As much as I hate to admit it, a person’s work is integral to their life and their overall satisfaction.
A thought that occurred to me this weekend is AI tools that relieve programmers from, I guess, programming, is seems like a tool for programmers who don’t like their work.
Not unlike people who work outdoors increasingly building bubbles around them with air conditioning, music, screens, etc. Seems like a bunch of accessories for people who don’t like being outside.
The counterpoint to this is probably “calculators”, the actual profession that existed before computational calculating. The movie Hidden Figures features three notable examples. These were three black women who did math in their head and on paper to calculate trajectories during the early days of the space program.
They were eventually replaced by IBM calculator machines. There are two things about this worth knowing:
- Being a “calculator” was considered a demeaning job, which is why the most common calculators were often black women.
- The machines not only took their jobs, but for many resulted in their job loss because there was no other position to put them, at least in the 1960s. The movie made this a little happier by showing the women “moving up”. Not shown were the no doubt millions who did not.
Also worth recognizing is that no doubt many calculators quite enjoyed their work. And they had no control over any of the forces working around them.
