A friend linked to a post by an experienced programmer about why he is not using AI anymore.
Something about how people debate AI has bothered me for a while. There seems to be artificial divisions. Some people think that the division is in knowledge and understanding: people who can use AI are pro it, people who object just don’t understand it or have not really tried it. Or people who use AI don’t just understand how many mistakes it can make and how biased it is, or how immoral, while people who do not use it are the ones who understand the issues.
The linked post is by someone who has tried, and who does know that with some measures efficiency does increase, and still objects. And the objections are quite familiar from a completely other context.
The term Luddite is often used these days to refer to a person who objects to new technologies out of backward thinking or unsubstantiated fear. The original Luddites, however, did not object to technology. They worried about its impact on products, professionals, and society.
Specifically, they worried that the use of machines might lead to mass unemployment to the people while the rich owners of them got richer still. They worried that while the cloth industry machines could produce a lot of material in a short time, the material would be of inferior quality, leading to the need to buy new things when the old ones broke, and thus to waste. They worried about physical safety in the factories, but also about the mind-numbing conditions of the factories, where the individual worker was disconnected from the product. They lamented that professional skill in making quality items would be replaced by unskilled labor mass-producing lower quality work.
Looking at the issues that current day’s fast fashion has given us, I don’t think they were wrong.
LLMs are the Spinning Jenny of software industry (and other forms of information industries). A development has started, where it is easy to mass produce great amounts of sort of functional code, but the code produced is of lesser quality. It is not easily maintainable. It is not easily repairable. Producing it is mind-numbing and bad for one’s mental health. It reduces the skill needed by the programmer, and eventually it is lost. It concentrates profit in the hands of a few rich individuals getting richer still, instead of spreading it to those who produce it.
The programmer Brett C. I quoted in the beginning of the post is no more anti-technology than the Luddites were, as his homepage proves. He seems to love programming. He uses it for both work and play. What he does not like is mass-produced code and the effects the mass production has on the industry, on the product, on the people involved. And he is not alone.
Maybe in a decade or two we will have artisanal programmers and doctors whose services you can buy to self-care for yourself after you have spent a mind-numbing week at a program or health factory. Or maybe this time, we will have a successful neo-Luddite movement.
I, for one, conscientiously object to mass-produced science and mass-produced healthcare services. I believe we can do better, and in these fields, it is very seldom that faster is better.
