There are extreme, scary claims being made about AI — the speed, extent, and pervasiveness of the changes it’ll bring. Much of the hype is coming from people in tech, especially software developers. They’re seeing themselves replaced, and extrapolating to the rest of the world.
This is a mistake. But it’s understandable. When you’re deep in your tools, they can distort how you perceive reality. Let me give you an example.
Before going all-in on web design, I made architectural 3D renderings using an amazing software product called 3D Studio.
It was a threefold process. First, you had to get the volumes right. Then, you had to get the lighting right. Finally, you had to get the surfaces right. All three had to work together to create realistic simulations. PCs weren’t as powerful then, so I had to carefully tweak variables like the number of facets, the reflectivity and coarseness of surfaces, and the 2D bitmaps to wrap on them.
One day, after a long project, something weird happened: The tool started mediating my experience of reality. I’d walk around wondering how I’d simulate the scene before me: the light reflecting off the breakfast table, the dishes’ reflective gloss, the steam from the coffee cup. I started dreaming about how I’d render particular kinds of marble or a fuzzy carpet.
I knew that under the hood, these were just numbers. But it felt like I’d unlocked an amazing new ability. I could create believable worlds beyond what a camera could capture. Not merely intellectually: I could feel the scene’s parameters. This wasn’t just a superpower — the tools had changed my relationship to reality.
But it was a delusion. To state the obvious, that’s not how reality works. It’s just how you model it. Yes, that’s still very powerful. Simulations can be very useful. And if the web hadn’t happened, I could’ve had a career in game design. But there’s a tangible difference between a building and a simulation of a building — and I was in so deep that that difference had started blurring.
In retrospect, this was a scary time. I felt elated — but wasn’t seeing clearly. I’d lapsed into parsing reality through the tool’s affordances rather than the other way ‘round.
I think about this whenever I see software engineers raving about AI. Today’s LLMs are amazing at software development. And yes, software mediates and enables lots of useful activities. But coding is a very narrow use of language, one with characteristics that make it unlike most others. You can’t extrapolate from there to the rest of society (except, perhaps, the law.)
AI will reshape our world. But the transition will happen more gradually than many people are assuming. There’s a wide gap between software development and most of what we care about, which is much fuzzier than what can be rendered in code. Some of the most important things can’t be objectively represented with words at all — much less systematically codified.