After programming for 35 years since I was 12 and learning everything from the transistor level up through highly abstracted functional programming, I'm a total doomer. I put the odds of programming being solved by AI by 2030 at > 50%, and by 2040 at > 95%. It's over.

Programming (automating labor) is the hardest job there is IMHO, kinda by definition. Just like AGI is the last problem is computer science. You noticed the 3 year pace of exponential growth, and now that will compound, so we'll see exponential-exponential growth. AIs will soon be designing their own hardware and playgrounds to evolve themselves perhaps 1 million times faster than organic evolution. Lots has been written about this by Ray Kurzweil and others.

The problem with this is that humans can't adapt that fast. We have thought leaders and billionaires in total detail of the situation. Basically that late stage capitalism becomes inevitable once the pace of innovation creates a barrier to entry that humans can't compete with. The endgame will be one trillionaire or AI owning the world, with all of humanity forced to perform meaningless work, because the entity in charge will lack all accountability. We're already seeing that now with FAANG corporations that are effectively metastasized AIs using humans as robots. They've already taken over most governments through regulatory capture.

My personal experience in this was that I performed a lifetime of hard work over about a 25 year period, participating in multiple agencies and startups, but never getting a win. So I've spent my life living in poverty. It doesn't matter how much I know or how much experience I have when my mind has done maybe 200 years of problem solving at a 10x accelerated rate working in tech - see the 40 years of work in 4 years quote by Paul Graham. I'm burned out basically at a level of no return now. I'm not sure that I will be able to adapt to delegating my labor to younger workers like yourself and AI without compromising my integrity by basing my survival on the continued exploitation of others.

I'd highly recommend to any young people reading this to NOT drink the kool-aid. Nobody knows what's going to happen, and if they say they do then they are lying. Including me. Think of tech as one of the tools in your arsenal that you can use to survive the coming tech dystopia. Only work with and for people that you can see being someday. Don't lose your years like I did, building out someone else's dream. Because the odds of failure which were once 90% in the first year are perhaps 99% today. That's why nobody successful pursues meaningful work now. The successful people prostitute themselves as influencers.

I'm still hopeful that we can all survive this by coming together and organizing. Loosely that will look like capturing the means of production in a distributed way at the local level in ways that can't be taken by concentrated wealth. Not socialism or communism, but a post-scarcity distribution network where automation provides most necessities for free. So permaculture, renewable energy, basically solarpunk. I think of this as a resource economy that self-evidently provides more than an endlessly devaluing and inflating money supply.

But hey, what do I know. I'm the case story of what not to do. You can use my story to hopefully avoid my fate. Good luck! <3