Tech Workers Say They're Rapidly Being Replaced by AI

"She claimed it was outperforming us."

As AI conquers every human-driven endeavor at a breathless pace, from bombing military targets to teaching kids, we gotta ask ourselves a scary question: what is it doing to the workplace right now, and in the future?

Sure, we have Dario Amodei, CEO of hotshot AI company Anthropic, saying he foresees AI models erasing 50 percent of entry-level white collar positions throughout the entire job market, but that could be all marketing hype.

To get to the bottom of it all, tech journalist Brian Merchant solicited responses from tech workers for his acclaimed newsletter Blood in the Machine — and the answers will probably depress you.

A Google software engineer was dismayed that young programmers were relying too much on AI to code, while more experienced workers were inadvertently propagating bad code by not thinking deeply about what they're building.

"'Anyone can write code' sounds good on paper, but when bad code is massively produced, it hurts everyone including those who did not ask for it and have been trusting the software industry," they wrote.

Dropbox eliminated another respondent's job last year after the company decided to allocate resources to Dash, the company's new AI helper.

"The industry is absolutely toxic right now as cost-cutting is dominating everything but the most recently funded startups," they said, while opining they may stop looking for work altogether because they're not getting any interest.

A tech worker at a marketing department shared the story of how one of their company's leaders claimed a ChatGPT model was their new chief marketing officer, which came as an omen for the rest of the marketing team.

"She claimed it was outperforming us," the person wrote. "It wasn’t — it was producing garbage. But the real harm was watching someone who’d given decades to his field get humiliated, not by a machine, but by a colleague weaponizing it."

Recently, due to AI, the company fired its human chief marketing officer and a bunch of other people.

And the stories keep on piling up.

The danger with pushing AI into everything this fast is that it's currently still unreliable, and yet employers are laying off scores of workers — valuable people with institutional knowledge. It risks ruining the foundations of industries as we shirk the hard work of investing in the proper training of younger people.

And if we do all end up getting replaced, it's hard to imagine something like universal basic income coming soon enough to avert economic catastrophe.

There's going to be a reckoning as we run headlong into this future — and it's almost certain to be messy.

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