Don't Learn To Code

lEaRn To cOdE…

This was the so-called advice offered up by journos in response to the decades of endless offshoring and automation that have absolutely ravaged the American middle class and financially decimated entire swaths of the population.

“From Coal to Code,” was NPR’s ridiculous take on the 10’000 Kentucky coal miners who lost their livelihoods. During the last presidential election cycle, Joe Biden even suggested to a crowd in a coal mining town that they learn computer programming.

Sure, just learn to code…

The local textile plant closes and 6’500 employees lose their jobs?

Learn to code!

Food stamp recipients increase 160% and household income drops 26%?

Learn to code!

Murder rates triple and gang activity becomes rampant?

Learn to code!

Your home town slides into a general state of misery as drugs flood into the community and fentanyl induced fatal overdoses spike?

Learn to code!

Your daughter’s on the street turning tricks for an 8-ball?

Learn to code! :)

None of this is hypothetical. This is the reality for Danville, Virginia; Dayton, Ohio; Newton, Iowa; Johnstown, Pennsylvania; Bruceton, Tennessee; Flint, Michigan; Galesburg, Illinois; Youngstown, Ohio; and Muncie, Indiana—among many, many others. Princeton professors Angus Deaton and Ann Case have identified a “Sea of Despair,” with rates of addiction, suicides, domestic violence, and depression rising.

By no stretch of the imagination can learn to code be confused with well meaning advice. This is the ruling class openly taunting their subjects, for whom one can only conclude they must have an intense disdain.

But in a delicious twist of irony, technology is playing a wild card.

This next wave of automation isn’t bottom up, it’s skinning the fish head first.

Copy writers? GPT-3 will draft something.
Client services? The chatbot will answer emails.
Programmers? AI is the new code monkey.

In fact, Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang, explicitly urged kids not to learn coding, at the recent World Governments Summit in Dubai:

Over the last 15 years almost everybody who sits on a stage like this would tell you it is vital that your children learn computer science. Everybody should learn how to program. And in fact, it is almost exactly the opposite. It is our job to create computing technology such that nobody has to program… Everybody in the world is now a programmer. This is the miracle of artificial intelligence.

This is a complete narrative shift, as we crash into the new economic paradigm. The social implications are sweeping and the potential fallout enormous.

With last week’s launch of text-to-video generator Sora, Tyler Perry suddenly put his $800 million studio expansion on hold:

There’s got to be some sort of regulations in order to protect us. If not, I just don’t see how we survive.

Yes, reality is hitting hard.

Perry must have realized that the production cost of those $200 million Marvel movies will now rapidly trend towards zero as the production capabilities of Hollywood studios are folded into a smartphone.

nooo you can’t distribute machines that allow anyone to own a means of production for arbitrary media!!!! think of the intellectual property holders and existing commercial interests!!

That’s right, automation has stormed the gate, broken down the walls, and is about to sack the city. That’s a problem because 20% of US GDP is financialized compared to 11% contributed by manufacturing activities.

Financialized is a nice way of saying busy-work, i.e. nonessential work in the parlance of our post-covid era. It’s no coincidence the 20% financialization figure roughly matches the US census bureau’s estimate that the number of people primarily working from home increased to 18% between 2019-2021. In other words, these are jobs that can be done with nothing more than a computer - perfect fodder for AI.

We already know this intuitively. People can’t help but notice that the economy basically kept working despite 20% of the work force taking a sabbatical.

But this is only the beginning.