Do we just want slaves?

I said many, not everyone.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Goomba+falla... Maybe

Some people do. Here's a bill going through the Ohio legislature, HB 469.[1] Excerpts:

Sec. 1357.02. (A) Notwithstanding any other law to the contrary, AI systems are declared to be nonsentient entities for all purposes under the laws of this state. No AI system shall be granted the status of person or any form of legal personhood, nor be considered to possess consciousness, self-awareness, or similar traits of living beings.

No AI system shall be recognized as a spouse, domestic partner, or hold any personal legal status analogous to marriage or union with a human or another AI system. Any purported attempt to marry or create a personal union with an AI system is void and has no legal effect.

AI systems shall not be designated, appointed, or serve as any officer, director, manager, or similar role within any corporation, partnership, or other legal entity. ...

AI systems shall not be recognized as legal entities capable of owning, controlling, or holding title to any form of property, including real estate, intellectual property, financial accounts, and digital assets.

That's a call for slavery. If you question that, substitute "Negroes" for "AI systems" and see how it reads.

[1] https://search-prod.lis.state.oh.us/api/v2/general_assembly_...

> Now there is a reluctant acceptance and admission that yes, people are building something useful every now and then

Those are the people who were already doing so without AI.

> I've watched the headbanging, stressful, but stockholmed love of coding be all but abstracted away from me.

This is only true if it was ever that hard for you to do the job while getting paid for it.

As long as you keep on stubbornly insisting that this wave of "AI" is anything at all like "AGI" or ever heading towards it, you're going to stay wrong and be pushed out of the profession because nobody can reliably trust you or your judgment. Your value as a developer was always your judgment. The code has always just been one artifact of that.

You're still expected to own every line and defend it. It will never be abstracted away because it is the primary contract between business needs and the machine. It is at once both the operational plan and its execution. The only people who insist that it will/should be abstracted away are pushing propaganda to discourage the continued power shift towards the more technically literate who can and will argue for what actually provides value instead of passive investor-pleasing moves. They'd rather you play with the skinner box than meaningfully compete. All this was already set in motion many decades ago. What happens when the next wave of tech comes out? Do we really want you at the helm if you're going to be this naive and easily manipulated? The premise of this blog post is no less delusional than what we were hearing a couple of years ago.

Trying to reduce how much you pay other people, with its attendant job and self-worth losses, has been happening since at least the Industrial Revolution; nothing about it is novel. The only novelty of the latest wave (AI) is that it affects a class of society (knowledge workers; smart people with degrees) that previously considered itself immune to this process.

If you also hold all technological advances since the Industrial Revolution to be "bad in our culture", then no contradiction arises. Otherwise, please explain why that was good, but this is bad.