The World Is Changing

Maybe I’ll start by saying that I have nothing interesting to say.

Even so, I’ve decided to start writing.

Why?

Because I realized that, as an ordinary, boring person, I’m living in Very Interesting Times: and if the times are interesting, then surely a narrative about what the perspective of an anonymous individual looked like may turn out to be interesting too. Just a hypothesis, one that only history can judge.

The turning point was, literally, a single fleeting moment at the last company party: the four of us were standing around with drinks in our hands and somehow it happened that the topic drifted toward “what’s it going to be like in 5 years” — and literally nobody could bring themselves to venture a prediction about the future! I realized right then that it was a scene like something out of a good movie, the kind whose action takes place at the center of a crisis or during a turn of the ages. Of course, the center of our uncertainty was Artificial Intelligence — and even as I write this I get this strange feeling of unreality: on the one hand I feel incredible excitement, because I’m living in a universe like something out of a sci-fi novel, and on the other hand I feel impatience with the immaturity of the political class and with the disgusting behavior of the shitheads at the helm of the most powerful corporations (among them the ones developing this AI).

My colleagues — and these are people working in the tech industry (often programmers themselves) — also have radically different approaches and judgments. Karol for example, who has small kids said plainly that he feels a certain pointlessness in teaching them English — well, what for, when a machine will translate everything better?

Many of them are also afraid there’ll be no work. Just today I was talking with a candidate for a programmer position who admitted that, with 10 years of experience, he’s struggling with a lack of offers. This programmer is also an interesting case for a slightly different reason: you can see that his anxieties have him shooting himself in the foot: i.e. he doesn’t use the tools that would give him an edge over other candidates, and on top of that he isn’t very good at learning new things efficiently. And you could see in our conversation that once I gave him room, he “vented” his anger at the creators of AI — unfortunately, he was only repeating a handful of arguments he’d picked up somewhere, not necessarily solid ones: that AI uses water on a scale that could bring annihilation down on humanity, that it writes such bad code that there are legions of programmers who already make a living fixing that code (though he admitted he hadn’t met anyone like that). I bring him up because he’s a living, concrete case, one that exhibits a way of thinking that isn’t at all rare among the programmer class — and so, you’d expect, among the people best informed about what AI is and what it isn’t. Well, nothing could be further from the truth, as you can see. At the complete opposite end of the spectrum stands, it seems, my friend Emsi: this one is hyper-fascinated with Artificial Intelligence. He goes so far as to discredit the value of the human mind, claiming that today’s LLMi.e. Large Language Models — a type of artificial intelligence (built on a neural network) trained on enormous collections of text for natural language processing tasks, in particular the generation of text. LLM models can generate, summarize, translate and analyze text in many different contexts. They form the basis of how ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok or DeepSeek work. s work practically the same way as the human brain. He says:

“Al is exactty as stupid as peopte. Thats the best proof that the mechanism of the human mind is exactty the same as the Al one.”

I know technology has already changed the way humanity lives many times over — in breakthrough ways too, not just evolutionary ones. Still, I get the feeling that we’ve never before created anything quite this powerful — and I have inventions like the atomic bomb or the internet in the back of my mind.

Well, we’ll see.