AI is our Punishment

Growing up, I was insulated from the plight of the masses. I grew up in upper middle class squalor, surrounded by bigger, shinier things in ever-bigger homes, with ever-bigger and nicer cars, in ever-smaller neighborhoods with parks for nobody and sidewalks to nowhere. Friends had to be within the same neighborhood, and thus the same strata. Friends who lived across the main road, or across town, or even one town over, were all treated with suspect. I learned to loathe the unions driving my parents nuts with angry phone calls, to aspire to the gated community one rung up from where we lived, to golf with the "better" kids in town and schmooze with their parents.

When I joined the workforce, that entitlement followed me. I was too good to stock grocery shelves, too well off to ruin myself with meager retail work. No, I would finish college on my terms and immediately join middle management, life would be automatic as it had been growing up, and my upwards momentum would launch me into the classes of the elites: luxury cars, downtown loft, first class travel, the works. I would be better off than my elders, who in turn were better off than their elders.

Thus the narrative goes.

Technology is exceptionally good at fostering the myth of merit. Every major tech company swears they're a top-down meritocracy, where those who perform exceptionally well are rewarded accordingly - and those who struggle are ejected back to B or C-tier enterprises to ply their trade, hone their skills, and try again. You never succeeded because of your team or manager, you succeeded because you were better than the rest. It's why you deserve a total compensation measured in hundreds-of-thousands of dollars, why you deserve infinite PTO, and sabbaticals, and generous leave policies.

You're simply better.

For a while, this was a very easy story to swallow. Even as hardworking people lost their jobs and homes in the 2008 collapse, tech stood strong against the rough seas slamming into its gilded gates. Throughout the 2010s, companies bragged they had never laid off workers in a recession before, that they would always take care of their staff like good companies do. To be fair, they did: layoffs were rare, and once you'd found your way inside the gates you were nigh untouchable in most firms.

The net result was a complete lack of class consciousness at every rung of the technology ladder. While communications workers were striking, tech workers kicked up their feet and laughed at the grizzled old fucks being replaced by technological progress. The prevailing attitude was not one of solidarity, but of "Get gud bro." Developers were treated as gods, showered with compensation and shiny things, watching their shares accelerate into orbit quarter after quarter, minting thousands of millionaires in a matter of years. Even as outsourcing crept into their hallowed ranks, nobody batted an eye, as obviously only the unacceptable ones were replaced with cheap labor abroad. Those who remained were the cream of the crop; those who were exited, inferior trash.

By the time consciousness began seeping into technology, it was too late to stop the machines from chewing up humans into organ paste. As companies laid off hundreds of thousands of workers despite raking in immense profits, tech workers began to sense something was deeply wrong, that they weren't as untouchable as they'd been led to believe. This disquiet turned into panic, as rather than form collective bargaining units they simply doubled-down on what had served them so well thus far: delivering more with less.

Then one little paper lit a fire under the asses of some of the most brilliant software engineers of our time, a "final exit" of sorts they could run through and save themselves in the process. They could reign supreme atop their weaker, shittier peers as the rightful gods of programming, forever. The ultimate and final form of meritocracy had emerged: those who could do their craft so well, they eliminate the need for it entirely for everyone else, forever.

And thus the modern AI boom exploded.

AI today is a touchy topic, largely based on which side you believe yourself to be. The proponents are often (but not always) staunch Capitalism supporters, if not always Capitalists themselves. Deep in their hearts they believe every man is solely and singularly responsible for everything in their lives, that merit pervades everything, everywhere, for everyone. They proudly demonstrate their new software factories and agent swarms as proof of their supremacy, defiant against critique and ignorant of the plights of others. Critique is swatted away as socialist, communist, draconian, or just plain idiotic. To be anything less than a full supporter of wholly unregulated AI is to be an enemy of progress who must be eliminated at all costs, at least in their eyes.

Their opponents span the entire rest of the opinion spectrum: from brilliant minds raising nuanced critiques, to casual enthusiasts with a modicum of humanity for others, to Luddites opposed to the mere proposal of the elimination of labor in a society predicated on the necessity of work for survival. They approach a profession steeped in an illusion of rationalism with arguments of empathy, of systems analysis, of community, of safety. These arguments are dismissed as being without merit, the ghostly visages of Ayn Rand and Ronald Reagan backhanding those who dare oppose the invisible hand of the free market.

Yet with time, the pendulum has clearly swung further and further in favor of the opposition. Initial critiques about the fragility of LLMs and their propensity to fabricate information have been shored up with guardrails, tests, scenarios, and consensus models, demonstrating the very real threat to survival these tools pose to a swath of knowledge workers - and eventually, in some form unrecognizable to today's models, to physical labor as well. What was once dismissed handily with claims of "alarmism" now have to be thoroughly crushed under the boots of "the free market" or "national security", lest more of the populace realize the immense stakes at play in this technological revolution and demand a better compromise than billionaires keeping all the money and all the power. As data centers pop up like plagues in the backyards of citizens, spiking energy bills and scarring the landscape, more and more "regular folk" are starting to see the immense costs of this buildout - and the minimal benefit to them, if any exists at all.

All of it can be traced back to that lack of consciousness, particularly given how US-centric the current AI buildout actually is. China isn't building thousands of datacenters commanding nearly a trillion dollars in CapEx, nor is Europe; it's just the United States, and not through any sort of technological edge either. China arguably has better data sets with superior tagging for training these models thanks to its mass surveillance programs, and the EU is certainly looking for a technological edge with Russia and the United States banging on their respective doorsteps. Yet neither party is building on the scale of the United States, which begs the question of why. Why, if AI is the future, do these juggernauts of economic might not compete directly with the United States? Why do they not court OpenAI or Anthropic to move operations to their shores, enticing them with tax breaks and land grants? It could be because they believe this to be a flash-in-the-pan, an interesting development with limited practical application beyond software creation and highly speculative profitability, or it could be because they see the impacts such a technology would have on their populace - and fear for their own heads should the unemployed masses begin rioting in earnest.

In the United States, however, AI proponents see no downside to this laissez-faire approach. In fact, said harms are the entire point. In the ultimate expression of merit - and thus their personal superiority over all other man - these people and companies continue to train, refine, and shove their tooling down everyone's throats and race to a world of no labor, consequences be damned. When confronted with a question not of class consciousness but basic human empathy, they emphatically and clearly responded with, "Fuck you, got mine, hope you die."

I remember when my wall of entitlement broadly collapsed, exposing me to the harshness of reality. My career until that point had been, while not ideal, better than I'd expected. I'd found a role as a Systems Administrator on a government project, supporting an amazing mission for National Defense. Sure, I worked nights by myself and had no social life to speak of, and yeah, I had to hide my sexuality from everyone I knew lest I be fired from my job or evicted from my rented condo, but I was about to buy a Ford Mustang, I was looking at buying a home. I was on my way.

The termination was sudden and lacking any sort of context. I showed up to work to have a guard demand I leave, one hand on his sidearm while the other pointed to my face on a "Persona Non Grata" poster. My credentials allowed me in, which was weird, so this was all very sudden and stank of refuse. Even my own boss had been told I was simply unable to make my shift that night on short notice - an oddity, given my perfect attendance record. Calling my employer (as I was a subcontractor) revealed similar confusion: they'd been told nothing.

After an increasingly panicked few hours, I got the formal response: discharged due to lack of work. I was devastated, as I'd done everything expected of me and then some. I'd written the documentation for the entire system by myself, indexed it to a searchable document of symptoms for common problems and the SOPs for resolving them. I single-handedly kept a system running with an SLA measured in minutes, and where consequences for failure meant death of soldiers in the field. By the virtues of merit, I should still have a job; by the realities of American Capitalism, I had outlived my usefulness or become a thorn in someone else's side.

I spent fifteen months unemployed, feeling as if this was my fault. That I hadn't worked hard enough, that I must have made a critical mistake. Was it that time I collapsed from exhaustion at the end of a fifteen hour shift, having been forced to wake up early yesterday for mandatory training during the day shift? Had I missed an alert somewhere? Had I failed to scrub a database backup properly?

I contemplated suicide at one point. Of walking to the top of the tallest building in town and hurling myself from its roof. Obviously that's the only solution for someone who has spent all of his savings, all of his time, all of his credit, desperately applying for any technical job within two hours' driving time and getting nothing in response. The only viable outcome for a faggot in a state that wouldn't mourn my loss.

Mercifully, completing that thought terrified me to no end. Suicide was not the answer, but neither was suffering through this alone. Merit didn't actually matter, or at least the seed of that truth had been planted in my psyche. I accepted the help of a friend in New England, who promised me I'd find a job in the two weeks I'd be staying with them, and that they'd even cover my Amtrak tickets.

Fucker was right. I had landed a contract gig within that very two weeks' time at a prestigious pharmaceutical firm.

When you strip away the marketing bullshit and hype, AI tooling is honestly really kind of cool. Knowing how it works, knowing its limitations and propensity to just make shit up, it's honestly pretty dazzling for a variety of use cases. I don't think it's going to actually replace workers where accuracy is paramount, like law or medical care, but I do see it acting as a seismic change for the technology industry in general - and programmers or software developers more specifically.

Were I to be blunt, I'd warn anyone in the software side of things solely for the money and career prospects - the bootcampers, the market followers, the outsourcers and consultants - to start pivoting immediately. The fact is that any C-tier talent and lower can now be supplanted, if not outright replaced, by brute-force agents on a modest subscription or locally-run model. Anyone not determined to see this sea change through to the other side out of sheer passion for the craft alone, income be damned, is better off finding something else.

Like accountants. Remember, accuracy matters, and LLMs are inherently inaccurate. I mean, humans are too, but when 100% accuracy is the mandate and not merely the target, we're nowhere near the point of blindly trusting LLMs to handle said tasks.

What about the rest of us though? The passionate crafters who will never leave this industry, even when AI actually can replace us? Well, we'd best throw aside our entitlement and naivety around meritocracies immediately, and start reaching out for help now. The winter has only just settled in, and it does not look like we'll ever return to the heydays of half-million TCs for writing Python or Go for a startup or tech firm. That era is gone, at least for the foreseeable future.

We also need to reach across industries and dividing lines to build bigger alliances. IT has been playing catch with shitty code and software for decades, watching our roles get outsourced to domestic MSPs or foreign outsourcing firms as an excuse to depress our wages, force out older folks, and destabilize our careers. Remember, we had the stratospheric TCs long before software did, and lost them decades ago by similarly believing we were strictly meritocratic. The (video) gaming industry offers us allies and guidance on how to navigate the waters ahead, as well as just how rough the battle will be for fair treatment and contracts. Building bigger collectives lifts us all up that much higher, and similarly allows us to set better skill standards for our profession.

In the meantime, we must acknowledge that AI is our collective punishment for doing the wrong thing for so long. We built technologies not to empower our fellow workers, but to siphon more money upwards into the pockets of shareholders and executives. We lost sight of what technology was supposed to do - make our lives better, giving us more time outside of work for families and hobbies, more money in our pockets as productivity exploded relative to time worked - and instead bought into a fanciful lie: that if we pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, alienate our fellow workers, believe ourselves to be superior, and never, ever question upwards, that we'll be rich just like Elon, or Zuck, or Bezos someday.

The truth is that you never, ever will be that rich. None of us will. It's a statistical improbability on par with winning the lottery, and a position a disproportionate amount of people naively believe will come true solely through hard work. The odds are stacked against you, and if you weren't a millionaire by the time you graduated High School, you'll almost certainly never be a billionaire.

Thus, the only path forward in a post-AI world comes not through merit, but by the human traits no chatbot or agent can truly replicate: empathy for others, help for those worse off than ourselves, and a renewed focus on building thriving communities instead of material wealth. We must transform our economy away from work = survive, and build new institutions that support everyone with high-quality staples like housing, food, education, and medical care regardless of their employment (or employability).

Until then, we must suffer the punishment of our creation as it wreaks havoc on our survival, never forgetting that we did this to ourselves willingly.