The human-car gestalt, for example, experiences life and has opinions that are quite different from the human-bicycle gestalt, the human-train gestalt or even the bare human with no mode of transportation. What’s possible and what’s desirable for a driver is pretty radically different even to what’s possible or desirable for the same human outside of a car: in individual instances of this happening, we call it road rage, and on a policy scale it leads to things like people getting extremely angry about bike lanes even when said bike lanes would benefit them at all times when they’re not in their car. The human-car gestalt has interests and opinions that are separate from the human in the gestalt, often opposed to them and able to assert them over the human part of the gestalt.
It is an unfortunate fact that, when faced with such an analysis of technology, tech people will often think that for whatever reason the considerations that apply to literally the entire rest of the world of technology somehow don’t apply to them. This kind of overweening arrogance is, of course, why we find ourselves in so much of the shit that we’re in, but nonetheless, to really get my point across it’s probably a good idea to spell out how these dynamics operate in the tech world specifically.
Software engineering and it’s tooling is all built towards trying to make it more like factory work and increase output in the bid to make more software. LLMs are another aspect of this where the concern always is for capital to increase the amount of garbage shit we make.
LLMs do not improve existing software, they do not optimise, they do not fix, they do not iterate and they especially do not delete. A frustration I’ve had with software “engineers” for my entire career is all they want to do is serve what capitalism wants and shovel ever increasing quantities of garbage out the door because everyone seems to be programmed to want to ship crap. STOP MAKING THINGS WE DON’T NEED YOUR GARBAGE SOFTWARE.
I have reached the point in my career where I spent most of my time just deleting other people’s code. LLMs just means I have more crap code to delete. Like a solid 80% of code written is a solution in search of a problem and I end up gutting half of these half baked frameworks people write that solve nothing at all. If you think your output with an LLM is good I can absolutely guarantee you are just creating problems and solving nothing and someone else is going to have to tidy up your crap later. One of the most important decisions an experience software engineer can make is to write no software at all because all code is debt making more of it isn’t a good thing.
White collar work is the endless toil of inventing problems to justify your job and somehow we have convinced ourselves that’s how we should actually operate and it’s not infact a survival mechanism for a system that doesn’t work and the LLM is the ultimate tool for the system that doesn’t work