Yesterday, like many of you, I read about Jack Dorsey announcing the end of employment for 4,000 people at Blocks after a strong year of profit increases. It’s another splash in the pool of anxiety engineers and creatives alike are swimming in as we watch the astoundingly fast evolution of AI agents.
Rumination
How do we process this? Thousands of our career-siblings losing the employment our society has made non-optional with some severance and a well-meaning “good luck” pat on the back from the people who just hired them.
If you feel offended at this statement, and move to defend it as “just the way things go in business”, I understand. I have that reaction, too. But after that I take time for some abstract consideration; if our companies aren’t here to keep us employed and innovating, what are they here for? Is their purpose to maximize profit for the owners? Is that what our societies are showing a need for right now, maximized profit? More concentrated power?
I’m trying to figure out how to wrap up that emotional paragraph, make it tidy, and get back to business. But it won’t fit back in the mind-drawer where I had it. The feelings are there, the fears are there, the emotions are there, and I suspect I’m not alone with them.
Will there now be hundreds of tech companies cutting thousands more jobs? None of us know what’s going to happen.
What Else Could be True?
In my personal wrestles with anxiety, I’ve learned to ask an important question when worries come up: “what else could be true?” It can help to shortcut the mental doom-scrolling of ways the future seems certain to turn into tragedy. It can make some space for possible beauty.
As I look at my own current experience with AI engineering, I don’t feel doomed. I don’t feel replaced. I don’t feel useless. My own creativity and passion has blossomed as I’ve immersed myself in a new way of working, enabled by AI agents.
My Reality
At work, I’m starting to take on much more of the stuff that used to be just wishful thinking: I’m adding test suites I used to skip from lack of time. I’m doing refactors that have been waiting for months, or even years for my attention. I’m upgrading old dependencies.
By working faster, I’m creating more work for myself than ever. The mythical programmer-month has now become the mythical agent month. I’m doing all these things while also shipping ambitious new features, all of which increase the essential complexity and breakable surface area I’m responsible for. I’m having to come up with novel methods to handle the amount of new code & logic being generated.
Instead of having zero active side projects, I now have at least five, all of which are moving me into new levels of creativity, understanding, and experience. I’m finding myself with the time and ability to dive into areas of engineering that used to be inaccessible to me as a father with limited night/weekend hours, and building bespoke software that was previously too expensive to produce (given the addressable market).
I’m not running out of work, I’m drastically expanding my appetite for creation and maintenance.
(no, an AI didn’t generate that sentence. This article is 100% Human-Intelligence 😉)
My Hope for the Future
I’m hoping many companies in the industry don’t see this as an opportunity to slice headcount. But as an opportunity to finally build the dreams we’ve been sitting on for years. A new generation of software and creativity lies at our doorstep, and it seems probable to me that there’s space enough for all of us.
Sustainability
I’m a heavy AI user. It is now almost exclusively the way I write code. And I’m almost always having it work on many things at once. I love this, it’s so powerful. I almost can’t believe how slow and meticulous my work used to be. But that comes with a huge cost that’s largely hidden to my daily attention.
It’s not a cost in dollars. It comes in the form of strain on the environment. On communities. On animals. On other living creatures.
As Dr Sasha Luccioni put it: AI is dangerous, but not for the reasons you think. (The truth actually seems to that it’s dangerous for all the reasons you think, and more)
These things weigh on me, even while I’m learning to harness the world-transforming power of this new tool.
AI needs water, a huge amount of it.
Humans need water.
Fish need water.
Trees need water.
Trees matter.
Fish matter.
Humans matter.
We’re on a path to sacrifice what we have for the sake of what we could have; for the sake of progress. But what good is progress if it crushes life?
I’m proud of Hugging Face for hiring Dr Luccioni as their AI Climate Lead. I hope every AI-related company forms a team of people whose job it is to understand what progress is costing our communities and our natural world. Progress, if pursued without stewardship, is no progress at all.
I hope the AI giants take their responsibility for sustainability seriously, and make it non-negotiable.
That said, we may need deeper change than companies getting serious about the environment. Our economic structures themselves may require deep and serious refactors in order to be sustainable.
There are indigenous professionals who have been working against the destructive power of capitalism, facing governmental and cultural opposition for generations to convince us that we need to work with the land1, instead just extract from it2.
As unlikely as this is to happen, imagining a way through is the first step to changing the future.
- It is not the responsibility of the indigenous people of the USA to be the “environment people” while the rest of us do the techy stuff. It’s the responsibility of the tech companies who profit from these products, and the people who are it to educate ourselves and refuse to “move fast and break things” when it comes to our planet. I’m grateful to the many indigenous educators who work to help us understand. ↩︎
- It’s not enough to have some sustainability efforts worth a few million dollars, or even to make carbon-zero data centers. We need companies to root sustainability so deeply into their way of working that tech no longer advances without also advancing the wellbeing of the Earth. We’re already past the point where zero emissions can save us. We need active, urgent, and consistent reparation. ↩︎
Big thanks to Laura Randle for proof-reading and feedback on this post, and for the conversations that opened my brain to these thoughts.