Feeling Sad about AI

Feeling sad about AI This video doesn't contain any code: feel free to skip it if you like, but either way I'm going to try to keep it short, so see you on the other side :-). Also, this video isn't about the ethics of AI - you can read how I feel about that in my article Why I don't use AI. And it's not about whether AI "works". It's about how I'm feeling, and some reasons for why I'm feeling like that, and some hopefully hopeful conclusions. Feeling sad AI has been making me sad for quite a while now. Really sad, out of proportion with how much AI has materially affected my life. Sad enough actually, that the sadness is the main effect that AI has had on my life, making it harder for me to deal with everyday life and be a good spouse, parent, friend, colleague. Obviously, AI is a potential threat to my livelihood and career, especially if I continue to refuse to use it, but I don't think that explains quite how sad I've felt. Disrespect I think I've felt sad because of the disrespect. For most of my life I have loved programming: I've made it my hobby, my work, my identity. I made it my way of proving I have value, because I can be good at something, and improve at something, and it is useful, and beautiful: you can make cool things, and those things can be made in ways that are like craft or art or science or Maths. And if you can do it, people think you're clever, and respect you. Now some people in our industry are telling us that programming is obsolete, that we are dinosaurs, and the only exciting or viable career path is to move on from programming, the thing I love, to paying them to rent programming from their machine, because it's a commodity now. The thing I love; the thing I made my identity. The thing that earns me the respect I am so desperate for. I know a lot of people could be watching this and thinking, "where were you when they disrespected me?" How much respect is given to the work of farmers or nurses or drivers or parents or carers or teachers or hospitality workers or cleaners or car-washers or so many other people? I know, I am late to the party, but I've arrived now. It was a shock to me that bosses were so keen to ditch people like me and replace us with an imitation. How naive I was, and how self-centred. So that's why I've been sad. But I want to move on and try to provide some hope. I've got three people in mind, who I'd like to encourage: myself, people watching my videos for the love of coding, and people watching them to learn, to build their career. Let's talk to me first. To myself Andy, the first thing you need to understand is that they can't take your love of programming away from you. You love it. You just love it: it excites you, it calms you, it gives you a creative outlet, it satisfies you. That's a God-given thing about you that they can't take away. They also can't take away the fact that you are quite good at it, and can improve. Enjoy it. Don't waste your time and burn your creativity caring about receiving respect from people who don't deserve any respect from you. To the code lovers Now, for people watching for the love of coding, the message is the same: they can't take it away from you. Just enjoy it. If you like watching videos about coding, encourage the people making them, and you might just supply enough energy that they are able to continue. To the learners For people watching to learn: don't listen to people who say this skill is obsolete. Let me be clear here: even if the highly optimistic predictions about AI are true, we are going to need a lot of code, and the people who understand how it works are going to be very, very useful. First, the type of thinking you learn by coding is going to be incredibly useful, even in a future where that thinking is applied to wider-scale problems. Training your brain to create complex systems, analyse them, remodel them, debug them is going to make you useful, and employable. Second, the knowledge of how code actually works is going to remain useful. Did we stop understanding machine code when we wrote compilers? No! People have jobs writing compilers, and their understanding of machine code and pipelines and caches and locality and loads of stuff I don't understand is way deeper than anyone had when compilers were invented! I have skin in the game here myself: two of my kids are learning programming and heading towards potential programming careers. Despite my deep sadness about the changes in my industry, I have no worries about them learning non-AI-powered coding at university and school - I am convinced it will set them up for whatever the world looks like over the next few decades. Love to you So that's all I have to say. If you are feeling some of the confusion, fear or sadness that I know many of us are feeling, I hope it might help a bit. Let me know on Mastodon (@andybalaam@mastodon.social) or via a comment on my blog, or under the video. Love to you: you have massive, massive value, and you deserve respect, as you are today. Whether you can code or do anything else is irrelevant. (Yes, I'm talking to myself again.) Love to you.