Whatever else you say about the AI doomers, they have more than two decades’ history of explicitly spelling out exactly what they believe and why, even when it was complete science fiction to talk about AI at all. They’ve earned the right to be treated as sincere.

it is not even obvious that AIs aren’t conscious! People often dismiss this point by diagnosing it (to my mind, the absolute worst way to argue against anything), or by pointing at some philosophical theory that suggests it might be impossible in principle to construct artificial sentient minds.

I think we are asking the wrong question. Maybe the question should be, are humans obviously conscious?

Staying ahead of the models is a moving target. At the start of 2026, “make working changes to large codebases” was in this category, but now it’s not. For this reason, I doubt that you can retreat to some “hard engineering” area that requires deeper expertise. That might work in the short term, but not forever. If LLMs can find a better lower bound on the Riemann hypothesis, they will soon1 be able to write solid high-performance kernel drivers or GPU shaders or whatever.

Brilliant advice for dealing with slop from your coworkers.