And all the benefits that brings. Not just in raw economic terms, but in quality of (family, community, recreational, commercial, ecological, medical) life.
Kind hard to imagine it will suck if another order-of-magnitude leap along that long line happens.
A bit of a tangential anecdote from my dad, who is a retired a biologist. He was one of the first in the department to use a computer in the 1970s and wrote some programs to do tedious calculations that had to be done by hand before and took days of human labor. Even a 1970s computer could finish the calculations with his programs in a few minutes.
His boss, an older tenured professor, could not believe that 'these damn computers' can possibly be right. Doing the same calculations in a few minutes? Impossible. So for a few weeks (or months, I forget), he did all the calculations done on the computer by hand to prove that the computer must be wrong.
One day he comes to my dad and says "can you show me how to use one of these computers?"
The world is changing quickly. Our most coveted defining traits - our minds - are under attack. This is a technology that seeks to replicate your thought processes and critical thinking and then to execute it at machine speeds.
If you think this is like the industrial revolution, you're actually right. We're still replacing animals with machines. But now we are the animals.
Anything other than a serious discussion about UBI or a post-labour economy is a joke. This is technology that aims to displace most of us.
You'll have even more time with your family when you are no longer a SWE, e.g.
When automation displaced farmer manual labour, it also led to new jobs opening up for that labour to flow into.
What new jobs/fields do you see developing out of AI tools and how they've been marketed so far?
Every step of automation across the history of humanity has led to a "concentration of power" in jobs/fields which required brainpower. AI is the technology coming for brainpower. Where do we go from there? Back to farming?
And when I say AI is coming for the brainpower, it's coming for it in two ways: directly where it takes our jobs and indirectly where a lot of people using it are seemingly getting dumber. Both are quite dangerous to our combined futures.
It won't be Marvin saying, "Oh god I'm so depressed, what's the point?" We'll just start killing each other in massive numbers cause, well, if you can't create anything and there isn't enough for everyone, what else is there to do but fight over what there is
Everyone in America is now fed and most children grow up spending a ton of time with both parents. This is because of automation greatly raising productivity and bringing costs down throughout the 20th century.
It's easy to think things are terrible, but they are actually insanely good. Just 100 years ago life was horrible for basically everyone by today's standards, now it's not.
AI will continue the trend, raise productivity and bring costs down. Now it's for white collar output, instead of manufacturing and agriculture.
The labor force disruption will be painful, as it always is, especially in a country without a strong social safety net, but things will be better on the other side because we just made a ton of work more efficient and can produce more with less.
We shouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water just because it affects us this time...