1 link tagged with all of: software engineering + luddites + technological progress + ai automation
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Sean Goedecke argues that software engineers have no moral standing to resist AI automation, since the entire profession has always been about automating other people's jobs. He compares engineers opposing AI to the mechanics who built power looms and then complained when their own skills became obsolete.
- Software engineering's core purpose is automating human labor—from spreadsheets displacing bookkeepers to software eliminating video rental stores, travel agencies, and data entry jobs. Engineers can't claim this is suddenly wrong now that it's happening to them.
- The historical parallel to Luddites doesn't work: software engineers are like the mechanics who built the automation machines, not the workers being displaced. Those same mechanics were automated away 50 years later and were seen as hypocrites for resisting it.
- If engineers genuinely believe technological progress is harmful, they should quit. Complaining about AI while continuing to build automation is intellectually dishonest—it's "pulling the ladder up behind you" only after you've climbed it.