Neo-Luddism before AGI, and how we are going to live on
This post is a rant. A thought-provoking rant, I hope so.
No, I don’t mean Luddism in a pejorative sense. I am referring to the Luddite movement in England, which took place in the early 19th century. And no, I don’t plan to reiterate the well-worn debate about how AI replacing humans is justified / unjustified. The world is not black-and-white, nor is it something we can resolve through political theater.
Days ago, there was a rumor spreading around the Chinese internet industry, that the infamous video and livestream platform Bilibili is laying off 60% of its employees. This rumor was later debunked by insiders and such, but the somber atmosphere already hangs in the air. Many people pointed out one jarring fact: that the software engineers have dug their own graves through the development of AI.
Marxists often say that “the capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them,” but the software engineers have indeed invented the perfect replacement for themselves.
I am deeply in agreement with this sentiment. With agentic AI, we now have the ability to code ten times faster, no, a hundred times faster. Last week I built a desktop app—partially in TypeScript and partially in C#—in two days, with most of the code written by GPT 5.4 and Claude Opus 4.6, and it perfectly fits my niche needs of writing LaTeX formulas everywhere. Something like that would have been unimaginable in 2023. If I were to write my own code, it would take one to two weeks. We are living on the edge of Software 3.0, and the sad part is that humans seemingly don’t need to be involved anymore.
People often say that the factory workers are the first to be replaced in the era of technology development. Well, that may be true in the first, second, and maybe even the third Industrial Revolution, but the forthcoming fourth is vastly different. The blue-collar workers, in China and ASEAN countries, are the least influenced in this economy—they are often cheaper than the machines, which is a very sad truth. The white-collar workers, software engineers, accountants, cartographers, reporters, and even lawyers, however, are getting replaced faster than ever, because an AI agent is cheaper and does a comparably good job.
And the software engineers appear to be getting replaced the most. Well, this may be attributed to the fact that the field is oversaturated. — Sounds callous to say, but I am not joking here. There is a very fitting Chinese nickname for the software engineers, “code farmers (碼農).” This is due to people flocking into the internet industry during its gold rush, while the industry kept growing like a balloon. Whether the AI bubble will burst is up for debate, but the internet industry itself appears poised to pop, once again, as it did after the 2008 financial crisis.
Some people were questioning why the programmers so readily embrace AI against the overwhelming trend of opposition from writers, visual and performing artists. I say that it is because they are smart—smart in the sense of overconfident, or egocentric enough to believe that they will be the last few standing in a Squid Game.
What is left for this new wave of unemployed people, you may wonder?
For many people, especially Gen Z who have not experienced a layoff wave before, they may want to refer to China’s Great Layoff Wave (大下崗潮) in the 1990s. However, this comparison is not quite fitting, as those getting laid off from state-owned enterprises could still find a place in private companies: the need for workers was still there. This is not the case for the AI Layoff Wave we are facing right now.
Instead, a better comparison would be the Russian people after the invasion of Ukraine since 2022. The same structural abandonment of the working class can be seen in the compelling article discussing the miserable life of the Russian underclass, written by Sergey Chernyshov, a historian and researcher at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Chernyshov has been branded by the Russian government as a “foreign agent.”
Ever since China became the world factory, Russia has essentially been trading oil for products. It can buy any industrial product simply by exporting oil and gas, without having to painstakingly train talents and build industries. Russia’s own industry workers were left behind, forgotten in the countryside, where even participating in a high-casualty war has become an honorable way out of this misery. If you follow this analogy, China has been Russia’s AGI, so to speak—providing everything so Russia doesn’t have to. Russia trades natural resources with China, and in return imports literally every product from China. What about the unemployed left behind when Russia no longer needs workers? They are discarded and forgotten, while the Russian government doesn’t even need to take responsibility, because it is the “free market” that led to their deprivation of employment, not the upper-class. Something similar can be seen in the incoming AI Layoff Wave, where AGI is the new invention, the shiny big word that would deprive people of jobs, while there is no target for people’s complaints except the cold machines. Capitalists only care about how to save costs. As for what to do when employees are replaced by AI, they will only downplay it by saying that some people are destined to be eliminated by the tide of the times. They will say that they’ve already paid so much in taxes, and whether the underclass will starve to death is a problem that the government should solve instead.
In Liu Cixin’s novel For the Benefit of Mankind, all wealth was eventually concentrated in a single person called the “Last Capitalist.” This sounds extremely miserable, but the tech oligarchs are clearly in favor of this outcome. Before that day comes, we would need to make ourselves more valuable and competitive, in the sense of “cannot be easily replaced by AI.” And of course, although you might say that this way of thinking is no different from “let them eat cake,” sadly I don’t have a better answer: maybe we all eventually need to seize the opportunities within the tides, so that we can still be standing on the paddleboard instead of under the sea.