AI Is Not a Labor Crisis. It Is a Meaning Crisis

By some measures, the software industry is in a state where steel production was maybe in 1880-1900. By the end of the 19. century we were quite able to produce largish steel constructions but the Siemens-Martin furnace aka Open Hearth Furnace was new https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-hearth_furnace and allowed us to produce large quantities of quality steel. At the same time the industrial processes were still quite imprecise and manual, people got hurt regularly during work. The LLMs we use today are an improvement in the process, just like the Open Hearth Furnace, but there are much quicker, more precise technologies that we don't yet know about/ don't use in the mainstream. (The electric arc furnace, electro-slag remelting, vacuum arc remelting, oxygen converter process would be equivalent advancements to the OHF for example.)

So where is the meaning in all this?

We can look at the steel making revolution and try to learn from it. Software is in most places, so is steel. In my experience a steel mill employee generally gets paid. There is the dignity in struggle, because the work tends to be demanding. Perhaps we will have machines working on the standardized components for us to put together after QA/ conformance testing to form a larger system. Maybe software engineering will really be more like work planning or a machine engineering studio. What I am confident about is that we will get more standardization and everything will get a lot more complex, yet we will have tools to cope with that.

I can't get the original tweet to load at all, so I'm only responding to the headline here

Of course it's a labor crisis. It is also a meaning crisis. It will probably also be a financial crisis before all is said and done, based on how things are going

AI is a massive lever of power to pull. The more autonomous it is capable of being the more powerful it is

It isn't a surprise that many people are defined by and find meaning in their labor, it is what we spend a massive majority of our lives doing. Anything that threatens our labor also threatens our meaning. These concepts are pretty tightly coupled.

The question we need to answer is: How do we navigate a world where we have removed labor, both as a function of finding meaning and as a function of earning a living? The answer isn't as simple as free bread and circuses. We will have to replace people's meaning somehow too.

Frankly I'm not even convinced that the people in power will even hand out the bread and circuses either.