John Gruber blogs about the split in reaction to AI-assisted programming:
The divide I’m seeing is that the developers who are craftspeople are elated because their productivity is skyrocketing while their craftsmanship remains unchanged. They’re achieving much more, much faster, than ever before.
As things stand right now, I see people falling into roughly four buckets:
- Normal people who use ChatGPT and love it.
- Normal people who are worried and want us to slow down or stop building data centers.
- Programmers who love building products but never loved the low-level details. AI is huge for them.
- Programmers who think of coding as an art itself. AI is taking away their sense of purpose.
That second group of folks who are worried is perhaps represented best by this video from Bernie Sanders. I watched the whole thing (about 9 minutes) because I don’t want to lose sympathy for people who feel lost with what is coming. I think this division in society is going to be a very big deal.
There are going to be protests against data centers, humanoid robots, billionaires, lost jobs. I’m an optimist, though, and to me the possibilities for the future outweigh the challenges. The key will be for all of us — fans and skeptics — to push AI in a direction that is widely available and empowering. The worst outcome would be for it to further concentrate power and wealth in a small group.
