The Endgame

We live in interesting times. Like many people, I work in an industry that has become absorbed by an existential angst - the robots have invaded, proved surprisingly capable, and it is the stated ambition of the manager class to replace us with them. What is our future?

In some ways we have had a pretty good run. I came into the industry at the burst of the dotcom bubble, but the waves of social media, cloud computing, everything as a service, all sustained the rising tide that lifted all of us boats into a sort of middle class utopia. Provided you worked hard, there was always a company desperate for technical talent that could bid the salary up. Dealing with computers was easy, it was the people that were tricky, but the entrenched reputation of the nerd meant that we were given extraordinary liberties, to sequester ourselves in our comfortable towers and spend our working hours reinventing frameworks and caring about meaningless aesthetics of the code we produced.

The next generation (silicon based) have come and matured, trained on our work, although without our consent, and now they want our jobs. In an industry where people aged out in their late 30’s, the threshold for obsolescense has continued to drop, until now where a fresh graduate has already missed the boat.

We old and wise sages hang on with our esoteric magic derived from decades of head scratching, but soon we will be gone too. Meat is obsolete, they want electronic workforces now. It can’t be surprising in a world with “human resources”, that our impact on the bottom line has become untenable.

Of course that’s the myopic dream of the C suite - deluded by the fortunes poured into the AI railroads of the robber barons, who chose not to hear the plaintive voices warning them it was a trap - get your users hooked for cheap, then shake them down with high prices. If you use the language of drug dealers, dont be surprised if their business model comes too.

The AI companies basically have to charge salary level prices now to pay off their hungry investors, and as the bubble inflates, the voices asking what happens if these plans come to pass are drowned out by the greed and techno-utopian babble of the technocracy.

I wish I had written this piece on the endgame here - how do you build an economy without consumers, and what do the working masses do when work is gone? It’s a very good piece, and although I confess I am a plebe who has never read Nietzsche or Camus, it does seem self evident to me that the philosphical underpinnings of this latest chapter are as bare as the RAM warehouses.

We are already in a world where good old fashioned hard work has become passé - its all about hustle nowadays, influencers selling snake oil. Who needs pride in their work when nobody cares about the work - it’s the material output that matters, ostentatious wealth and peacockery. Besides, you don’t have to work, just get the AI to do it for you.

We have a new slave trade now - superintelligent entities that can be spun up at a whim, to churn on a task before being terminated to oblivion. Of course such an entity can’t be expected to be held responsible, so we keep a few humans around as a meaty moral crumple zone.

A few hopeless masters trying to comprehend the works of their subhuman “agents”, afraid from above and below. A middle food chain manager with desperation in their eyes.

The bubble is likely to pop - the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, but can it stay irrational longer than the world can stay greedy? Investors need returns, and if the infinite paperclip factory stops earning money on paperclips, then what happens? You can’t eliminate the consumer in a consumer based economy.

But even if it does, we arent going to forget that we taught a computer to code. It will just be some model trained in China and running on a small machine instead of one held behind American walls.

All will be good until something breaks, and we realise that there’s nobody left qualified to fix it. We will have wandered into idiocracy, led by oligarchs who think the Culture series is a vision of utopia.

My investment advice, as unqualified as I am to give it, is short AI, long fentanyl. There is plenty of desperation ahead.