Right. AI is a tool that helps some people "make their situation better." I don't believe technology is value neutral either.
Say a tractor does the work of ten farmers, and the farm owner lays off those ten farmers. Is that the tractor's fault? It's just the farm owner's fault. But we usually say the tractor took the ten farmers' jobs, because the farm owner trusted the productivity gain and made the cuts. That's the real point.
I agree AI has that same dynamic, but I'd argue that people who write this kind of thing tend to come from the establishment. Just look at their background.
People treat "open source" as if it's inherently good. But honestly, they don't realize how open source can actually work in a pretty vicious way for non Anglophone countries. Do you know why? For people whose access to knowledge is limited by the English language, it's hard to sell software that offers less value than the open source stuff the Anglosphere gives away "for free." Now think about it. Can a developing country really produce that same kind of elite mental model?
Open source does have a positive impact in the Anglosphere, sure. But put another way, that's for the people inside the castle. For the people outside the walls, it acts more like a high barrier. So this, right here, is exactly the kind of thing that changes depending on where you stand.
In places that are ten or twenty years behind in technology, do you really think they can produce technology that surpasses Anglophone open source? At that point, learning English itself becomes a privilege, and that's where the technological asymmetry comes in. And the thing is, learning English in a developing country is expensive.
In that sense, AI actually has a more egalitarian side to it. That's why I find this kind of professorial binary thinking so naive. Whether using it is evil or good depends entirely on where you're standing. When a professor tells everyone else not to use it, it just looks like a "this is about my own livelihood" problem to me.
The entire culture of programming and IT is Anglophone. And to even get a proper understanding, you have to read academic papers. To really use Rust properly, you need to deeply understand polymorphism, starting from ad hoc and going from there. Do you know how much time it takes to really internalize all that? The starting line is different, so you can never catch up. In that sense, AI is an asymmetric tool.
It feels like people born on third base are saying, "What's so hard about getting to home plate?" I have no problem with people projecting their own emotional lines onto tools and creating echo chambers. But this logic that only human made work is inherently good, I just find that hard to understand.
This right here is the hypocrisy of the struggle that the establishment loves to celebrate. Some people can afford to stand on stage and fight the good fight, but others aren't allowed that luxury.
To the person writing that, technology might feel like oppression. But to someone else, it's liberation.
Honestly, what I find hard to understand about this piece is that it completely fails to recognize that what counts as a meaningful struggle is determined by your social and cultural position. Their worldview is just narrow. A person's institutional position shapes what they see as human labor and what they see as automatable labor. That's purely a matter of where you stand.
The struggle for survival isn't romantic, not the way the OP makes it sound.
There's a line from Russian literary criticism, if I remember it right:
"Those who glorify the soil are usually the ones who never had to till it."
Reading the OP lamenting that AI steals the struggle away, going on about how the struggle of climbing the mountain is what gives it meaning, it reminds me of a wealthy person dressing up in peasant clothes to till the field. They don't understand the heart of someone whose survival is on the line.