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Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster. A shockingly inefficient trillion-dollar project.
(www.theatlantic.com)
this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2026
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Technology
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I agree its pandoras box but I disagree about the quality of life it brings. What it is creating is larger electric bills that is strangling the lower class, killing consumer low end computers which also harms the lower class, creating a dependency which will likely increase in price, lowering childrens critical thinking (according to studies private schools are not being as affected), killing jobs, oh and the fuck ton of effect it has on climate change which also affects the lower class more.
Yeah but you see, everyone who's gun-ho on AI doesn't seem to be bother to give two fucks. It's bat-shit people are chasing this like their lives depend on it. They don't give a fuck about the lower class, they never have, it's a new shiny toy, and until something catastrophic happens, nothing is going to change.
Eat the rich.
Yes. I agree those are all terrible. And I agree with your assessment of almost all of them. But I'm not naive enough to think that we can put the evils back in and switch back to a non-ai world. We live, we grow, we adapt. This is the future, no matter how bleak it is.
I didn't say it improves quality of life. I said it can lower barriers of entry to some things, and it can improve a workers productivity when you compare two workers of equal skill.
It makes you seem more productive in most metrics that corporate america seems to measure, but that doesn't really mean anything. Even if most of what the current AIs produce would be good quality (and it's not, its mediocre at best), one hallucination costs you more time than everything it saved you.
Hard disagree. Random utility scripts, most, terraform, and ansible, brainstorming architecture decisions, throwing an error log at it and spitting back the plausible solution. All faster. But the engineer needs to be capable of knowing when it's plausible or not.
I don't think replacing sr engs with interns+claude is the solution. But many sr+principal engineers can be accelerated on a majority of tasks. That's why was careful to say equally skilled engineer with/without.