We’re watching an already isolating industry become even more dehumanized in real time. Programmers are getting laid off in favor of AI agents. Companies are replacing budgets earmarked for salaries and repurposing them for the purchase of AI tokens (the calculated cost of running a prompt) because “AI is always the answer!” My former company used to pride itself on saying that our support chat was a human being, until we quietly replaced that person with an AI chat bot. Just as manufacturing went through waves of change from which it never really recovered, as robots replaced line workers and jobs went to countries with lower wages and weaker labor laws, AI and outsourcing are coming for tech workers.
But while some people get replaced, the remaining workers are getting pushed to their breaking point and being subjected to ever more intrusive forms of surveillance.
