In his 1974 book, Labor and Monopoly Capital, the influential Marxist political economist Harry Braverman argued that the expanding “science-technical revolution” was being exploited by companies to increasingly “deskill” workers; to leave them in “ignorance, incapacity, and thus in fitness for machine servitude.” The more employees outsource skilled activity to machines, the more controllable they become.
It’s hard not to hear echoes of Braverman’s deskilling argument in something like Cherny’s AI programming demo. A world in which software development is reduced to the ersatz management of energetic but messy digital agents is a world in which a once important economic sector is stripped down to fewer, more poorly paid jobs, as wrangling agents requires much less skill than producing elegant code from scratch. The consumer would fare no better, as the resulting software would be less stable and innovation would slow.
The only group that would unambiguously benefit from deskilling developers would be the technology companies themselves, which could minimize one of their biggest expenses: their employees.
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The real means to prevent this is unionizing, which is really the answer to most other techbro-hellscape problems too. Just like Hollywood is putting anti-ai clauses in their contracts, so too will tech workers need to. Unfortunately, given that the end goal is to remove the IT workers entirely, this is still only a delay if companies push ahead, since just like scabs, there will always be people willing to sell their fellow workers down the river for their own enrichment.
But we’re not even close to that point; most tech workers think unionizing is a 4-letter word. There’s always a private chat room where folks are lamenting the absolute class-ignorance of their coworkers who are all convinced they’re going to stumble into unicorn stock options soon, despite multiple rounds of layoffs each year now being standard in tech.
The real question is what has to happen to end this horrible capitalist nightmare in general.
