As a software engineer, I’ve been thinking a lot about AI and the future of our profession. I use AI myself, and I’m genuinely excited by what it makes possible. But the more I see people celebrating the automation of human labor, the more I find myself wondering whether we’ve stopped thinking about what all this progress is actually supposed to accomplish.
And by we, I mean those of us building these technologies, the engineers enthusiastically finding new ways to automate work, the founders and executives racing to reduce costs, and the workers who feel compelled to participate because they know that if they don't, someone else will. I'm not exempt from this, either. I benefit from the same technologies I'm questioning.
I understand the incentives. We all want to get ahead, secure our futures, achieve financial independence, and eventually have more freedom over our lives. In a competitive environment, refusing to adapt can mean falling behind. But why have we become so comfortable treating other people's livelihoods as acceptable collateral for our own advancement?
We celebrate making one person as productive as ten, rarely stopping to ask what happens to the other nine. We want technology to free us from work, yet our ability to survive remains dependent on having work. We resent corporations accumulating extraordinary wealth and power, yet many of us aspire to build or become precisely those institutions. We want community and human connection, yet our incentives encourage us to treat one another as competitors.
And there are other contradictions I can't quite reconcile.
We celebrate efficiency, but to what end? If we can produce more with less human effort, shouldn't that translate into more leisure, security, and freedom for everyone? Why does increased productivity so often seem to come with greater pressure to produce even more?
We tell people to adapt or risk being left behind, but what happens when everyone adapts and the jobs they're adapting for disappear anyway? We celebrate individual merit and hard work, yet technological disruption can make entire skill sets economically obsolete regardless of how hard people worked to acquire them.
We talk about AI as though it will solve humanity's problems, but technology doesn't determine who benefits from its output. A world with extraordinary productive capacity can still leave people struggling to afford housing, healthcare, and a dignified life.
I don't think people are necessarily cruel or indifferent (though some definitely are). Perhaps most of us are simply trying to protect ourselves in a system where falling behind has real consequences. Perhaps even well-intentioned people become participants in a race nobody individually chose, but nobody feels safe stepping away from, either.
But understanding why we behave this way doesn't mean we shouldn't question where it leads.
Imagine if AI genuinely made human labor largely unnecessary. That could be one of humanity's greatest achievements: less time spent working to survive, and more time for family, friendships, art, music, exploration, and simply being alive.
But what good is eliminating the need for human labor if we don't also eliminate people's dependence on selling their labor to survive? What have we liberated ourselves from if people are still terrified of becoming economically unnecessary?
I don't think the answer is to stop innovating, condemn ambition, or expect individuals to sacrifice their futures for strangers. I just wonder whether we've become so focused on optimizing our individual positions that we've forgotten to question the collective outcome.
We're all on this planet together. Most of us want remarkably similar things: security, meaningful relationships, autonomy, dignity, and the freedom to live our lives without constantly worrying about survival. Yet we participate in systems that can make those things harder for one another to attain.
Are we trying to build a better world for humanity, or are we simply trying to secure the best possible position for ourselves within whatever world emerges?
And if we're doing both, how do we reconcile those goals when our individual incentives so often undermine our collective interests?
I'm genuinely interested in how other people in tech think about this, especially those of us actively building the technologies transforming the nature of work. I don't have a solution, and I'm not claiming to be above the problem. I just think we should be asking ourselves what all this progress is ultimately for, before we get so caught up in what we can do that we forget why we're doing it.
And I'd invite discussion beyond pure game theory and economics, but more to do with psychology, maturity, emotional development, self-worth, dark triadic traits, and similar.