Be Wary of Digital Deskilling - Cal Newport

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. […]

Boris Cherny is a senior technical lead at Anthropic who manages a large team and likely owns a significant amount of stock options in the company. Of course, he’s excited about the idea of agents replacing programmers, but that doesn’t mean we have to share his enthusiasm.