Chip Cullen

The need for importance, and AI

If you tell me how you get your feeling of importance, I'll tell you what you are.

This is from Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, which I recently started reading.

It hit me like a thunderbolt. I don't know about you, but working in the tech industry the last few years has been to be in a constant state of malaise, if not in an outright existential crisis. And I'm one of the fortunate ones who still has their jobs.

I've had a hard time putting my finger on why exactly. It was deeper than a threat to my individual job. What was it?

AI has fundamentally threatened our sense of importance.

Now that I've said it out loud, I fear it's akin to saying "water is wet". But it helped me put a name to the blah feeling that I've had for a few years now.

My early career was during the age when everyone told you "learn to code", "coding is the future!", etc. And I did - I largely taught myself to code HTML, CSS and JavaScript. And for a long time, that has made me useful and important. I was the builder of a lot of projects that I look back on with pride. I did that. It is a craftsman's pride.

Working in tech, specifically on the web - was exciting and fun. Every day something new came on the horizon, and it was fun to learn. The more we learned, the more important we were. We, the coders, were the ones who could make things happen.

For good or ill, that's no longer the case.

People with no coding experience can build applications that they could have only dreamed of before. Questions of quality aside, that's the reality. We, the coders, are now not the only ones who can make things happen. Anyone can.

Simply being able to write code is not as important as it was only a few years ago.

What to do about it?

That is a great question. I'm still casting about for answers. The point of the post is that I've been able to put a name to the problem. First thoughts: