What if this state of tech learned helplessness cannot be fixed? What if people really do just want a glorified little TV in their pocket? What if most people truly just don’t care about tech problems, about privacy, about Liquid Glass, about Microsoft’s upsells, about constantly dealing with apps and features which just don’t work? What if there will be nobody left to carry the torch? What if the future of computing belongs not to artisan developers or Carol from Accounting, but to whoever can churn out the most software out the fastest? What if good enough really is good enough for most people?
I’m terrified that our craft will die, and nobody will even care to mourn it.
I’m just going to come out and say it: I think software development, in nearly all its forms, is dying. The process of creating software in the next few years is likely to be as unrecognizable to us as making webpages with table-based layouts is now.
I spend a lot of time reading books written long before the Clinton Administration. I sometimes enjoy reading books from the 60s and 70s because the predictions about politics, technology, and culture are easier to spot as either accurate or loony.
A host of authors from Robert Putnam to Wendell Berry and Neil Postman have been accurate in their belief: things will get worse. There is no going back. Too many people orient themselves around a constant stream of ease and entertainment at all costs. And they are totally fine with it.
I’m lucky to teach young people because it feels like I get to look straight into the future. Student attitudes on AI in particular have been really interesting over the last five years. Most started out afraid and ended up professing they don’t like it. In my student survey this semester, I asked 24 students to rank the statement “I have a favorable view of AI/LLMs” and no one rated the statement as “neutral” or higher. All were “disagree” or “strongly disagree”.
Thing is, they all use the hell out of it. They don’t like social media’s impact on the world, either, but they love their TikTok time.
Like most people, they are just sorta powerless to effect the change they want. Just as most Western people are culturally incapable of eating a healthy diet, moving their bodies, or retiring at 50. A few do it, often at significant effort and cost, but it’s almost impossible unless you “opt out” entirely to a lot of the world, either by living self-sufficient in a cabin in the woods or joining an Amish or Mennonite community that has (rightly) oriented its entire way of living around community preservation.
I have been telling students for many years now that our craft as media creators will hinge entirely on creativity. I am not convinced that, with today’s technology, if you could go back in time and give a model training data before 1995 that AI could have created Toy Story. I’m not sure AI could have dreamed up The Simpsons, Breaking Bad, The Godfather, or Star Wars. I’m not sure any model could have given us Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club or Bohemian Rhapsody.
And I have been telling students for years that our profession will be like furniture makers after WWII. Prior to WWII everyone makes bespoke furniture that is beautiful, handcrafted, and long-lasting. You bought only what you needed. Then, we started standardizing everything into the grind of machine operations and now everything is cheap, mostly bland and ugly, and lasts about as long as it takes to move it from one side of the room to the other. And we have a lot more of it. And this is pretty clearly “good enough” for most people when it comes to nightstands, bed frames, and corner tables. Maybe they spend a little more on a desk or kitchen table, but not much.
It’s obvious to me from several (but not all) my students, several people I work with, and just looking around and what’s happening that “good enough” is absolutely going to take over the world. It always has. Most TV shows are bad, but “good enough”. Given a choice, no rational human who cares about food would ever go to McDonald’s or some fast food joint when they could go to a “real” restaurant, but drive-thrus are full nearly every hour of the day.
Most people just don’t give a crap about anything. Whatever gets them the most money in the least time, with the least effort and thought, is always going to win. Because it always has. Just look at cars. We reoriented entire countries to support cars, even though many people didn’t own them. And now we’re just stuck with it. This is what it’s like living under the constant march of “progress” and “efficiency.” A lot of people have been trying to tell everyone that for generations.
