frontend-only demo data webapp for them in 10 minutes, leading to the question, “I was able to have AI make this in a half hour, why is it taking your team weeks?”
The manager has power here. If their golf buddy convinces them an AI is better than you, then, an AI is better than you. History, winners, etc.
Speaking of Golf Buddies
You will be replaced because the people that rule our society really, really need you to be replaced. The AI industry has created a concupiscent circle-jerk of deals that make the financial instruments of the 2008 financial crisis blush, and unlike us, the Capital class has class consciousness. What’s bad for Elon is bad for everyone holding the strings. Luckily for them, they have those strings, and so they can artificially increase demand for AI by handing down those AI directives that leads to middle management firing half their workforce. They can meet with politicians to get national security directives passed, grants distributed, subsidies established.
There is No Safety Net
There are liberal optimists out there operating under this strange idea that it’s ok if we lose our jobs, we’re heading towards a Star Trek future where we don’t have to work anymore! Finally, our productivity has never been higher, we can have the mythical 10 hour work week. Or even better, let AGI and autonomous robots serve our every whim. After all, improvements in productivity through innovation has always led to improvements in working conditions, right? Just like profit improvements from increase in business efficiencies leads to higher wages for workers, right?
Star Trek was a communist society. Is there a path to communism in America? Why would a technology cause a social change? No, liberal capitalist societies will not reduce work hours, increase safety nets, do UBI, or competently handle massive unemployment. They’ll reach for the tools they always do: brutal suppression of the poor, leveraging of propaganda, and the dangling of carrots to a select few class traitors needed to enforce and maintain the system (middle managers, scabs, and cops).