Introduction

In the last part, I went through the evidence, or rather total lack thereof, of any revolutionary productivity boost that AI was supposed to create in the economy. Besides the distractions I mentioned there, a common tactic AI Boosters use to brush the missing ROI aside is to perpetually claim it’s coming any day now. It’s been 6 months away for 3 years.

Of course no amount of empirical data, which by definition is from the past, is going to plainly refute a claim that is perpetually in the future. No empirical data is going to support such a claim either, although the empirical data cited to support that something revolutionary is totally about to happen, just you wait, is this:

“The early progress in a new technology was exponential, therefore progress will continue to be exponential all the way up to sci fi magic” is not a serious argument (people have always done this, in the 50s they thought flying cars were a decade away, in the 60s they thought moon colonies were a decade away). Besides, if you agree with me that AI is computerized charlatanism, the only thing continued exponential progress could mean is that the deep fakes generated by AI get exponentially harder to detect as fake, which is only “progress” for the scammers trying to charge money for those deep fakes. Regardless that isn’t happening. The early exponential “improvements” were achieved by simply scaling the size of the model (the number of parameters in the neural net). That stopped working in late 2024. Since then, the modest “improvements” have all been from traditional code “harnesses” surrounding LLMs, which constitute a set of clever text preprocessing, feedback loops and workarounds, which do not progress exponentially, they all have to be individually, carefully thought up, implemented and tested.

But perhaps surprisingly, the most effective way to dismiss all this stuff about “what’s coming soon” is not to try to argue that it is not coming, but to expose that the people who claim it is don’t really believe that. If we inspect their predictions closely, we find incoherent, contradictory claims that do not line up at all with the high-level premise that AI is a revolutionary technology leap, and instead reveal they’re quite anxious about the future not being very bright.

What Do AI Boosters Actually Believe?

By and large, and it brings me no joy to have to say this, AI Boosters are antisocial bullies who spend most of their time taunting people that they’ll be “left behind” (what does that mean? Starve to death? Be sentenced to a lifetime punishment of being a DoorDash driver?) if they don’t “embrace AI”, and patting themselves on the back for embracing it early, which contains within it two critical implications:

• The future is not one of superabundance but one of scarcity and struggle for survival with a growing divide between people who can “make it” and people who can’t
• AI is not “just doing the work for you”, it’s creating a new category of complex, highly cognitive work that requires substantial investment of time and resources to “learn”

In other words, the future they actually envision is that the world looks the same as it does today, except in order to earn a paycheck to cover basic necessities, you need to earn a degree (or go to a “boot camp” or something) in this new field called “AI”, and labor for, I’m guessing, around 40 hours/week, applying this skill to get the AI to do stuff. Since the need for this skill suddenly appeared out of nowhere, the older people with already established careers and skills need to all abandon their now obsolete career backgrounds, rush to retrain and reskill in the new field, and thereby barely grab a humble spot for themselves on the new ladder (since they’ll be at 0 years of experience while the AI Boosters already have 1-3 years).

People don’t act in these kinds of toxic ways if they’re really excited about great things to come. People become antisocial bullies when they’re under stress and anxious about the future.

The guys who started playing around with chatbots early on are especially fond of this predictive model, and it’s easy to see why: they have secured a position for themselves at the top of the new hierarchy, which is inherently not open to competition because the only way to have a comparable amount of hands-on experience in the new skill field is to have been an early adopter like they were. They are graciously helping people at least get some scraps by clinging onto the bottom of the ladder, but they are comfortably near the top. They will become part of the new elite or upper class in the AI Future.

If we inspect more closely what individuals believe this progression looks like, we find something even more interesting: everyone has different, contradictory ideas about how AI is going to “disrupt” the economy, but they are all similar in that AI will disrupt all jobs right up to mine, which will be fine.

AI Programmers think “manual coders” (which, we’ll dig into this more later, means people who actually know how software works) are cooked because AI has “solved coding”, but their skillset of building, maintaining and/or instructing the coding agents with software requirements is perfectly safe. AI will never, or at least not any time soon, be able to handle that. AI is so good at coding it can code enterprise SaaS from nothing but JIRA tickets, but AI coding agents can’t write the AGENTS.md or skill files for themselves. Who knows why their capabilities abruptly stop there, or why the markdown files are a harder problem to solve than the production code (well, we do know why, or rather why AI Programmers think so).

Product Owners think programmers in general are cooked, because AI can just take the business requirements, which they are responsible for writing out in detail, and produce working software from them. At most, they need programmers for another few months to build the “dark factory” and then they can all be liquidated (hey, programmers training their replacements before getting fired, where have I heard that before?). But, of course, the job of taking the high-level use case for software and working out all the precise requirements of that software (the job of Product Owners)? That will never be handled by AI. You can’t just say to AI, “build me a Point of Sale system tailored for stores working in this industry” and expect it to figure out all the screens and flows and persistent records that would require! What do you think AI is, intelligent or something!?

Managers think “AI has taken over execution, now orchestration is what’s important”, so instead of them managing a team of humans, they manage a team of agents. The agents do the “gruntwork” (what lots of managers think of their individual contributors) while the manager focuses on what’s really important: orchestrating all those agents to work together. But AI will never be able to do the orchestration. That’s just too complicated for AI. It can easily do all the individual contributor work, but telling an agent to manage and orchestrate 5 agents… that’s a bridge too far for AI, apparently.

Executives think AI is going to replace entire departments, but whatever it is executives do all day (make deck slides, go to a bunch of meetings, watch demos and decide who gets more or less money?), that of course definitely cannot be handled by AI. It’s just too complicated, or maybe it can’t be trusted to hold the purse strings (what? You mean AI isn’t trustworthy!?).

That last part is especially funny because if AI can actually fully automate any of those jobs, it would be the executives. AI is already being used constantly to make PowerPoints, summarize meetings, and review things. You could easily hook all this up to an agent harness that then determines budget allocations to different departments or products, and there’s your fully AI CEO/CTO. And that would save a lot on company payroll, wouldn’t it?

You surely see the pattern, here. Everyone thinks AI is coming for everyone else’s job, which is trouble for them and they better scramble to switch to a different job (which, weirdly enough, would be their job, i.e. AI Programmers think “manual coders” better rush to become AI Programmers, Product Owners think Programmers better rush to become Product Owners, Managers think everyone better rush to become Managers, etc.), but the AI job takeover always abruptly stops at their job. They will be fine, as long as they learn to delegate down to agents instead of subordinate employees. These are all contradictory positions (is AI going to replace Product Owners or not?), but they’re all mutually self-serving.

This is funny because if it is actually true, it means for any particular person, everyone under him is getting eliminated and replaced with a machine, leading to all the people previously employed in those lower positions now competing with him for his position. This means both that he is now working a job at the bottom of the hierarchy, and that job position is now saturated with applicants from all the eliminated lower positions. The way they twist this is weird. This means they are now the individual contributors. If you were a manager or lead before, we called you that because you had people under you. If you replace those people with a computer program, you aren’t still a manager or lead, because you aren’t managing or leading anyone. You are now the individual contributor! A junior programmer doesn’t call himself a “team lead” because he has multiple programs open on his work laptop! In the predictive model held by executives, they become the lowest level individual contributors. Everyone in this society will be an executive running their own little company, leading to massive oversaturation and competition at the level of private businesses.

So… congratulations? In this new world, you are in the lowest rung of the corporate/office ladder with endless competition for your position, which means your pay is going to tank. You are now going to earn the salaries that individual contributors were previously earning. If this actually happened, going back to what I discussed in the last part, the superabundance of products being produced by AI would mean this low salary now pays for luxury, but either way, you’re now at the bottom of the hierarchy, because as you believe, all parts of the hierarchy below you got destroyed.

Of course anxiety over any of this is a clear indication none of these people think any kind of revolutionary productivity increase is coming. If a real AI revolution was coming, unemployment would be the goal. Why would anyone still work when AI does everything for us? If it can do all knowledge work, then we’ll all drive for DoorDash (what’s wrong, are the self-driving cars not going as planned?) or do construction work for 5-10 hours/week and the wages will pay for what we now consider upper-class living standards. Why would anyone be worried about this? Why would anyone be “coping” that their career skills will still be “relevant” (relevant for what? Continuing to work a 40 hour/week desk job when 5-10 hours/week of manual labor you don’t need much training or skills for gets you rich?)?

Because no one actually thinks that’s coming. They think what’s coming is some kind of Elysium style exaggerated cyberpunk dystopia of haves vs. have-nots, and that for some reason learning to babysit chatbots will be the ticket to join the new elite (spoiler alert on that, if anything like this is coming, you’re not invited to the floating city, period, getting certified in chatbot babysitting isn’t going to change that).

The statements and behavior of executives is even more schizophrenic. In SaaS, executives apparently believe AI is so good, either already or it will be in a few months, that it can just produce SaaS from vague use case prompts. Well if that’s true, that means there is no SaaS industry anymore. Obviously this is because everyone has access to chatbots and can just make their own SaaS for no more than the cost of a chatbot subscription (something I keep pointing out is that even this is schizophrenic on its own, if chatbots can be prompted to make SaaS, why can’t they be prompted to just be SaaS? Why ask a chatbot, “make me a Point of Sale software system for my store” instead of just asking the chatbot to ring up your customers?). But if they believed that, they’d be scrambling to get executive jobs in completely different industries and liquidating their SaaS companies. Well, they’re not. They’re shaking their fists at their programmers to “learn AI right now and do it fast” in order to… I don’t know, become a chatbot drop shipper? Do they think their business is going to just vibe code SaaS the same way their clients could do themselves, but then just mark it up and pocket the difference? Whatever it is, they must be the first mover in this brand new industry of, I don’t even know, which is why their individual contributors need to move fast. This is so incoherent I can’t even properly put it in words.

The Resentful Mediocrities

There is another category of AI Boosters who will taunt you about your impending obsolescence beside the anxious status-seeking white collar worker who just wants to keep his cushy high-paying job, and that is a type of person that is much more toxic: the person who has no skills or creativity and is excited to see people who do have skills and creativity get torn down, humiliated and impoverished.

I don’t think it is fair to present the behavior of people like this (who aren’t new and obviously have personal problems) as representative of AI predictions, but the fact people like this seem to have swiftly embraced “AI is gonna change everything” predictions and derived a specific result from doing so illustrates further what AI predictions are really about. The prediction here is really not much different from the other predictions, it’s just emphasized and framed differently.

These guys claim to believe that AI will effortlessly automate all coding, game production, art creation, movie direction, math and science proofs, health diagnoses, and so on, but this will not lead to any kind of increase in broad living standards. We won’t have more basic necessities like food, housing, etc. All this superabundance of creative outputs will do is destroy the livelihood of people who work in creative or intellectual fields. And more than anything, it will rob those people of any ability to claim they provide any value to the world. They will “cope” that the AI can’t replace them, but it can, because it will make better code, better art, better proofs, better diagnoses, etc. than they ever could.

And that will show them. That’s the important part. Those arrogant jerks acting like they’re so smart and creative and skilled and talented or whatever else will see a computer program outdo them in every way, and they’ll get what they deserve for thinking they accomplished anything or made anything of themselves. They’ll be forced to admit they’re now worthless cogs in the machine just like the rest of us. I have been seeing a lot of this on social media lately, and I suspect it is itself the “cope” with the fact AI is not nearly as popular or well-received as it was supposed to be. In fact it appears to be widely despised, and the AI Boosters have given up on pitching their argument for it or even trying to threaten people into accepting it, and retreated to psychoanalyzing the public to explain why their argument didn’t take.

My intention is not to focus on the obviously toxic resentment people who think this way hold toward people they perceive to be more creative, knowledgeable or talented than themselves, but the fact their prediction of AI being so amazing it can wholesale replace human creativity (I mean, that would be pretty incredible, like sci fi fantasy level incredible) leads to nothing except a collapse in the economic value of creativity and an ensuing humiliation of creative professionals. It doesn’t… do anything else. It doesn’t usher us into post-scarcity Star Trek utopia with replicators and holodecks. It isn’t so brilliant that it immediately figures out robotics and manufacturing and takes over manual labor. It only destroys the economic value (that is, scarcity) of human creativity and intellect.

In fact, once it does that, and creative people are out of a job, those creative people are then going to have to go work at McDonald’s or something (as these guys like to put it on social media, “put the fries in the bag”). Okay… so the predictive model of this absolutely magical revolutionary technology appearing is that talented coders, artists, etc. have to work full time menial (what these guys consider inherently humiliating) jobs, presumably for poor wages and therefore also struggle to earn a living. I’m sorry, but that doesn’t sound very revolutionary. It actually just sounds like the schizophrenic ranting of angry, resentful people.

The line between this kind of attitude and the anxious office worker attitude is not a fine one. There is a blurry transition from one to the other. There is a ton of toxic resentment among programmers, where ones who don’t really get all the stuff about code quality, code design or architecture don’t like thinking of themselves as less talented and potentially in over their heads, so they want to tear down the programmers who excel at that stuff. There is a lot of toxic resentment toward programmers in general by product owners, many of whom think programmers are weird, arrogant overpaid glorified data entry clerks. The ostensibly empathic warning to get good at chatbot babysitting before it’s too late can easily be an insincere mockery that your job is now mere chatbot babysitting (so it’s worthless), it’s over for you and you deserve it for thinking you were so “talented” and “important”.

Conclusion

Overall, the emotions behind AI predictions are some combination of anxiety, fear, envy, resentment and a scarcity mindset (I better get mine before it runs out). None of these are good. I have never seen AI predictions come from a place of joy, excitement, optimism, or charity (abundance mindset), even when they are superficially presented as an ultra-optimistic vision of a hi-tech future.

Against this backdrop, the fact everyone seems to have been coached to regurgitate the words, “AI is here to stay” (either as AI boosters or skeptics) is profoundly bizarre. So basically everyone hates this, no one really wants or is excited about the AI Future (except maybe broken people who want to see the world burn and fiddle over it), everyone agrees it’s a dystopia, not utopia, but we all think it’s getting shoved down our throats either way, so we better do what we gotta do to survive it? Did this originate from corporate propaganda? If it was social media influence, who coordinated it? Is this the marketing campaign AI labs decided is their best shot at success?

Regardless, no one actually thinks a positive advancement of human civilization is underway. If we believe anything real is happening at all (which, remember, I don’t, chatbots aren’t automating any jobs, layoffs are just companies failing, and everyone’s been wasting their time with this), we think it is the construction of some kind of hellish hi-tech walled city that excludes most people, or pollution of the internet with so much creatively sterile AI Slop that real creators can’t make money anymore (exactly the opposite of the utopian vision, which was originally that AI would do all the labor and free us to sit around writing poems and painting or whatever all day… actually it’s going to churn out uncannily creepy poems and paintings ad infinitum while we do all the labor).

None of these are coherent or internally consistent predictions anyways, so more than anything it just tells me this is all a mirage. I believe the inconsistent, vague fogginess of AI predictions are directly downstream from the vague fogginess of what AI even is to begin with. If it’s actually “people in computer form”, we’ve just created a new class of sentient beings who are going to need resources, develop their own emotions, interests and hobbies, and not simply follow instructions we give them, which will create a new class conflict, not a productivity revolution. If it’s a tool, well like I keep asking, what tool for what operation specifically? Since no one answers that, everyone invents their own ideas about what the application of AI is, which never really have anything to do with what AI is or how it works (most people, even programmers, have no idea), and the result is what we see: “AI is gonna change everything”, but not literally everything (how many executives are selling off assets because profitable business and money won’t matter soon?), just “lots of things”, and the more you ask about details, the more annoyed the predictors get.

If these guys can’t explain in clear terms what this revolution even is, I don’t think any of us need to bother with believing a revolution is underway, or coming.

In the next part, I’ll start analyzing AI in relation to computer programming specifically.