Honestly that kinda of culture was the best thing about being a dev and now it became the training set. I hate how openai/google/anthropic/etc scraped it all, learned from it, and now they sell our love back to us as a product. Sure, I get it, it's capitalism, whatever, but I feel like the biggest fool out there. I guess I just have to accept it, put my head down and keep going. There's one thing I dislike most though: the people around here that glorify AI/LLMs. It's just a matter of time until the higher ups normalize reducing even more headcount because of AI, 90% of us will be affected. Not everything is about the technical details people!
I sometimes wake up so angry about it, but what can we do?
How do we stop them?
We can make an open letter to the AI labs and the employees (they can be anonymous confirmed signatories of course) so that they can reconsider their business models.
I'm thinking of ways how we can stop them
Going in with an adversarial approach is just going to end up in conflict and burned bridges. You want to get a deeper understanding on why everyone is doing what they are doing, then help people find a path forward that meeting their goals in a healthy way.
If LLM vendors are doing it for the money, you need to show your employers that following the AI vendors' leads doesn't help the company, it just sends their revenue to vendors. You need to show how to achieve the same business results without using the AI tools.
And that is possible - I'm a consultant, and all the AI-First companies I've worked with have some truly awful results going on internally. Their metrics looks good, they are delivering code, even delivering and selling new features and products. But they are also piling up internal tensions and debt that are going to invoke a huge cost some day in the future. If you can show them those tensions and costs, you can change how they operate.
As a consultant it isn't as skewed, but still a little bit. In any case, what codingdave said is spot on.
It broke a long time ago, back in the modern industrial-agricultural revolution. People say communism is worse, but the problem is that communism was a response to capitalism. When communist revolutions trigger, then the higher ups decide that maybe all we need is a patch instead of a rewrite, and start tightening laws. But these are just patches. Things like ad-driven models and consulting on open source are patches as well.
Capitalism will continue to break every time there is an industrial revolution. Robots took jobs but added a few, computers added plenty of jobs, but with AI we might not be so lucky.
Capitalism of a sort, but not how we understand it today. If we're talking about the Russian revolution of 1917 that wasn't really "capitalism" as we would describe it today. It was closer to feudalism with a very small aristocracy controlling all the resources, while treating the "workers" with extreme brutality.
Even then it's arguable that the 1st world war was the spark that made the revolution possible. Partly because the extensive mobilization allowed for "worker leaders" to become visible (ie at NCO levels) while at the same time swelling the army numbers (and it was those conscripted army folk that provided the back-bone to the revolution itself.)
While it's fair to say "the workers had no access to capital" - and that was certainly a part of the problem - the underlying factor was the aristocratic system.
Bear in mind that Russia at the time was still very much in the "monarchy" stage, unlike France (French Revolution) or the UK (English Civil War) which are much clearer as being "against the monarchy". The Russian revolution lead to Communism (more accurately described as Authoritarianism) than some form of elected parliament. (The English and French systems had elections, but voting was limited in lots of ways.)
The problem with Communism was less about the political ideals, and more about implementation. China is communist today, and doing really well. But the system is unlike Leninism or Stalinism. (Or indeed different to Mao's China.) "Communism" works best when there is a lot of local control and less central control. Central control (Lenin, Stalin et al) failed for much the same reason the Tsars failed - too few people benefiting from the system as a whole.
Ironically what we're seeing now (in the US) is the consolidation of wealth to the few. The tendency to authoritarianism in govt. I'm not sure that the US form of Capitalism (as we see it today) is "worker friendly".
I would suggest that Europe is on a better path - a broad mix of democracy (ie multi-party voting), socialism (an understanding that a society does better when looking after the bottom) and capitalism (the ability to start your own business, make profits and so on.) Allowing, but then tempering, the rampant greed for ever larger piles of money, and social control, seems like a win.
"Either you're part of the steamroller or you're part of the road."
If not AI then something else would have been there to disrupt.
Cheers
If so, I'd just like to point out that none of this is inevitable, and the argument of "If I don't do it, someone else will" is a lazy excuse for abdication of social responsibility and the common good, a textbook race-to-the-bottom mentality. It's possible for a critical mass of individuals behaving ethically to prevent the "someone else" from taking actions that are harmful to society overall in the name of "disruption", as much as those bad actors would try to convince us otherwise.