The Human Engineer 293 - Scarcity Theatre

I just discovered this fully written newsletter in the outbox - unsent. Here's what I was thinking a few week's ago. I'm pleased to say nothing has moved on significantly.

It's the May Day bank holiday and I'm sitting in my office on the 10th floor overlooking Amstelveen city centre. Amstelveen is a suburb of Amsterdam, attached to it via a Metro and tram way which makes the city centre very accessible. However, I'm not going there today because it's going to be hot and full of hot tourists doing hot touristy things.

So where do I go instead? I come to my office and make the most of this sacred day, the latest vrije dag or bank holiday in the Netherlands until Christmas. And I choose to come to the office. So why is that? Well, like free days, they don't come around very often and it's good to make the most of them. I can't think of anything else I'd rather do than be able to sit here and write down my thoughts right now. Because I'm in the flow state, and that's a state that doesn't come around very often plus also I have to clear my browser tabs of some wonderful articles to share with you.

The theme of this newsletter is scarcity and what to do with AI abundance.

I'm listening to the Scriptnotes podcast, and I'm suddenly struck by how all of us who work in the knowledge business, from tech to media to writing to accounting, are struggling still with the moral implications of using AI, what it means for our careers and where the pinch of the billionaries is hitting us hardest - at work and at home. Because, both subjectively and objectively, things are going down the toilet right now. Careers are upended, people are stuck in jobs that they loathe possibly even more than usual in pure fear of the alternatives, and spending power is down across the board. While you could say we have mainly ourselves to blame for our apathy in letting Meta, OpenAI and Claude into our lives, we also are the people who can be there for each other to see each other through. In times of abundance, films like The Devil Wears Prada gets made - where everyone is on the up and the world is a playground for everyone to achieve what they will. It is a film of selfishness and excess.

In times of thrift and despondency, films like Devil Wears Prada 2 get made - acknowledging our despair perhaps?

Us vs Them

I've been considering what it means to us as individuals in the workplace. Very few of us are high-powered, high-net-worth people running departments, businesses or sometimes even our lives very well. Most of us are streetfighting our way through careers, looking over our shoulders. And the same is true no matter what our age. No matter how much we have in the bank, we are all under threat from increased prices due to war, increasing pressure due to layoffs and tech solutions coming for our role.

Another wonderful piece from Brian Merchant in "Blood in the Machine" highlights the current pushback in tech, the unionisation of tech workers, the rejection of data centers and the continued and increasingly vocal opposition to AI-themed university addresses. The disconnect between those who clearly have no idea what AI is, and those that clearly understand the threat it represents seems to grow wider by the day.

Doing the Work despite Our Feelings About It

One of the challenges I've faced over my career is knowing when to keep my mouth shut. When I was younger, I would wear my heart on my sleeve and say the things that other daren't say. Why are we building this piece of crap solution when it'll only make our lives worse? Why is this meeting necessary? What's the point of filling in these reports when nothing is done with them? Real "Office Space" stuff.

I would call out the dumb ceremonies we do, acknowledging the box that we were all trapped in and not making any friends along the way. WIth time though I learned diplomacy and increasing authority, to make it work for me. So I navigated the seas of IT and eventually reached leadership positions. But those didn't work out so well because in the words of a famous book: "What Got You Here Won't Get You There". When you're in a sea of engineers doing their thing and you come up with innovative solutions, that's great. When you go up and start trying to innovate, you just mark yourself out as a troublemaker.

I see the arguments for both all around us all the time. Keeping your mouth shut, or speaking out when you need to. I include a link to a glorious rant by Robert Llewlleyn (Kryten from Red Dwarf) as well as a beautiful piece from Billy Oppenheimer about the importance of knowing when not to panic about the things you see around you.

Finally a lovely link from Charity Majors - a classic about the path we take from tech Individual Contributor to Manager and back again. As I continue to write the followup to Human Software (currently around 65% on first draft) I'm also considering writing my first non-fiction book. More of both in the weeks to come.

Have a great Sunday.