The people do not yearn for automation

I enjoyed this essay so much - I read it, then watched the video version because I wanted to absorb it a second time.

It's by far the best commentary I've seen on the growing AI backlash from the general public outside of the tech industry, helping explain why even the people who are using AI on a daily basis actively dislike it.

I yearn for automation, but not expensive, stochastic automation from rent-seeking megacorps.

I think people would be receptive to more automation if e.g. these software companies just made better software with meaningful interoperability and deterministic automation where it makes sense.

Instead the focus is generally on how to extract more dollars out of your user, and relatedly how to keep them in your silo and keep them using your software for as long as possible. The kind of automation being pushed here didn't make sense economically, and there is no mechanism to compel companies to provide it anyway for the greater good.

Now it does pay to provide a version of it, but only because it requires continuously boiling the ocean, and you can rent out access to ocean-boiling machines.

Regular people don’t see the opportunity to write code as an opportunity at all.

This has been a big failure since the dawn of computing. So many people slog through terrible mind numbing tasks or just avoid tasks that they want to see done entirely, just because the computer doesn't already do what they need and they don't know how to make it to that. Cutting and pasting hundreds of webpages from one CMS to another manually. copying lines from one spreadsheet to another and then into an email and back into a spreadsheet. The list is endless.

So many people have tried to solve this problem. Low code. No code. Teach everyone to code. Open source. There's an app for that. Coding agents. Nothing works. Because what we have most of all is a failure of imagination. Until people can imagine the computer being a force for good in their work they won't seek out or be able to take advantage of it, no matter what pathways we build.