I also enjoy walking more than driving, but if I had to travel 50 miles every day for my job, I would never dream of going on foot. Same goes for AI for me. If I can finish a project in half the time or less, I still feel enough accomplishment and on top of that I will use the gained free time for self actualisation. I like my job and I love coding and solving challenging problems, but I also love tons of other stuff that could use more of my attention. AI has created an insane net positive value for me so far. And I see tons of other people who could also benefit from it the same way, if only they spent a bit more time learning how to use it effectively. Considering how everyone and their uncle thinks they need to chime in on what AI is or is not or what it can or can not do, I find most people have frustratingly little insight into what you can actually do already. Even the people working at companies like Amazon or MS who claim to work on AI integrations sometimes seem to be missing some essentials.

I don’t really understand your point about AI freeing up your time to do other stuff at your job. Does your employer let you work less hours since you’re finishing projects sooner? Mine certainly doesn’t, and I’d rather be coding than doing the other parts of my job. But maybe I’m misunderstanding why you were trying to say?

I also would rather a project take longer and struggle through it without using AI as I find joy in the process. But as I said in my original post I understand that type of work appears to be coming to an end.

Maybe think of it this way: If your job is delivering mail and the only transport you have is a horse, your life would probably suck a lot. You'd barely be home and you still wouldn't cover that much distance. Now, if someone gave you a car for your job, you would not just cover a lot more distance and deliver a lot more mail (=happy employer), you would also get to sleep at home every day and not be exposed to the weather all the time (=happy employee).

This is how all industrialisation/automation works in general. A lot more stuff gets produced and people still get to have more quality of life. Code is just another product in the end. Your employer will get more product and you will get to worry about less when you're at home. Imagine you could be a 10x engineer as a normal guy without working 100 hour weeks. And the true 10x guys who still work 100 hours will be able to change the world.

Where I live we have labor rights and if your job is delivering mail and you're given a horse for it, you'd only be expected to deliver as much mail as you can in your contractual work time, which is then limited by the legal limits (8 hours/workday, up to 6 days/week). So you'd be home for most of the day, but delivering less letters per day.

(where I live a car would also be slower for delivering mail than a horse, most delivery people are given trikes, but alas)

This is how all industrialization/automation works in general: When you have a way to deliver faster/more, you're given more mail to deliver in your work time. Your pay does not go up, but any given road blockage or instance of traffic makes you fall behind quota significantly more. You're not paid by how many letters you deliver, but by the hours you work. Maybe you even make less as there's less overtime. Post will then proceed to simply employ less people over time as each employee is made to deliver more letters, then maybe you're part of the people whose jobs are cut. Or they might just reduce wages for everyone anyways, as now the job is much more accessible and there's more supply of labor than there is demand.

This is not an argument against industrialization or automation, but your perspective of what would happen if we had more industrialization is... very narrow.

We must consider the potential future where there's simply not enough work for most people to do (a realistic future now), and how we'll prevent that from going the same way it would currently go (losing income -> losing domicile -> starvation/freezing/etc).