As I've brought the main thesis of this essay to others, they've quickly pointed out to laziness as the root of all evil. Laziness has lead to this ever increasing usage of Gen A.I. and it's consequences.

I do not think this holds true.

Some people are lazy. I know plenty of examples and they do not work. I repeat, they do not take part in the workplace. As such, they do not need any new tool to 'not work.' They never needed to justify their existences to either their parents or their inheritances in order to obtain subsistence. And they never will.

On the other hand, some people toil hard in the workplace to avoid work, as my grandmother used to say: "the amount work it takes to not do the job!" Others even commit themselves to hard toiling in the workplace, in order to generate some output, somewhat aligned with their employers requirements. And if they are self employed, they toil for their output to be quite aligned to their employers requirements. All these cases are very hard working, even if they do not work at all, and we can describe them as not lazy. They are also the ones to gain the most from Gen A.I. tools in their day to day job.

Nietzsche is considered part of the Existential school of Philosophy. These guys wonder "why" we exists as humans. Nietzsche also frames this question within his Death of God. Meaning, once humanity has gotten rid of God by the XIX century, we are devoid of our traditional meaning and a new meaning is required. In our note under study, Nietzsche proposes that

mankind will be able to find its best meaning as piece of machinery in the administration's service: as a tremendous clockwork of ever smaller, ever more finely 'adapted' cogs; as an ever-increasing superfluity of all the dominating and commanding elements; as a whole of tremendous force, whose individual factors represent minimal forces, minimal values.

– Nietzsche, 1887

That is to say, there is an opportunity for a new meaning as a piece of Capital. Work is a fundamental human need. It quite easy to drown in work the existential question proposed by Nietzsche. Furthermore, it's quite common for people to build their sense of identity from their work.

This last point has also been brought up in my conversations about this topic, to imply that some people already are their work. Workaholism is a required but not sufficient condition for the leveling of men, as some workaholics have a very high degree of agency in their work: these workaholics are not cogs of an ever-increasing superfluity. The degree of integration with production that we are talking about here goes beyond workaholism. For the workaholics, all human aspects outside work have been minimized. For the leveled men, even work is minimized. His identity likely coming from that whole of tremendous force.

So, if not laziness, what could be the allure of Gen A.I.? And the answer is right in the above fragment.

Gen A.I. will bring freedom. As the cogs become ever smaller and ever-increasingly superfluous, so do their chances of failure. Gen A.I. is the ultimate excuse from participation in life. "The Gen A.I. told me so" is an ever frequent reply from my junior colleagues. With anything we do, there is a host of decisions to be made, as Gen A.I. gets integrated in different workflows, individuals will be freed from these decisions. Each decision is a potential point of failure, the wrong option is there for the taking. When orders from Gen A.I. are followed; freedom from failure is established. This reinforces my point about workaholics. A daring workaholic entrepreneur is not a leveled man. But a force to reckon with.

This newfound freedom has some compounding effects. Because the leveled man has made no decision, he no longer has to grapple with his own fallibility. When you make a monumental failure, the experience is quite unpleasant. That is a solid invitation to reflect in your own limitations and design a path forward to overcome them. The leveled man is free from all these: the unpleasantness and the overcoming. His ideas and opinions are untested, and he could have potentially been right.

An that is why the perspective from my own workbench is quite advantageous. On a previous post I explored the idea of programming as a (however imperfect) touchstone for self improvement and compared it Math or Music. When writing a program, you first have an idea, then code it up and finally it either technically works or it does not. If it does technically work, your program may also need to be useful, but that is outside of scope here. Inside of scope is testing with it's potential failure and an opportunity to up-skill.

As the leveled man gets further assistance from Gen A.I. to write his programs, he is freed from grappling with his own fallibility and his opportunity to up-skill. Since failures are shared with the Gen A.I. he could have potentially been right and thus he gets freed from the conviction that his own skills are limited.

Unless you are convinced that your skills are limited and rough, you will not strive for mastery.

– Myself from earlier

And thus, the leveled man is freed from the strife for mastery as the last compounding effect of this newfound freedom from failure.

In the XX century we got granted programming, which I believe to be of the noblest endeavors born in that century, that can be performed in an office. It is a noble endeavor because it has some similarities with trades or crafts: it is an avenue to transcend your current self into a better skilled one. (No offense to trades or crafts intended.) Again, to bring my favorite quote from myself:

But of all the things that are, the one we change the most as we develop new solutions, is ourselves. Through the struggles and frustrations of birthing an idea into a concrete program, we also give birth to new, wiser, better selves. That gold nugget is technology's true reward.

– Myself from earlier

However, this brings about an unleveled field. Everyone is at a different point of that avenue. If we require leveled men, we also require freedom from failure. Nietzsche states that there is an "imminent, inevitable total economic administration of the earth" and that requires the "miniaturisation of man." But the true masters I know are not men in miniature.

With all that, I hold that Gen A.I. is a key enabler of that "imminent, inevitable total economic administration of the earth."

I've heard stated that Gen A.I. tools do not provide much assistance to good programmers. I think I am a good (and not the best) programmer and a fast typer. I do not find Gen A.I. to be that useful. I use it sometimes, say once a week. But that's about it.

Statistically, what we can expect from Gen A.I. is mediocre quality, give that it will generate the most likely piece of text out of the internet given a particular prompt. The most likely piece of text is not expert level code, because there are less experts than non-experts and they've written less code than everyone else combined.

We can talk about quality as something of an intrinsic value. And I believe it is. The quality of the shelf behind me, which my grandfather bought in the 40's second hand as a student is way better than the quality of the table where I've written this essay, which was bought brand new from IKEA when I moved out of my parents. There are way more IKEA tables than 40's shelves and the gap is increasing. Some trades (like woodworking) have already experienced a sharp drop in quality, we can expect a similar situation with programmers.

Furthermore because the goal is not to make everyone a great programmer. But make anyone a mediocre programmer, so they can become "ever more finely 'adapted' cogs."

In The Failed Commodification Of Technical Work, the argument goes to say that no matter how much you simplify technical work, most teams will always fail to ship working software. I believe this situation will hold, no matter how much Gen A.I. you throw at the problem.

This is not a problem. If you can have organizations that consistently fail to ship working software, maybe those organizations have different goal. Maybe its goal is the promotion of middle management. Or maybe it is the generation of consistent output, no matter the outcome. Since it is easier to measure output than outcome, the likelihood of the last case is non zero.

Let's look at a different area. At mother's workplace, a music library, someone got tasked with creating the library's calendar for the next year. The calendar got Gen A.I. generated. The calendar is big enough to be cumbersome, small enough so you cannot write appointments, its dates are hard to read and the decoration is candy and butterflies instead of the books, instruments or musical notation. The calendar is perfectly useless other than a piece of decoration. But someone got called to do it and the calendar was delivered.

The point was never to create a calendar or build some working software. The point was to accomplish tasks, now with Gen A.I. and tell your colleagues about it, now with Gen A.I. They will read all about your tellings, now with Gen A.I. These are now all measurable points of output flowing through the system and now with Gen A.I. we enable "total economic administration of the earth."