Building the future

Watching the tech hype train while working in the industry has always felt a bit surreal. There's this nascent feeling that what I'm working on, while it pays my bills, either won't amount to much or is potentially a net negative. I'll admit that I'm predisposed to cynicism and will freely cast off jokes at the expense of what I observe. It's easy to do.

But, what's being built and what's the value? The pervasive hype we find ourselves gripped with is AI. Is it the future? Is it a bubble?

I have an over abundance of skepticism. Like we all have an over abundance of tokens. Until we don't.

I do and don't understand the compelling points of this all. From a business perspective you can sell into enterprises effectively (and garner significant investment) by promising to lower labor costs and replace those pesky employees. That's the argument. Eventually, at scale, your labor costs decline while productivity increases. The numbers work.

From the labor perspective, you're seeing the field you work in deskilled and market power shifting to employers. As your situation becomes more precarious, you concede more. You take a lower salary, fewer benefits and worse conditions.

It's a dynamic not at all unlike what we saw platform companies introduce with gig work. The argument there, granted, was tailored to both consumers and the people working in each disrupted industry. Flexibility on both sides. That flexibility was, in fact, precarity and job insecurity. None of these jobs are materially different — taxis accomplish what they accomplished before — but they are materially worse. You do the same job for lower pay, fewer benefits and an opaque platform mediating the entire process.

In much the same way, AI companies promise to "democratize" any number of fields. What's missing here, however, is that all of these fields are already democratized. You can be an artist, you can be a musician. You have to put in the work, push through the friction and learn. What you create will be better for that work and will have meaning. Typing into a box does not make you an artist nor a musician.

Wherein democratize actually means deskill. Friction builds competence, it builds personal investment in craft. You put time, effort and pain into honing your work. Or you go to school. You study, learn and invest in a profession. A prompt does none of this. It spits out an output, yes, but it's an output devoid of meaning or effort — it's a facsimile. You've given up doing the work and lost meaning and value in return. It's an indefensible tradeoff.

Platform work represents a similar tradeoff. In embracing promised convenience, you've ceded control over your work. You've lost the power and reward that accompanied that control over your relationship with customers, over how the work is done — over anything the platform decides it wants.

There is value, however, in what these tools can do. Who extracts that value, who profits from it, what it costs to generate are all massive, glaring issues. Yes, these companies pillaged the internet. Yes, they're building data centers in communities that don't want them. Yes, they're accelerating the climate crisis. Yes, they're making every cultural issue they touch worse. They can write code, they can recognize patterns. Is the code good? It's verbose, but perhaps ask the engineers now tasked with reviewing code that's both verbose, ever increasing in volume and devoid of context.

There are uses there. Is the value commensurate with the cost? If you own it or profit from it, I imagine you'd argue that it is. But you're also in a position where those costs are being externalized (much like gig work). But, don't worry, you're a visionary. Wave your hands. Those aren't costs! That's disruption. People will adjust, maybe, who cares? You're a genius. You're also an artist and a musician.

The depressing part, naturally, is for everyone else on the other end of the dynamic. The folks running these companies will gesture broadly and generally at concepts like universal basic income. While a robust social safety net funded by a fair system of taxation would help ameliorate these harms, we have neither the latter nor the former. Relying on the benevolence of private companies who are incapable of or unwilling to offer specifics is a not insignificant contributing factor in how we found ourselves here.

Is the tech industry building the future? Yes, I think that's hard to argue. What is easy to argue is that it's a future most folks don't want. I'm not hopeful that that'll be meaningfully expressed without the benefit of hindsight but I remain confident that the result will not be anywhere in the vicinity of tech's vast, idyllic promises.

I don't have an actionable solution here, either. I believe in the power of collective action more than I do in the impact of individual economic decisions. I also can't predict an outcome here. What I can say is that it feels like we've been here before and that folks will be hurt when everything shakes out. Some of the wreckage will be companies that invested in it, some will be those that hyped it and some will be those pushed out by the hype. I also know some folks will walk away fabulously wealthy, looking for the next big thing.