We used to build things. Software that did something. Products that solved problems. Tools that people used.
Now we build apps to talk about building things. Project management tools for managing projects that produce nothing. Communication platforms for communicating about communication. Productivity apps that consume more time than they save.
The industry has become meta. We are so busy building tools for building that we forgot to build anything.
Look at a modern developer’s setup. They have tools for task management. Tools for note-taking. Tools for documentation. Tools for communication. Tools for code review. Tools for deployment. Tools for monitoring. Tools for managing the other tools. Each tool promises productivity. Together they consume productivity. The time spent configuring, maintaining, and switching between tools is time not spent on actual work. The tools became the work.
You can earn more money. You can rebuild your health. You can make new friends to replace the ones you lost. Most resources that feel scarce can be regenerated if you invest the effort.
Attention cannot. You have a finite amount of attention in your lifetime. When you spend it, it is gone. There is no getting it back. There is no earning more. You get what you get and then you die.
There was a moment, somewhere around 2012, when the internet was as good as it was ever going to get. We did not know it at the time. We thought it would keep getting better. Instead it got worse, and we have been coasting on momentum ever since.
This is not just nostalgia. The structural incentives that made the early internet good have reversed. What we have now is optimised for different things, and those things are mostly bad for the people using it.
In 2008, the financial crisis destroyed millions of jobs. The unemployment rate doubled. People lost homes, savings, careers. It was the worst economic crisis in generations and it scarred everyone who lived through it.
I think we are headed for something worse. Not a financial crisis. An automation crisis. The kind of job displacement that makes 2008 look like a practice run.
This is not going to happen all at once. It is going to happen gradually, then suddenly, the way these things always happen. And when it hits, we will not be ready because we spent the warning period arguing about whether it was real.
I have a ducted air conditioning system made by iZone. It works fine. There’s an app. The app does what apps do. You tap buttons, things happen. It’s perfectly adequate.
But I’m a developer, and perfectly adequate is never enough. I wanted to control my AC from the terminal. I wanted to type a command and have my house cool down. I wanted to ask an AI assistant to set up my bedtime routine and have it actually do it. Not some hypothetical future integration. Right now, on my local network, with no cloud dependency.
Someone alive today will be the last professional writer. Not the last person who writes. People will always write. But the last person who makes a living primarily by arranging words on behalf of others. That person exists right now. They might be in their twenties or thirties. They might be starting their career as I type this.
And they will be the last.
This sounds dramatic. It is dramatic. It is also, I think, probably true. The economics of professional writing have collapsed, and AI is accelerating that collapse to its conclusion.
For decades, we optimised for the wrong things. Memorisation. Credentials. Which university name you could drop. How many facts you could recall in an interview. The education system was built around filling heads with information that would be useful later.
Then AI happened and suddenly the information is just there. You do not need to remember it. You need to know how to get it.
The new skill is prompting. Not in the narrow sense of writing clever queries to ChatGPT. In the broader sense of knowing what to ask, how to ask it, and what to do with the answer. The people who thrive in the AI era will be the ones who can extract value from these tools. Credentials are becoming less relevant by the day.
I am going to be bleak for a moment. You should probably sit down.
AI is going to take a lot of jobs. Not in some distant science fiction future. Soon. Maybe not your specific job in the next twelve months, but within the next decade, the employment landscape is going to look radically different. And I do not think we are ready.
This is not doomerism. This is observation. The capabilities are improving faster than anyone predicted. The economic incentives are obvious. The companies building this technology are not doing it for fun. They are doing it because automation at scale is the most valuable thing in human history.
Mark Zuckerberg bet his entire company on the metaverse. He renamed Facebook to Meta. He poured tens of billions of dollars into Reality Labs. He did interviews in virtual environments with cartoon avatars that haunted my nightmares. He insisted this was the future of human interaction.
Nobody asked for this. Nobody wanted this. The metaverse was not a response to demand. It was one billionaire’s science fiction fantasy imposed on the rest of us.
Crypto has been around for over fifteen years now. Bitcoin launched in 2009. Ethereum in 2015. We have had a decade and a half of innovation, billions of dollars of investment, countless startups, multiple boom and bust cycles, and a generation of developers working on blockchain technology.
Name one problem crypto solved for regular people.
Not hypothetical problems. Not problems that might exist in authoritarian regimes. Not problems that only crypto people have because they got into crypto. Real problems. The kind normal people experience and would pay to fix.