I haven't been this excited about tech since I set up my first home server 20+ years ago. And Claude doesn't sounds like an always-on vacuum cleaner (it was a decommissioned proliant).

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> My answer to the question of how you can not be angry in tech is that it’s by no way the most only possible feeling. First of all, instead of being angry, you can simply be unsure. The feeling of uncertainty is a much more productive emotional state because it can lead to curiosity.

With respect to Armin, whose work I respect a lot, I think that it is totally valid and in fact productive to reserve a degree of anger and hatred for the hyper-capitalists that are going to use AI to further make the lives of the many worse to further entrench the power of a very, very few.

It is very true that being entirely consumed by anger is bad. At the extremes, it clouds judgment, is bad for your health, and makes you little fun at parties. That said, it's a human emotion and being upset by injustice helps fuel action.

So insofar as we're called to being uncertain and curious, it should perhaps be uncertainty about our current social/class structure and curiosity about how we might change it for the better. If you have the means and the talent, maybe start a worker owned tech co-op. If that doesn't seem likely maybe start talking about organizing a union. Remember when folks said that if tech workers would you unionize, it would upset the good things folks had with wages? Well if tech workers had unionized earlier on, the precarity and anxiety workers feel today might not have come to pass. If now seems like a bad time to unionize, a future where AI usage is more pervasive and better understood might be much worse.

But I have never been more anxious. I have a hard time sleeping, I constantly feel the need to keep up or fall behind. It didn’t use to be like this.

I can't get myself to stop finding it terrifying

When I think about my future I am scared. Not uncertain. Not merely anxious. Definitely not excited. I'm quite frightened.

In fairness, I think I'm a bit of an outlier. I already felt my place in society was fairly tenuous. I struggle to make friends. I don't feel I fit in very well. I've never managed to stick at one job for more than a few years. The one thing I'm really quite good at is building software and that's let me stay afloat and thrive somewhat

And that's going to go away. And I'm nowhere near close to retiring.

So no. I'm probably not going to find a way to let my anger give way to curiosity any time soon. I feel under threat and I am scared for my personal future safety and security.

Is this my fault for placing too many of my eggs in one basket? Yeah probably. I regret it a lot. If I could go back in time I would have chosen a different profession and branched into software instead of being all software all the time.

I'm trying to tell myself it's not too late to branch out now, but it's been very difficult

So.. I dunno. I can appreciate what the article is saying, and I think it's probably accurate and useful for other people who are more secure than I am, but... Eh.

I guess I just hope people realize that people like me are out there, not just uncertain but AI is shaping up to be the blow that knocks us off the bridge and into the water

Righteous anger is a healthy and natural response. Those who admonish others to "be curious", to "wait and see", to "be rational" often have an agenda.

Like this author who is invested in AI.

Exploration: Hey there's some cool new tech, let's see what it can do for me, for us.

Anxiety: What will happen to my craft? Will my skills still be important? Will I have a job in a year? How will I keep up? If we stop or slow hiring junior engineers, what happens when the experienced folks retire?

Frustration: This could be a time of fun and exploration with these new tools at hand. Instead we are measured by weird metrics (tokens, PR times, etc, etc), some of us are laid off, etc. There are $100bns spent on AI data centers.

The last one is the closest to anger, but it's not really the same.

This is the same game. They tried to play with the mindfulness movement in tech. Ignore your anger and just keep coding. And that’s why everyone is more angry and anxious now.

From the perspective of the article, it seems that not having a target distinction between anxiety and anger would make the two feelings indistinguishable and thus the argument would fall apart. BUT, I do think there is a difference between the rage that comes from anger and the unease that comes from anxiety, and that may be triggered by the uncanny valley feelings from AI or the loss of job security from AI or the feelings of replacement that may come from AI or the environmental concerns that come from AI or the capitalistic underpinnings of the current implementation of AI, the list goes on. Some people may take anxiety from these things, and others may take anger. I don’t see one emotion as being less valid than the other.

Also, I don’t see any use in saying someone shouldn’t be angry or anxious in a particular situation. You can’t control your emotions like that. You can control how you _react_ to your emotions, but not the emotions themselves. I do think that emotional regulation is important in work (and also in life), but that doesn’t mean that you don’t feel what you feel.

People hate being unsure. Neurochemistry prefers anger to uncertainty. People get angry about being unsure. We feel anger in large part as our brain's natural salve for the discomfort of uncertainty. The suggestion he's making sort of defines away human nature.

(There's a lot of practical benefit to be gained from understanding this; for instance, skilled consultants put a price tag on certainty; you can sell determinism by itself, separate from any product or service you're more overtly offering.)

The answers are obvious. This wave of AI uncertainty and layoffs didn’t just mystically happen to our industry. It wasn’t an act of God. It’s the management and “leaders” of companies like OpenAI and Microsoft going around selling bullshit, and it’s the management of the other companies that dove head first into this without doing any critical thinking, laid a bunch of people of, and are now struggling to figure out what to do.

And no, they don’t get a pass just because now some of them “express doubt about AI” too. They should have thought about that before laying tens of thousands of people off. They should have thought about that before investing hundreds of billions into questionable hardware that may or may not be a bubble. They should have thought about that.

The author is right that we are in a transformative time. And in transformative times, we need strong leaders to step and lead us to success. And yet, have they?

These are people that are tens of millions, sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars a year, and collectively control the livelihoods of millions of people. Their influence has significant impact on our society and environment. We should expect more of our leaders. I think it’s entirely justified to be angry at them and their complete lack of living up to those expectations.