Don't Panic: AI Changed the Shape of My Job

A hyperspace bypass is coming for your job

In January, all seemed well. I was a senior engineer at a busy software development studio, coding hard in the day, and in the evenings following my family routines, such as reading to my 12-year-old son. In January we started to read Douglas Adams' classic comedic SF novel The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

I did not expect that before we'd finished that book, my job would be utterly transformed.

Not by a layoff or an AI-driven restructure. The job I had simply ceased to be useful in its old form. Last year, most of my professional life was spent writing and debugging code. This year, AI coding models crossed a tipping point. The low-level construction work is gone (mostly), and the other parts of my job have expanded to fill the space. Trying to keep working the way I was before simply doesn't make sense. The technology itself has promoted me from engineer to overseer.

As my son and I continue to work through Hitch-Hiker's Guide, some pithy phrases and ideas from that book now resonate in new ways.

Like the protagonist Arthur Dent, who awakes to find his home about to be bulldozed in the name of efficiency, I find myself questioning the very safety of my career. But I have reasons to be hopeful. There is a key system-level dynamic that is often not considered in the AI doom talk.

The fear is that because AI can do the work faster, there will eventually be no work left for humans. To understand why this is probably wrong, we have to look back at 1865 and a man named William Stanley Jevons.

Jevons noticed a paradox: as steam engines became more coal-efficient, the consumption of coal didn't go down. It soared. As the cost of using coal-powered energy dropped, it became viable for a thousand new uses. Efficiency didn't slow down the railways; it led to a massive acceleration and expansion of the system as a whole.

The gap created by AI efficiency is being filled instantly by the expansion of our own ambitions. Which may be infinite.

As the effort required to produce a technical asset drops toward zero, I'm not working less. But my workflow has changed radically.

Labrys website

• Create migration plan
• Import and process Notion documents
• Research, download and process images
• Produce SEO reports

We've just built and launched a whole new company website for Labrys. Last year, that project might have taken a project team months to complete. This year, it took only a few weeks with a tiny team of one or two.

In The Hitchhiker's Guide, Adams mentions a civilisation whose ambitions were unimaginative. As efficiencies grew, they focused their efforts only on shoes. At a certain point, shoe shops were the only economic activity and their civilisation collapsed.

Obviously that was a parody, but as Jevons' Paradox compels our old workload to be replaced with new work, we should be thinking very carefully about where we want to go with all that new industrial power.

Globally, the economy has long been locked into a pattern of mindless growth. Trying to simply accelerate our existing pattern of economic activity is at best a lost opportunity… and at worst a global catastrophe.

The Hitchhiker's Guide describes a starship fitted with an Infinite Improbability Drive that allows a ship to go anywhere and actualise anything, no matter how improbable, difficult or distant. Working with modern AI feels remarkably similar. If you can imagine it, you can probably go there... almost instantly. (Although you may need to put up with the occasional unexpected bowl of petunias).

So the question is, what ambitions will we as a global society pursue? Now is our chance to go somewhere really interesting. Build a better future instead of one dictated by short-term economic goals.

Here's a few wildly improbable places that might now be within reach very soon:

• What if we could deploy adaptive robot-managed permaculture food gardens to massively scale up sustainable agriculture?
• What if recycling plants didn't just sort plastic from glass, but automatically assembled waste into useful products?
• What if every home were architect-designed?
• What if every scientist got their own lab of research assistants that never slept?
• What if we could literally ask whales to help us explore the oceans?

You name it, maybe we can afford to go there now. Like… now. Next week.

And what actually is the meaning of life, the Universe and everything?

So, if you're worried about the future, grab a towel, don't panic, and remember: Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

• Jevons paradox