Technology

I think this post is a cope.

You might be 100% right. But that wouldn't change the fact that you're focusing on the individual in a story about trends, and I think you're doing so because doing so is a way to avoid engaging with the larger point of the article.

Tech work isn't safe. No work is really safe these days. It doesn't even matter if AI can do your job well. It is just a facet of a project to devalue labor and disempower laborers. And that project is going really well! No matter how good you are at your job, none of us can "merit" our way out of that project.

I'm great at my job, and my job is very AI proof. But that doesn't protect me from the fact that my company is looking for ways to gigify the work and hire contract workers from among highly paid laid off scientists and engineers to take over little easy parts of my job. They'll concentrate the hard parts, of my job and yours, and reorganize it until it's as modular as possible, and raise our workloads without increasing our pay until they can make it hard enough to say we're not doing it fast enough.

No chatbot will replace me in the next 10 years. But my company doesn't need them to in order to limit my bargaining power! They're fostering an ecosystem of abundant cheap, fungible atomized workers so they will never have to bid for your labor or worry about you being irreplaceable.

All of us need to get wise to the con. We need universal incomes, universal services, universal healthcare, universal housing. We need a guaranteed safety net that is high enough that everyone has the ability to turn down bad jobs. Even the people you think suck at their jobs.

You cannot escape this by dismissing any laid off worker as too slow to keep up. Because this is a team event. And the bosses are on the other team.