Artificial Intelligence is here to stay... or so say all the "Influencers" in every tech space on every platform. Since about the middle of 2023, we've been permanently "6 months away from AI completely taking over software engineering!"
Oh, don't get me wrong, LLMs and MCPs and Agents and OpenClaws (and all the new family of buzzwords) have made tremendous strides... and it truly is exciting to see the latest manner in which we've tricked rocks into thinking for us.
But y'all... I gotta say, I'm a little worried about the trajectory we've established. I think it's time we have a talk.
First, let's talk about... everything else
In 1969, the US Department of Defense made a connection between a few key computers called ARPANET. It was created out of fear of a nuclear strike - if the Soviets bombed our research facility, everything we were working on would be lost! We need to protect that research, so we created an easy way to transmit the data to another location. Then in the 1990s, we saw a "worldwide web" built on ARPANET's technology and learning. For a few years, the web was a place of people exploring and building and learning together and sharing. But the infrastructure was expensive.
And then came the advertisers. Somebody got the bright idea to make some money by selling advertising space on their web page. Then someone else figured out how to make an ad "pop up" in a new window when you visited their page. The entire internet became a hellscape of windows popping over (and under) the page you wanted to view... sometimes multiple ads for a single content page. If you lived through this era, the trauma's still too near to talk about.
But in the early 2000s, the dot-com era arrived: we started thinking of ways to use this "internet" thing to make money. Everybody needed a domain name, even if they didn't have a business plan. The Bubble Popped. Loads of businesses went bankrupt. Millions in venture capital was flushed down the drain. People lost jobs... and fortunes... overnight.
During this bubble-pop, some new technological advancements entered the arena, dubbed "Web 2.0". It wasn't enough to visit a website and see a bunch of static content, users needed to interact with the site. The browser, with interactive technologies like Flash and Javascript, rose to prominence... and we started thinking about ways that we could interact with people using the internet. First there were web forums, but those gradually became larger and larger communities, eventually evolving into Social Media websites. Myspace... and then Facebook... along with Twitter, LinkedIn, and a host of others, consumed us. We could keep up with our friends around the world, and share our thoughts and news in a way we had never been able to before!
But you can't run a site that serves billions of users on goodwill. These sites started as side projects born of the desire to connect someone to their colleagues, friends, family, or neighbors, but they never charged their users to participate. (At least, the ones who survived never did...) They needed a way to pay for the massive amounts of infrastructure they created.
And then came the advertisers. One by one, the revenue pressures of running a business consumed each of the "connection" platforms. Today, my feed consists of a ratio of about 1 friend's post to 3-4 "Promoted" posts for things I never subscribed to. We all hate it, but the platform has to make its money somehow and we'd all quit in a heartbeat if we had to pay to remain on the platform.
While this was happening, Steve Jobs launched the iPhone and changed the way we communicate on the go. The phone platform offered apps of all sorts. The app stores were filled by developers doing what developers love to do: building things and sharing them. For a while, it was a fun place where we could explore the possibilities.
And then came the advertisers. Take a look at your app store now. You can classify all the apps as one of these types:
Free apps maintained by a large company to give you access to the systems you're already subscribed to (so they can keep you on their "real estate" as much as possible). Think Google services, or your car insurance company, or your social media platforms.
"Free" apps that do nothing unless you subscribe to the company's service (usually for a monthly fee).
Paid apps that you buy for a large price tag in order to use, just like old-school software purchases.
Paid apps that you buy for a tiny price tag (sometimes they're free apps too though) and then they nickel & dime you to death with "microtransactions" to unlock the full functionality.
I REALLY hope you're seeing the pattern here
Every technological advance in my lifetime has followed the same playbook:
- Someone comes up with a cool idea that improves the world.
- They share it, people love it, it scales up to the point that it "becomes a business" instead of being a hobby project
- Shareholders demand profits, revenue pressures cause leadership to cave, this thing isn't gonna pay for itself!
- We use the technology as a vehicle for advertising in order to pay for it
- It becomes 💩💩💩.
Heck, we don't even have to talk about technology. I believe can generalize the pattern to this statement:
When anything good scales up to the level that Advertisers and "the Money Men" get involved, its death has already begun.
I see it in College Sports here in the US, where NIL (name, image, likeness) deals and The Transfer Portal are new factors, and the centuries-old tradition of playing for school pride has been replaced with athletes transferring between schools in order to build their own personal brands instead.
I see it in TV entertainment, where we all abandoned cable in favor of streaming services only to be saddled with price hikes and intrusive advertising (which were the main reason we cut the cable cord to begin with).
And that brings me to AI
Even this year during the Super Bowl, we began to see the stress fractures appear in AI companies... evidence that they're following the same path. Anthropic ran an ad throwing shade at OpenAI for the announcement that ChatGPT with Ads in your prompt responses was coming soon. Now it's easy to say "good job, Anthropic" and switch to Claude over GPT, but...
Leopards don't change spots, y'all. Big Tech has a consistent playbook. We're going to have a brief period that we will someday look back on as the "Golden Age of AI", when we're all building and learning and growing and enjoying the benefits... but it won't last long. Shareholders will grow tired of waiting. CFOs will rein in spending. CROs will look for ways to roll out price hikes. CEOs will talk about efficiency and profitability. Monetization will win out over open sharing yet again.
Why this is a Problem
I can hear some of you already: "We've weathered every previous iteration of this storm, Blink. There's nothing to worry about!"
This time is different though.
Kelsey Hightower, who's been a super-respected name in Tech for a long time now, had this somewhat tongue-in-cheek post on LinkedIn back in February:
It might just be played for laughs, but after following Kelsey for a long time, I read it differently. It's a nugget of wisdom wrapped in a bit of a flippant hot-take. You probably need somebody to hold up a sarcasm sign.
See, in all the previous tech advancement iterations, we collectively moved forward despite the setback. Lots of people lost jobs and/or fortunes when the dot-com bubble popped, but they still had improved skills that they could apply to show for it. You might be an unemployed frontend developer, but... you were still a frontend developer with marketable skills.
Contrast that with what's happening in the AI space. Experienced software engineers are seeing 6-10x efficiency boosts by building an army of Agents to do their bidding, but every time you tell the Agents to write the code for you, it moves you one step further away from having the intrinsic skill of writing code yourself.
(There's a really intriguing article over on Psychology Today suggesting that this isn't a "loss of ability", but instead "estrangement from the part of yourself that thinks". Semantics aside, the end result looks pretty similar.)
Now let's fast-forward on the inevitable path toward monetization of AI. You've sacrificed your own personal expertise for speed-of-delivery, and you've put all that expertise... where, exactly?
...behind a subscription fee.
We've seen the articles, y'all. Investors are pouring MASSIVE amounts of money into AI companies. Those investments will eventually have to be settled someday... and where are they going to get the money to settle it up?
Advertisements and/or Subscription fees. And since we've already expressed our distaste for a world where AI is "polluted" with advertising... guess who's going to foot the bill when the investors stop?
That's right... you are.
These companies aren't giving away Artificial Intelligence as a service - they're harvesting human intelligence and putting it behind a paywall, to rent it back out to you.
Uh, is Blink becoming, like, a Doomsday Prepper or something?
Nope, I'm not. I'm also not saying that you shouldn't use AI tooling. I firmly believe that as technology professionals, we should be fluent in technology, even kinds that we hold at arm's length. In fact, I think maybe we should be even more fluent in the kinds we hold at arm's length... because we need to understand it well enough to make informed decisions.
Get in there, learn how AI tooling works, learn what it's good at and what it absolutely should NOT be used for. Build. Grow. But most importantly...
Under NO circumstances should you stop learning to do it the "old-fashioned way".
Because someday soon, you're going to realize that you have to pay them for the privilege of having a bot do the thing you used to be able to do on your own.
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