AI Is Destroying The Career I Once Loved

What happens when there's nothing left to lose?

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“I have so much gratitude to people who wrote extremely complex software character-by-character. It already feels difficult to remember how much effort it really took. Thank you for getting us to this point.” With this one tweet from Sam Altman, the game is revealed. What may sound like a note of genuine appreciation for people who spent their lives learning to do the impossible - to “teach a rock to think” - is really a shot across the bow, not only to the entire software development industry, but to nearly all of the places that humans derive the means to make a living. We are hurtling into an era of AI-driven mass deskilling that will take all of the human contributions gobbled up by this machine and replace them with a poor replica that allows bosses to “run lean” and lay off skilled workers across sectors while seeing no reduction in productivity. At least that’s the sales pitch. And it’s working.

You can hardly log onto any tech subreddit these days without seeing posts like “Execs thirsting over AI is killing my passion for software engineering”, “Has AI ruined software development?”, “Hot take: AI ruined the way we see coding - and I hate it”, and “AI timeline expectations are driving me crazy”. I know that it’s difficult to have sympathy for software engineers, as Silicon Valley has been responsible for some of the worst developments in our lifetimes, but it’s not the code monkeys that are the ones making these decisions. In fact, we largely despise them. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, is not a software engineer. He has never written a line of code. Neither is Peter Thiel. Nor Reid Hoffman. Nor even Steve Jobs. The people who have had a stranglehold on our lives aren’t the ones producing the code, making the products work. They are the vulture capitalists who are addicted to the Next Big Idea, who foisted on us the NFTs and the crypto and now the AI revolution with nary an ounce of our consent.

Just Learn To Code

I was one of the people who took this advice. Way back in 2013, after a divorce and a failed attempt at starting a sole proprietorship I found myself stuck. I couldn’t afford to go back to school. I had a 4 year old daughter and I needed to find an industry that was undersaturated and recession proof. While scrolling Facebook I saw an ad about learning to code and a lightbulb went off. After looking at the career outlook for engineers I was convinced that if I really committed myself to learning this craft, I would be able to provide for myself and my daughter and never have to worry about being homeless again. I threw everything I could into it. For a couple long, lean years I studied software engineering from my home for 10 hours a day, 7 days a week. I nearly ended up on the street just trying to make ends meet during that time, but I finally got there. I got my first Junior Engineer position, then another, and eventually worked my way up and pulled myself and my daughter out of poverty. For the first time in my life I was solidly middle class and didn’t have to freak out whenever I bought groceries. As someone who was on food stamps as a child, this was unimaginable success in my eyes. The peace of mind I felt knowing that if I lost a job there were 10 more for every 1 developer out there was immeasurable. I had a good run of it.

But in the last couple years, something shifted. I noticed that my bosses were getting infected with the mind virus sold to them by the AI hype men. They started to believe we weren’t needed anymore, or, if we were, we were now capable of producing 10x the amount of code in the same amount of time. We started to be required to use AI to write our code, and were given virtually no time to understand and solve the problems ourselves. We became more code reviewers than code authors. And no matter how much we produced, we were expected to do more. If AI can make one dev do the work of 10, maybe it can make one dev do the work of 20. Why not? We just have to spend more on tokens! Naturally, none of these increases in productivity have been passed down to the devs who are now somehow more overworked but paid the same. On my team, there isn’t a single engineer who doesn’t feel burned out, underappreciated, and virtually forced at gunpoint to be overreliant on a technology that has killed everything we enjoyed about our career. Beyond that, the outlook couldn’t be worse. The market is saturated with thousands of engineers that were laid off from the big MAANG companies, and just the process of getting your resume in front of human eyes feels impossible when AI resumes flood the zone and AI Human Resources apps read and reject candidates without a single living person involved. I can tell you from the inside, things have never felt so bleak. And just like everyone outside the software industry, we feel we are being dragged along unwillingly for the ride while this hype train destroys everything about a career we once loved, with nothing there to replace it.

This is not to say you must feel sorry for the poor suffering software engineers, but to emphasize what it represents in a larger pattern of how capitalists are approaching labor in the modern era. Having to hire human workers who might have pesky demands for more pay, better hours, or better working conditions is but a nuisance to them. They want to streamline their businesses by - ideally - not needing to hire humans at all. They are being sold a dream of a 100% agent operated business where they purchase tokens instead of labor hours, and at a fraction of the cost. After all, agents won’t ever try to unionize. They don’t need weekends off. They don’t get sick or fall pregnant. They can’t strike. They won’t fight back. When the one of the last vestiges of upward mobility (“just learn to code”) is being increasingly proletarianized and made redundant, it signals that the owner class has completely abandoned the notion that a minimum quality of life must be made possible for workers, even aspirationally. The oligarchs of old used to talk about a “riot tax”: some minimal concessions by capitalism to prevent the working class from an uprising; a base level standard of comfort that would quell a revolution. Our modern day oligarchs no longer feel such impulses. They (either rightly or wrongly) predict that no such uprising will occur, even if their wildest dreams come true and 25% of the workforce becomes unemployed and unemployable.

Of course, capitalists wanting to invest in labor saving technologies is nothing new. Since the dawn of capitalism, owners have always wanted to spend less on labor to produce more. This, however, feels different precisely because of the scale, the speed, and the fundamental discrepancy between AI itself and the developments that in some ways moved humanity forward. The industrial revolution may have displaced workers, but the fruits borne from it were important. The steam engine, the cotton gin, the telegraph, and the lightbulb were all crucial for human advancement. And while jobs were made redundant, other ones took their place. The same cannot be said for AI. What do we, as workers, gain from AI generated video games or music or art? What do we get as a society from a company hiring one engineer instead of ten and keeping the surplus profits? What happens to the 25% who now have nothing else they can do with their lives under a system that does not share the surpluses of this replacement with them, or universalize gains, and has no mechanism to care for those who can not justify their existence through laboring for a wage?

While people like Sam Altman have vaguely gestured at the concept of some sort of universalization of profits “I think just like a fixed cash payment, although useful and maybe a good idea in some ways, does not get at what we’re really going to need for this next phase and the kind of collective alignment of shared upside as the balance between labor and capital shifts”, it would be a mistake to trust them. As one memo from 2019 said about Altman: “Sam exhibits a consistent pattern of […] lying”. Silicon Valley bros do not truly want to move towards an egalitarian society where no one has to work, but they do want to make sure the transition to their vision of “utopia” involves less people trying to firebomb their homes. Even Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist, once said “any person working to build this civilization-altering technology bears a heavy burden and is taking on unprecedented responsibility. [but] the people who end up in these kinds of positions are often a certain kind of person, someone who is interested in power, a politician, someone who likes it.”

Even while these tech oligarchs wax poetic about a new technofuturist societal formation where robots do all our work while we play in the sun, the money tells a different story. The AI industry has been active behind the scenes trying to lobby politicians in both parties with hundreds of millions in bribes to legislate against AI regulation and expansion of data centers nationwide. Likewise, AI is being used by Palantir for ICE surveillance, and loaned out to precision strike little girls in Iran. Hardly the technoutopia we are told is just around the corner.

As the paths to moving beyond poverty begin to close completely, so comes the backlash. Whether it’s the council member whose home was shot at for supporting the construction of a data center the community was against, or the attacks on Sam Altman, people are beginning to understand AI as the existential threat that it is, and responding in kind. Estimates say around 16,000 jobs a month are being cut due to AI, and the outlooks are only getting worse. Public opinion is not on the side of the oligarchs, however they are completely unconcerned with our consent. Even while the data shows that the productivity gains are not being realized quite in the way they were expected to, this sort of job loss will have catastrophic downstream effects for society at large.

Speaking personally, the shift this so-called “AI revolution” has caused in a career I fought for with my blood, sweat, and tears; witnessing it become a shell of what it once was, with the looming threat of a return to poverty with no way out, has been a radicalizing moment for me. I can feel the pendulum swing above me, holding my breath and waiting, knowing that if it drops I will have nothing left to lose. This is the prevailing situation for so many of us. I can’t make any solid predictions, but I know that when you give tens of millions of people nothing to hang onto, the threadbare fabric holding society together will turn to dust. Ask Claude what happens next.