Disclaimer: this article has been written 100% by me, a human being, using mechanical finger typing. All typos and lack of stylistic taste are entirely mine.
I haven’t taken to this blog for a year now. I changed jobs. I was busy with family matters. I got into a rabbit hole of tokenmaxxing building a coding harness for writing code I can trust with LLMs. And I took notes about things I wanted to write about, but I thought to myself that won’t be of any interest to anyone, so I didn’t write them. But in the end here we are, It thought maybe I would write something that would add some value to someone somewhere, and that would be worth reading instead of reading it from ChatGPT, Claude, or any of their derivatives.
So here we go. I’m worried. I’m worried for us.
I don’t want this to be yet another AI doomer article. I do believe AI can and will automate software engineering once we manage to solve the problem of ensuring code correctness with 5-nine reliability at scale. We will get there, it’s not about if but when.
I’m not worried about AI taking over as the paperclip maximizer. I’m worried about us humans losing our ways. Losing the simplicity of appreciating another human’s presence, giving a smile to someone without expecting anything in return, feeling someone’s skin and looking into his or her eyes as you shake hands. I’m worried that through addictive apps and AI interactions we are going to atrophy our ability to empatize with other living beings to the point of becoming a society of lonely self-absorbed narcissists with culturally ingrained sociopathic tendencies.