I'm good at only one thing, and it's not valuable

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The only thing I’m (arguably) good at is not valuable anymore. I was the luckiest one, good example of globalization, coming from a small town, learning code in my mom’s basement while being undebatably dumb and academically backward.

I have seen it all. The first GitHub Copilot launch, and everyone roasting it for how bad it was, and in a matter of a few months everyone adopting it in their workflow. The same happened to Cursor, and then Claude and Codex. At this point all the open-minded, non-bigoted people have accepted how low their skill and degree now are. And the people who are still bigoted give really weird reasoning (I call it copium) to defend themselves:

AI is by nature probabilistic. AI won’t replace your job, a person with AI will. AI is replacing coding, not software engineering. AI can’t be held accountable. AI can’t discover new knowledge. AI hallucinates. Clients want to talk to a human. Someone has to maintain the AI. AI can’t do taste or judgement. AI is too expensive to run at scale. AI is only good for repetitive tasks.

All of them are either already proven wrong or close to being proven wrong. I know if you’re someone who loves giving copium on any of these, you’ll still come up with some reasoning and always win in your own mind. Keep doing that, bruv.

Comparing it with the old computer revolution is utter bullshit. Bro, it’s a somewhat human brain ported over, and it’s smart, fast and cheap.

The argument is still “won’t there be any programmers or doctors or any other profession?” Obviously there will be, but there won’t be as much demand for any of them.

You won’t see an independent programmer consulting on Java stuff, or a doctor treating common diseases. Demand will be highly commoditized and skewed, and it’s inevitable.

The fact is AI has reached a level where it can already replicate most knowledge workers if implemented properly.

Programmers are being cannibalized first. I don’t think it’s far off from replacing other prestigious roles like doctors, other fields of engineering, life science, healthcare and pharmaceuticals, mathematics, banking, accounting, anything.

AI will obliterate every field the same way it’s doing to programmers today, and those people are not as ready as programmers were. There will be recursive self-improvement (RSI), and there is no proper definition of it, including AGI. Things will happen slowly but surely, cutting one field after another. Anthropic isn’t going to declare “hey bro, we’ve achieved AGI.” There is no fucking definition. You will see the effect, not the declaration.

I think humanoid robots will also see some of the biggest breakthroughs in the next few years. If your plan is moving to more physical work, good luck.

I also don’t understand how much it changes the implications if AI turns out to be a financial bubble. Say some company goes bankrupt. Does that mean the fact that it can write a whole app for me pixel-perfectly, which took me a month before, or any other capability, is nullified? A staunch skeptic will give copium for everything except facing reality.

The most unclear thing is how the whole social fabric is going to work. A person who values human intelligence over anything else is going to suffer. For people to whom it matters more than anything whether you have a degree, or a fucking PhD or MBA from XYZ college, I don’t know how they’re going to see things and handle this.

For most middle-aged people, the whole basis of their identity is the job they hold. It gives them prestige, the car they ride in, pays their kids’ bills. They may suffer a lot.

In times of great change, the things we set as prestige, norms and rules, which we take for granted as the organizing principles of our lives, get obliterated. It’s as if all the rules of the board we played on our whole lives are being backpropagated to make a new game. But the problem is no new game is set up yet. And this time nobody knows how long it will take to set up the new board, or even if the board will ever be set up. It’s our turn to act, but no one knows the rules of the game or what move to make. And yes, those who are concerned feel intense pressure to play the game well, just like they played it well on the old board.

I still feel optimistic, still feel excited, and I’m somehow jealous of people who are still chill and can’t understand how their life is getting affected or will be affected by it. I’m running a software company that does both traditional and AI-related work, and I couldn’t ask for a more volatile yet exciting time. I’m excited and feel grateful every time I give a prompt to Claude and sip coffee while it generates file after file, or interacts with that boring software I always felt annoyed by. Doctors are fucking expensive and life science and healthcare are still backward. Drug discovery and new innovation at this pace was never possible before.

It’s a very, very, very difficult time to be in if the metrics you judge by are purely intelligence and prestige. As a person in his very early twenties, I’m still old enough in the white collar industry that it’s a hard place to be. I repeatedly see an annoying pattern in myself and my peers in how AI is impacting our lives. I still don’t know how most people, including me, will navigate this, and I think this is when luck is valuable. From my side, I think all I can do is play the game for the love of the game, increase my luck surface, and yeah, be bigotedly optimistic I guess.