I started my IT career in 2011, I have enjoyed it, I have got to do a lot of interesting stuff and meet interesting people, I will treasure those memories forever.
But, starting with crypto turing general computing from being:
“Wow, this machine can run so many apps at the same time!” or “Holy shit, those graphics look epic!” or “Amazing, this computer has really sped up that annoying task!”
To being:
Yo! Look at how many numbers I can generate!
That brought down my enthusiasm severely, but hey, figuring out solutions to problems was still fun.
Then came AI/LLMs.
And with it, a mountain of slop.
Finding help about an issue has gone from googling and reading help articles written by something with an actual brain to mostly being rephrased manuals that only provide working answers to semi standard answers.
Add to that a general push to us AI in anything and everything, no matter how little relevance it holds for the task at hand.
I also remember how AI was sold to the us at first, we were promised to do away with boring paperwork, so we could get on with our actual job.
What did we get? An AI that takes the fun and creative parts, leaving the paperwork for the workers.
We got an AI that we need to expect to be stealing our work and data at every point, giving us shit work back, while being told that we should applaude it and be grateful for it.
And the worst thing, the worst thing is that people seem happy with it. I keep getting requests to buy another Copilot license or asking for another AI service to be added to our tenant, I am sick of it!
We got an AI that somehow has slithered onto the golden throne and can’t be questioned.
I am not able to leave the tech market at this time, but I will focus on more tangible hobbies going forward.
This year, I have given myself a project, I will try to build a model railway in a suitcase. That will be a Z-scale tiny world in a suitcase.
I have never done anything remotely like it, but I feel like I need something physical to take my mind off tech.
Sorry for the rant, but I just came off of a high from realizing and putting words to my feelings.
Humans are the CNC machines in your analogy here. Basically we are left to clean up after the sloppy material inputs to get reasonable outputs. It’s just that techbros don’t believe that is (or at least will ultimately be) necessary and that AI can do this step.
The jury is already in on current tech (techbros are wrong), and still out on coming tech in this space, but it seems very unlikely (past experience with tech bros says they are hype machines and full of shit).
So what we land on with AI acting as the CNC is this pseudo facade where the furniture it cranks out looking OK from a distance, up close it’s pretty garbage but while everyone is starting (or forced) to sit on the chairs, it looks like they aren’t really load bearing…
now… apply this to IT, Medical, Financial, Military and any other serious application and you don’t have to wonder why people are concerned anymore.
I disagree with humans being the CNC machines. In both cases, humans instruct the technology to create the designs, but it is the machine which is digging into the product to create the visual patterns.