Anybody half paying attention knows that the SaaS industry, even most of the Nasdaq is in a funk over the prospect of AI eliminating an entire layer of tech jobs, maybe whole tech companies with a single swipe.
Here’s a though provoking article (with a nice summation for those who haven’t deep dived) about “How AI may change the world”, or something like that.
The A.I. Disruption We’ve Been Waiting for Has Arrived
The tech industry is a global culture — an identity based on craft and skill. Software development has been a solid middle-class job for a long time. But that may be slipping away. What might the future look like if 100 million, or a billion, people can make any software they desire? Could this be a moment of unparalleled growth and opportunity as people gain access to tech industry power for themselves?
Personally this all feels premature, but markets aren’t subtle thinkers. And I get it. When you watch a large language model slice through some horrible, expensive problem — like migrating data from an old platform to a modern one — you feel the earth shifting.
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Remember when somebody said “The Internet is going to change EVERYTHING!”
This is kind of like that. Remember when schools started teaching coding because “good jobs for the future”? Yeah.
(If you read the article you might scroll through a couple of the comments as well. Interesting reactions, some.)
Is it? I mean, it would be if software coding and “EVERYTHING” were coextensive. But they’re obviously not.
It sure looks like AI will revolutionize a lot of software coding. Which makes sense - it’s hard to come up with something that’s more suitable for AI to learn how to do than software coding. It’s language-based, entirely natively digital, has easy A/B testing that’s also entirely digital (does it work or crash?), etc.
But….does that mean that AI is going to disrupt much else? Or even particularly disintermediate the software industry? I come back to thinking about accounting. Modern software now does massive amounts of what human accountants used to do as grunt work in the early stages of their career. And we have more accountants than ever.
Because I don’t think we’re ever going to get to 100 million or a billion people making their own software, any more than those 100 million or a billion people are making their own music (even though software long allowed us to create guitar or piano or violin sound files without having to actually know how to play those instruments). Because who has the time? I don’t want to vibe-code my own alternative to Google.docs or the calculator on my computer or a video game. I suspect many other people will be similar.
Oh sure, and 30 years later there are still people who don’t know how to operate a computer or surf the internet, but that number gets smaller every day. At the beginning, say in 1995-1997 it took training wheels (i.e. AOL) to get online, and the business behemoths we know today were barely a glint in some inventors’ eyes.
I make no predictions as to where this might go, but I can envision the growth of this sort of “AI in your pocket” technology leading all sorts of places. Small businesses, now too small to have anything but rudimentary cash registers to medium size businesses, the kind that might have hired 2 guys to run a DEC mini for them in the 80’s, and up to large corporations (I remember Westinghouse having an entire building full of coders and babysitters in Connecticut just to service the Broadcast division - which amounted to just 3% of Westinghouse sales.)
The internet did change everything . OK, not everything; Walmart is still around. But Border’s Books isn’t, and most newspapers that still exist are hanging by a thread, and we’re now talking to each other over the digital fence. And logistics has changed and politics has changed and telephones have changed and, well, a lot.
I agree that many, probably most people aren’t going to want to be “vibe coders” or whatever you might want to call it. But who thought we’d all become “mini-columnists”, opining to the world, or stock market analysts in our spare time, or “influencers” or any of the other professions and distractions that have popped up over the last couple decades.
This is the beginning. It’s 1994. Or it’s 1903. Or it’s 1876. Hang on.
No argument there. The internet is a massively revolutionary base technology with countless uses in almost every field of human endeavor . Like the personal computer revolution before it.
I simply remain open to the possibility that AI might…. not be that. There will be some fields it will probably completely upend. The fields that it is best suited for upending will be the first upended. Like software writing, apparently. But the real question is whether it will then constitute a continued rapid upending of more and more areas in very short order (like the development and penetration of the internet and cell phones), or whether it will just slowly and incrementally start causing gradual changes and efficiencies in other industries (like software did to accounting). Whether it’s a short, sharp, shock that completely changes things very fast - or just another iterative improvement in “software” like what’s been happening pretty much continuously once the revolutionary moment of the Visicalc launch became kind of background.
The worry is that AI precludes the user from having to learn or work. As it turns out, the user learns more and works as hard. But not in all instances.
The specific worry is the end of critical thinking. That is the battle cry of every generation descending into old age.