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In a way, AI is harder on nerds than it is on anyone else.
It is interesting to see, now that it is ingrained into the personal and professional lives of vast numbers of ‘normal’ people, how mundanely it slots into the daily existence of the average person. I don’t mean that critically, I mean that the average person (especially globally but probably also in the rich world) probably already believed there were ‘computers’ who were ‘smarter than them’. ChatGPT isn’t so different from, say, Jarvis in Iron Man (or countless other AIs in fiction), and the median 90-100IQ person may even have believed in 2007 that technology like that actually existed “for rich people” or at least didn’t seem much more advanced than what they had.
Most people do not seek or find intellectual satisfaction in their work. Intellectual achievement is not central to their identity. This is true even for many people with decent-IQ white collar jobs. They may be concerned (like many of us) with things like technological unemployment, but the fact that an AI might do everything intellectually that they can faster and better doesn’t cause them much consternation. A tool that builds their website from a prompt is a tool, like a microwave or a computer. To a lot of users of LLMs, the lines between human and AI aren’t really blurring together so much as irrelevant; the things most people seek from others, like physical intimacy, family and children, good food and mirth, are not intellectual.
This is much more emotionally healthy than the nerd’s response. A version of the Princeton story is now increasingly common on ‘intellectual’ forums and in spaces online as more and more intelligent people realize the social and cultural implications of mass automation that go beyond the coming economic challenge. Someone whose identity is built around being a member of their local community, a religious organization, a small sports team, their spouse and children, a small group of friends with whom they go drinking a couple of times a month, a calendar of festivals and birthdays, will fare much better than someone who has spent a lifetime cultivating an identity built around an intellect that is no longer useful to anyone, least of all themselves.
I was thinking recently that I’m proud of what I’ve done in my short career, but that smart-ish people in their mid/late twenties to perhaps mid/late forties are in the worst position with regards to the impact of AI on our personal identities. Those much older than us have lived and experienced full careers at a time when their work was useful and important, when they had value. Those much younger will either never work or, if they’re say 20 or 22 now, work for only a handful of years before AI can do all intellectual labor - and have in any case already had three years of LLMs for their own career funeral planning. But in this age range, baited to complete the long, painful, tiresome and often menial slog that characterizes the first decade of a white collar career, we have the double humiliation of never getting further than that and of having wasted so much of our lives preparing for this future that isn’t going to happen.
There seems to be a similarity between AI and woke thinking in the workplace.
Right now in many businesses the expectations have flipped so that rather than being ashamed of using AI, one has to either use AI, pretend that you use it to your superiors, or keep quiet about the subject and hope it goes away. If you say out loud you don't use it, you are a drag, a buzzkill and a dinosaur (maybe a young dinosaur as I don't think intensity of AI use or AI boosterism corresponds with age).
Many people are even under pressure to use AI in cases where no one even pretends it is adding anything, so long as it gives them bragging rights to tell their bosses 'we used AI for this'.
It is/was pretty similar with woke thinking. There was a pressure to believe, pretend or keep quiet.
Both AI and things labelled woke can often get good results though.
There's certainly a lot of nonsensical pressure to use AI from executives, which all seem to drink at the same information trough that has decreed "AI is the hip new thing". I've written about my experiences with that here. That's a fad and will probably go away within a year or two.
I'd still recommend playing around with AI and finding where it can add value. I'm doing roughly 30-40% less work in my software engineering role because of it, with the savings being redirected into building more robust systems, as well as many hours into Factorio.
I enjoyed reading this, especially the part about your CTO. I am 4 years into my career (31 is still young right?), and I have met my organizations CTO exactly once and he came across as a complete moron, but he had a helper/fixer/(handler?), who actually had real technical competency of the sort I would expect from someone with a CTO job title.
He has probably just been out of the game a long time and has specialized in non technical things like "how to manage managers/directors," "political tactics to protect the engineering department's budget," "communicating the value of technical projects to the head of accounting who does not care about tech at all," plus all the mundane process, paperwork, and ego soothing one must do to keep things running smoothly. He probably hasn't written serious code in years and may not have more than a high level understanding of what his department's tech stacks are and how its products works, but that doesn't make him a moron.
Alternatively, he may be not do any of the above and might just be a smooth talking glad-hander. Your department might be a dumpster fire and he's just very adept at shifting blame or sweeping the fires under the rug. That would suck, but it also means he is far from a moron.
That’s a fair point, if you can become the cto for medium sized organization, you must be very smart (or at least very crafty!). It would have been more accurate to say that I was unimpressed with the level of technical knowledge displayed.
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