For some reason, AI boosters can't help but condescend. I've never seen this with the rollout of any other technology. It's like this stuff immediately becomes a core part of their personality.
I agree that this new thing is polarizing, but as with the rollout of any groundbreaking technology, the ones looking backwards is just going to be left behind.
As I see it, the only reason to make such a bold claim (as opposed to just doing what you do and seeing how things shake out) is insecurity. Especially if you’re condescending about it.
This discussion is not new. Books was criticized for being addictive and antisocial. TV for rotting our brains. And even if there are some truths to these claims, I do appreciate both.
If you want to be passive aggressive without AI, the more tokens there is for the rest of us ;)
I largely agree with you but I still can't stand the "you're gonna be left behind!!" framing that is really common with people who are enthusiastic about AI. What does it even mean to "be left behind" in this instance, it's just a vague emotional expression.
These AI tools are not hard to learn, in fact they're super easy when you have some experience programming, so the only people who are going to be left behind are the ones who simply refuse to use the tools out of principle. And why would they care about being "left behind"? They're making a conscious choice to not use the tools. They want to be left behind!
And not everyone who is skeptical are that out of principle, some just don't see the value yet or are slowly and cautiously adopting it into their workflow. If AI powered coding ends up being even half as good as promised, so good that denying the evidence is impossible, they can just start using it and catch right up. So who exactly is "being left behind" here? It's complete nonsense while simultaneously being extremely condescending and I get triggered every time I read the phrase.
I don't mean anything against you personally with my ranting, it's more a general observation. Perhaps you and some others do mean it as a genuine bit of advice, like "hey, you should learn these tools or else you might struggle to find work in the future", but the sense I get most of the time are people who are gleeful that the non-believers are soon to be homeless or whatever.
Yeah, I could have formulated that in another way - 'missing out' would be a better term. I do not mean to be condescending in the meaning that I look down on people that have other preferences than me. Take books as an example. I do not believe that people that can't read is of any lesser value than me, and whether you can read or not, is a poor indication of how intelligent you are - or how happy you are for that matter. Sure, information is important, but there are a lot of different types of information and a lot of different ways of acquire it - so I do not believe that my way is any better than someone else's. That being said, me being able to read and appreciate books, do believe that people who can't, are missing out.
We know books has been used for both good and evil, but I still think books are a wonderful invention. Same with television or the internet, the quality of the content on there doesn't really take anything away from the fact that the technology in itself is absolutely amazing. In hindsight - it has been a minute since Gutenberg - how the society has adopted the written word do have real implications for the people living in it though. If you can't read today, you will struggle. Not because there are anything wrong with you, but because the system more or less take it for granted that you can.
And it is going to be the same with AI, but even more so. The ones who learns to master it will dominate those who don't. It will create a new form of class divide, where access to tokens and knowing how to use them, is going to be the main drivers. AI is still in it's early stages and we see that not everything is alright with it, take for instance the economics around it or the environmental impact it has. But still, I do believe that it is an amazing invention, and that if you do not embrace it, you are missing out.
If someone said "Yeah I haven't read in 5 years" would you find it reasonable to tell them they're going to be left behind? If someone did that to me in person I'd consider whacking them in the face.
Maybe don't say it online if you wouldn't say it offline.
I think this approach means well, but it doesn’t connect with the reality of the times. You’ve got people repeatedly insisting that times have shifted and folks are going to be left behind because that’s what’s happening. October 2025 marked a turning point in all of software— that sounds grandiose, but it’s true. The longer we pretend that it didn’t happen the harder it gets to adjust.
I think people are talking like this because we have not lived in a genuine computing revolution like this since probably the introduction of the micro computer. It’s been more than 40 years.
I get that people are mad about this. That’s real obvious when you comment in any way about the use of AI. You get told that you’re a robot you get told that you’re not a real engineer you get told that you’re insecure you get told that—-all kinds of things. So it’s super clear that people are upset because they’re being fucking childish about it. Even a post like this one where the author tries hard to be pretty nice, we see the same sneering comments about training your own replacement and shit like that. It’s not subtle.
Where I get off the train is concluding that because they’re upset that they don’t need to be told what’s happening. All of computing is already changing. It’s already happening. It’s like if the sun winked out right now we would discover it in eight minutes, but the event has already happened. We are merely outside the cone of visibility. This shit is all happening right now. It is all real. I think it does a disservice to people to pretend as though it’s not.
No disrespect intended but I think you're in a bubble. Things will change, sure, but not to the same extent as the invention of the Internet for example.
I disagree. This is like the invention of the steam machine which may be the most important factor in kickstarting the industrial revolution. I am pretty sure none of the guys who were there, had any clue as to how this was going to change the world, but I suspect at least some, knew that; this is something else.
People are bitching now about how AI has ruined coding, not fully grasping that for most people, there will be no code, no applications, no operating systems. AI will pretend to be all of that, and doing it way better. A six year old will be able to "out-code" all of us.
I think we are *for sure* in a bubble. There is a kind of venture-capital driven craze for compute because...well a whole host of silly and sensible reasons. It's hard to talk rationally about the money being thrown around if you have suspicions that billions of it are being thrown around because some dudes think they'll create god in the machine and own it, or that they have some theory of consciousness tied up in the matter. Animal spirits, in a sense.
Some of the money thrown around is by companies that want to lock in some kind of interdependency because the only downside they can conceive is Oracle or Dell or whoever invents AGI and they get left behind. So huge circular deals are getting made which increase the correlation coefficient for any collapse to 1 lmao. These deals are getting made for reasons that feel like 2004-2005 american real-estate, where the downside risk of a national profile of mortgages was actually (not joking) taught in textbooks to be 0. So naturally if you're maximizing revenue by making things interdependent, you really only consider the upside.
All these forward looking energy contracts and local generation of energy are signs that the market is under strain more than we expect increasingly exponential future use. Giant companies are thinking they're locking counterparties into the right risk structure (here with an energy company being somehow willing to foresake this infinite future energy price they could charge by just waiting), but really that energy company is perfectly happy to accept some money to start a project which will generate revenue long before electricity. That energy company has an idea of its own risk and revenue profile and they can extract money from a bubble, too.
I give us...months? Maybe 18 months--probably less--before things things get really nasty and messy for the firms who thought they were buying a golden ticket. It then gets messy for users (if not sooner) who are right now being subsidized nicely--not the ludicrous 5k being thrown around recently but compute is at a subsidy right now, so long as you want to rent it or can run a model like Qwen locally. Lots of other people are paying for that subsidy while extraordinary amounts of money flow from one part of computing to another. That's already having weird consequences as firms who spent money on what is essentially rental compute pushing their employees to use more of it in order to keep the person who made the contract safe. More companies will do the Microsoft route (no I'm not talking about Copilot!) and try to push tasks into their internal pipelines like MSFT does with Azure--where with e.g. github, what github needed to do took a back seat (literally haha) to integration with the compute pipeline. That's good-bad-whatever, depending on how you want to think about it. But it's certainly disruptive and I think right now a lot of genAI is doing that kind of disrupting, where people and orgs are being forced through money shaped holes.
I don't know what happens when the music stops. I just know that it is playing.
My children are on their own journey and I’m just trying to be supportive. I don’t measure their worth by how much they agree or understand my perspective.