I’ve thought about this myself. Couple of points:

1) It’s not my job to fix all the problems of Capitalism. It’s painful to try to fight the system without collective action. My family and I have to eat too.

2) We have had a solution all along for the particular problem of AI putting devs out of work. It’s called professional licensure, and you can see it in action in engineering and medical fields. Professional Software Engineers would assume a certain amount of liability and responsibility for the software they develop. That’s regardless of whether they develop it with LLM tools or something else.

For example, you let your tools write slop that you ship without even looking? And it goes on to wreak havoc? That’s professional malpractice. Bad engineer.

If we do this then Software Engineers become the responsible humans in the loop of so-called “AI” systems.

It’s not your job to fix capitalism. But it is your job to evaluate if your money making skill comes at too high a price for others.

Say you found a job shooting people in the head for money. Like if you work for ICE or something…

You need to feed your family. Is this job ok? You may decide yes. I decided no. I will find another way to feed my family.

You don’t get to escape consequences because you are a small cog in a large system.

In the bigger picture, automation should free people from labor. But that requires some very greedy people to relax their grip ever so slightly. I imagine they see automation as a way to reduce reliance on labor, and if they don’t need labor, they don’t need people. So let them starve and stop having kids.