Links/2026×/#ethics×/3 entries

I apparently can’t hold a conversation with a friend, post on social media, or even daydream idly without the topic eventually turning to bloody A.I.

It’s not always me who brings it up, but it often is; I’ve rarely known such a “sticky” subject.

This resonates. Unlike Oliver Burkeman I do use AI more or less all day every day at work. But I also find myself talking about it so much more than I need to.

One answer is that the general topic is an unusually powerful trigger for a major disease of our times: overthinking.

This is an insightful take. Whatever you think of AI, it is upending many industries very quickly and has implications one way or another for the future of society. Whether you’re for or against, whether you use it or not, it’s become very difficult to ignore its pervasiveness in day to day discourse anymore. This diagnosis of the reason being that it naturally triggers all kinds of pre-existing neuroses about our place in the economy, the nature of our relationships, even what it means to be human in the first place, seems apt. These are all heavy, anxiety-inducing topics for many people and the way AI is often discussed very nonchalantly by those creating it as though it might ruin all of our lives is a bit hard to ignore.

Whatever the details, this is where overthinking kicks in, because it feels like the solution to the anxious feelings in your body is to scurry off into your head and think some more, read some more, argue some more, maybe use A.I. some more… But scurrying off to your head doesn’t work…

I think this is one of the key things software people get wrong about the world, and the source of a lot of the friction the tech industry is running into with regards to AI adoption. There’s a pervasive tendency among us to really highly overvalue intelligence, but not every problem can be resolved by just thinking harder.

Lives immeasurably fuller and more interesting than can be dreamt of in Silicon Valley’s ideology. Lives that encompass vastly more than what software can do.

I find this vision of what a good life can be so much richer and more appealing than what’s on offer in my tech bubble. It’s important to remember this. At the end of the day computers are just tools we can use to facilitate some of the things we want to work on, but have very little to do with what it means to live a full and interesting life.

I was excited to see that this is the first module in a new Coursera course I'm doing. I've long thought that ethics are missing from software development, and I think it's more important than ever to care about the consequences of what we're doing and building in this age of AI. This course on building agents literally opens with this statement:

This module is for professionals and data scientists aiming to build responsible AI.

I'm really heartened to see that building responsibly is becoming a legitimate concern, at least in some corners of the industry.

By bridging theory and practice, the program empowers you to lead initiatives that prioritize accountability, ensuring your AI systems deliver immense value without compromising integrity or public trust.

I'm looking forward to this.

Well this is awkward. Literally yesterday I wrote “the hard part of software engineering was never writing the code.” I concede that that way of describing what’s happening to the software industry is a bit lazy and exaggerated.

Nobody knows how the AI revolution will play out in the end, but it is clear many aspects of work and life will be transformed—including programming.

This definitely feels true to me. My day to day is already completely unrecognizable compared to a year ago and I wouldn’t have known how to even begin describing the nature of my job now if you’d asked me to only a few months ago.

If coding is easy, how come programmers were in high demand, and have demanded large salaries for years (even before ZIRP)?

This is answerable though, in terms of economics. How hard a skill is isn’t what determines its price. It’s true that a very small proportion of the labour force is willing to put up with solving abstract symbolic logic puzzles for 40 hours a week, but the main reason software engineers are so highly paid is more because the marginal cost of scaling software is effectively zero than anything to do with the work itself. Lots of jobs are harder and pay less.

I have met many programmers throughout my career, and very few of them want to talk to stakeholders, much less customers (exceptions are freelancers and founders, especially of software development shops). And, “having clarity on the priorities” boils down to “just tell me what to do and don't switch it up every two days

Relatable.

Whoever you are, don't outsource your understanding, judgement, empathy and taste to AI.

This feels like the most important takeaway for this moment. What drives me more crazy than anything else these days is people trying to pass off AI generated output as their own. It’s lazy and inconsiderate to ask someone to read piles of slop on your behalf, but that’s not even what I hate the most about it. It’s the abdication of our unique human ability to relate to other humans that gets me. I wish people would stop pretending like generated AI output could ever replace human interaction.