Yeah, this is why I'm having a hard time taking many programmers serious on this one.

As a general class of folks, programmers and technologists have been putting people out of work via automation since we existed. We justified it via many ways, but generally "if I can replace you with a small shell script, your job shouldn't exist anyways and you can do something more productive instead". These same programmers would look over the shoulder of "business process" and see how folks did their jobs - "stealing" the workflows and processes so they could be automated.

Now that programmers jobs are on the firing block all of a sudden automation is bad. It's hard to sort through genuine vs. self-serving concern here.

It's more or less a case of what comes around goes around to me so far.

I don't think LLMs are great or problem free - or even that the training data set scraped from the Internet is moral or not. I just find the reaction to be incredibly hypocritical.

Learn to prompt, I guess?

If we're talking the response from the OP, people of his caliber are not in any danger of being automated away, it was an entirely reasonable revulsion at an LLM in his inbox in a linguist skinsuit, a mockery of a thank-you email.

I don't see the connection to handling the utilitarianism of implementing business logic. Would anyone find a thank-you email from an LLM to be of any non-negative value, no matter how specific or accurate in its acknowledgement it was? Isn't it beyond uncanny valley and into absurdism to have your calculator send you a Christmas card?

Are people here objecting to Gen AI being used to take their jobs? I mainly see people objecting to the social, legal, and environmental consequences.

I wouldn't be angry if current AI _only_ automated programmers/software engineers. I'd be worried and stressed out, but not angry.

But it also automates _everything else_. Art and self-expression, most especially. And it did so in a way that is really fucking disgusting.

Very elegantly put.

> Now that programmers jobs are on the firing block all of a sudden automation is bad. It's hard to sort through genuine vs. self-serving concern here.

The concern is bigger than developer jobs being automated. The stated goal of the tech oligarchs is to create AGI so most labor is no longer needed, while CEOs and board members of major companies get unimaginably wealthy. And their digital gods allow them to carve up nations into fiefdoms for the coming techno fascist societies they envision.

I want no part of that.