I’m starting to see more and more of such tweets and posts.

as a software engineer, i feel a real loss of identity right now.

for a long time i defined myself in part by the act of writing code. the pride in a hard-earned solution was part of who i was. now i watch AI accomplish in seconds what took me hours. i find myself caught between relief and mourning, awe and anxiety. the craft that shaped me is suddenly eclipsed by a machine. who am i now?

I wrote about this topic a few months ago when it became abundantly clear that a lot of what passes for knowledge work or white-collar jobs are just bullshit jobs waiting to be taken away by large language models. Mind you, I am not talking about a job apocalypse. Look, I think large language models are really good at taking on all those pointless, repetitive jobs that a lot of people in white-collar professions do.

Speaking of jobs and identity, here’s what Demis Hassabis said at Davos:

“I don’t think that that that it’s anywhere near enough work going on about this. I’m constantly surprised even when I meet economists at places like this that they’re not more of professional economist professors thinking about what happens — and not just sort of on the way to AGI but even if we get all the technical things right that Dario was talking about and the job displacement is one question we’re worried about the economics of that, but maybe there are ways to distribute this new productivity, this new wealth more fairly. I don’t know if we have the right institutions to do that, but that’s what should happen at that point. There should be, you know, we maybe in a post-scarcity world. But then there are even the things that keep me up right now. There are even bigger questions than that at that point to do with meaning and purpose and a lot of the things that we get from our jobs, not just economically. That’s one question. But I think that may be easier to solve strangely than what happens to the human condition and humanity as a whole. And I think I’m also optimistic we’ll come up with new answers there. We do a lot of things today — from extreme sports to art — that aren’t necessarily directly to do with economic gain. So I think we will find meaning and maybe there’ll be even more sort of sophisticated versions of those activities. Plus, I think we’ll be exploring the stars. So there’ll be all of that to factor in as well for in terms of purpose. But I think it’s really worth thinking now, even on my timelines of like five to 10 years away, that isn’t a lot of time before this comes.” (17:39-19:05)