This is my first report from the muddy trenches of the 21st century. We’re being overrun by a technology which goes by many names, a word-guessing program (by Cory Doctorow), stochastic parrot2 (by Timnit Gebru & Emily M. Bender), large language model, chatbot, but many people call it just “AI”. Pronounced like “pain” - synonym for anguish and your first thought whenever someone hands you a slop generated by a theory-free inference3 machine.
Many of us felt awestruck the first time we saw an output generated by a word-guessing program. Some may have even experienced revelation about statistical regularity of routine sentences4. You no longer need an infinite amount of time for key-hitting monkey5 to produce any given text. You just need a large enough typewriter where keys are bananas of varying appeal to the monkey.
The technology had potential to become normal technology6, a code completion plugin, a word processor extension, a text summarizer add-on, a better language translator, etc. Instead, thanks to AI boosters and doomers, it’s pushed as an anything-machine to all aspects of our lives while at the same time being presented as a danger to our lives. Go figure!
You can still shut it off from your personal life by making decisions about where and how you shop, search, study, write, code, etc., but if your boss is trying to replace you with a word-guessing machine it’s something you can’t simply ignore.
Your first instinct may be to find ways to incorporate the machine into your work and hope for the best, but what if the wannabe anything-machine produces non-stop error output and you’re forced to correct its errors? Or what if the machine produces rubbish but you can’t recognize it because you didn’t have time to learn the needed skill?
Instead of you producing good output, your work is reduced to identifying bad output and in the worst case, fixing the bad output by applying more of the same.
Rather than learning new skills, you’re forced to produce synthetic output and hope that no one will notice or judge you by the output.
We’re deskilling by being just an appendage of the machine or by not learning the skills at all.
Software engineers are at the forefront of the struggle between token-printing machine overlords and the rest of us. They labor in trenches when their boss asks them to add an asshole ✦ button to every web page and app they can think of. They smile & wave when their manager shows them an app created using slop-bot. They fend off requests to move faster and silently curse all the useless code and text they need to review to keep the software running well. But they also see how everyone around them is slowly deskilling.
Juniors are replaced by token-generators that will never learn, seniors are pushed to uncomfortable roles where they are forced to use slop-machine without learning necessary skills, leaders are pushed to let seniors cut corners for the sake of showing the product can be built faster. No one learns, no one keeps knowledge, everyone cuts corners, everyone becomes dependent on overlord’s token-printing machine and crappy software is being built just as a side effect.
Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great people can automate their daily lives writing small scripts or personal apps they would not be able to make without learning the skill of writing code. But let’s not pretend that building a shack in your backyard is the same as building a bridge or that an app built by a coding agent has the same quality as one built by an experienced team of software developers. You cannot contain human knowledge and experience in an agent prompt.
The problem doesn’t lie so much in the quality of machine’s output. It lies in its forced adoption, in disregard for engineering experience and especially in deepening the inequality between those who can afford the price of output and those who cannot.
How long is it going to take for anything-machine skills to be a requirement for a wide array of jobs? If you can’t afford paying for machine tokens, how can you qualify for such jobs?
Some of us have already lost the ability to read long texts, and I commend you if you are reading these lines. Some of us don’t know the answer to 6x7; some don’t remember their parents’ or spouse’s phone number. We’re relying more and more on machines. But there’s a major difference between owning a calculator or a phone book and Silicon Valley overlords owning your means of getting a job or means of doing your job.
References
- Myth 3 - You need to use AI to keep up
- Stochastic parrot
- Pluralistic: Swapping money for expertise (06 Oct 2026)
- Pluralistic: Textured (18 Sep 2026)
- Infinite monkey theorem
- AI as Normal Technology