I think a lot about the nature of work, especially how it pertains to my own. What it comes down to, put simply, is whether one believes work to be zero-sum.
As best I can tell, building software is decidedly not zero-sum. Jevons paradox applies here, but I’ll go even one step further: there will be not just more consumption, but compounding productivity.
Software benefits from specificity; it really sings when tailored to a person, organization, or workflow. When building software is expensive, countless hours – our work – are spent on debating and front-loading decisions in hopes of reducing the expensive building, not to mention everyone else working around the limitations that are deemed too expensive to fix.
When building is cheap, however, work can go into judging whether the software performs to our satisfaction, and more importantly, into making it work well. I see this in my own work: instead of slogging through boilerplate or speculating on interaction patterns, I can build, judge, and iterate far faster than before. I don’t think it diminishes the value of work in this case, even if it diminishes the margins of software contracts.
I’ll posit that software productivity gains unlock at different levels. Right now, we gain productivity from software but lose some of it to sharp edges and workarounds. Soon, these edges will be filed down and gaps filled, which will then give us time to address higher-order concerns. That will give rise to new opportunities and perils as we build upon or reconfigure systems that were built on an earlier paradigm.
But that’s how expertise works, isn’t it? Once the foundations are laid, one is free to wander around the broader space to solve other problems that crop up. These lead to often unforeseeable breakthroughs that move the collective forward. I’d like to think that our intellectual labor works that way too, not by carving a fixed pie up between us and AI, but by leveling up and growing it as our competency grows.