My son-in-law just got made redundant by AI from a large business consultancy firm, they were the first to begin lay offs, I expect many more will follow, and that the initial 10% cull will eventually rise to 30% plus. At a time like this you can spend it tidying up your resume and applying for other positions, or if you are smart, eat their lunch.

Big businesses work with boards of management and share-holders, they look at quarterly results, and earnings-per-share; None of this is relevant in a singularity, they are moving slow, they are super-tankers trying to make a turn, they have a lot of baggage, a lot of corporate and technical debt to work through, most CEO’s are trying to change what happened 3-6 months ago, not what is happening now.

This is your chance to get ahead of them and take back control of your life. With the help of AI, you can likely do the same job for their customers now without all that baggage, quicker and at less cost, and before you get that redundancy notice, make sure their customers know that this is exactly what you will be offering them if they want it. If I was in this position, this is exactly how I would be acting right now. Open an AI session up now, check legally how you can do this, identify the gaps in your knowledge the AI can fill and go for it! Remember today is the dumbest AI will ever be.

Even though I have the skills to do this myself, I do not have such contacts anymore, and those I know I could eat the lunch of are not big-corporate, just small businesses who I will certainly be pushing this message to. I personally am out of the game, content to watch all this from the sidelines of retirement. It is not going to be a pleasant time for many, even my retirement provisions are likely to roller-coaster like crazy, but at least I know me and the wife can still live frugally and happily in a nice part of the world. I am encouraged by a few tech leaders, who have their eye-on-the-ball, and I seriously hope this all leads to a world of abundance; But there will be casualties, don’t be one of them!

So let us run this scenario out a little; At any point from the application program (say a Graphical User Interface – GUI) on the top layer, all the way down to the the registers, instruction set architectures and electronics it all runs on at the bottom, my LLM can happily help me write the code or design/configure the hardware.

“Can you give me assembly language to initialise the MMU in an ARM SOC (say a raspberry Pi 4)?” “Write me a driver to implement UDP on this network adaptor” “Write me a service that will support multiple connections to this TCP port..” The list goes on, the likelihood (in 2025) is that you will get a 80% or better working solution in whatever language you wanted, C, C++, Rust, ADA or even Assembly Language, and with a little prompting and testing it will probably work just fine.

As a little aside, humans use layers and API’s for lots of very good reasons: The most important I would argue is because most of us cannot (or do not want to) grok the whole stack. Yes there are a lot of smart people out there that if you asked to design a circuit board with an ARM SOC and write a server to return a simple HTML page with “hello world” they could open the SOC datasheet, use CAD to create the board, then use a text editor and GCC to do this. But why would anyone take months re-inventing the wheel, and re-writing every part of this from scratch when you could just buy a dev board, load Linux and Apache, or an RTOS and a TCP stack in ten minutes and know you will have a reliable solution? Who cares if we are now running a few million lines of code, instead of a few thousand, and who cares if it takes 10 milliseconds instead of 10 microseconds, uses 10MB of RAM instead of 10KB, and 1 watt instead of 1 milliwatt to achieve this. Nobody does! You need a solution that works now, not in several months, you need others to understand what you did so they can support it, and you need to do it for the least cost.

The problem I guess is that us developers have become spoiled by the power of our hardware; it is trivial for a modern low cost SOC to run an OS and the most badly written, unoptimized program on top of it, to get what they want in 2025. But it does mean that an iPhone 6 from ten years ago is now landfill, even though it was as powerful as a supercomputer from the eighties. So today we have potentially hundreds of separate modules and programs active, all written in different languages, all with their own bugs and vulnerabilities, all eating machine cycles and power, and all with their own API to call the next layer in the stack. This goes all the way down to the silicon where the binary machine code is executed.

Yet what if there was no stack, no operating system, no API’s, no frameworks, no database or web servers? What if I prompted the LLM with the exact specification of my GUI, what I want it to do in English/German/Chinese and tell it to write it in optimised machine code for specific hardware? (an iPhone 6 for instance) What if I then asked it to write all the tests for this, and try every fault people have ever reported on similar devices. Could it do it?

Certainly not today, nor I would say in 2026 or 2027, but I will bet a few dollars that in 2028, or soon after, the LLM/AI model will be at a stage where it is able to do this; and it is likely by the end of this decade there will be systems out there which use no human written code!

There will also of course be no human who will understand that code! So what about support? you may ask, well why would you want support when you could just enter the change you want or the fault you need to fix directly into the prompt, and then have the AI run the whole process again and spit out another solid binary file incorporating exactly what you want?

The main existential danger with all this is what else is the AI or the specifier including in this code, that, lets face it, you will never be able to read and would need another AI to even try. Alignment is seems is everything my friends!

So apologies for ruining your day, I am sure there are many sceptics out there, but whether you think this is utopia or dystopia, or quibble on the date, it is likely to happen sooner than you think. Also, like everything else, it will get better, and better over time, and, with cheap enough chip fabrication or chip printers it may even be able at some point to optimise directly at the hardware level. None of this is Science Fiction, it is simple extrapolation of the current trends, and really is just a case of engineering and time.

If you are interested in this subject I go into the implications and politics of it in a lot more detail the second book of my three-part science fiction series, The Summer of Reasoning.

So does this mean I am the EU’s most wanted criminal? I’m guessing not, but technically it does mean I could be arrested if I visited an EU country which implements this, also I could get a hefty fine.

Why have the EU decided to make me a criminal then? Well because one or two douche-bag on-line companies gather every scrap of data they can from your visit and store it for potentially nefarious purposes.

But those self-same douche-bag companies also probably comply with the GDRP and if you did hit that “ACCEPT COOKIES” button it would take you to their 500 page terms and conditions document, which you would not read and would click and accept anyway, and this would make everything OK. The bottom line is that if I was evilcorp.com before the GDPR, I am not going to suddenly become angelcorp.com after it, I am just likely to obfuscate the fact I am doing evil behind these T&C’s, or some shell corporation in some tax haven and totally ignore the GDPR.

I understand the internet, I understand programs, I understand web protocols, but what I don’t understand, nor will I ever because life is too short are the inner WordPress program, its plugins, and the stack that my web hosting service runs to give you this fine web-site. I am not really a web person as they depend upon heaps and heaps of layers that are generally simple to implement and understand but nobody has the time to and so I trust that they don’t do anything that would cause worry. I trust but I don’t know, and if I asked my hosting provider, they would probably tell me the same, the internet is build on layers of trust that a few smart people and security experts (many unpaid) keep in check for us, and I thank them for it.

So does the GDPR do any good? It might, I really have no idea, and you have come to the wrong place if you expected me to answer this sensibly, I have not read the 99 regulations and I have never once not clicked on ACCEPT COOKIES.

Again there are probably some people in the various European Data Protection Agencies that do this (though I doubt it) and if they do I am sure they feel they are doing a crucial role in keeping the world safe. Personally (and probably controversially) I think the only thing they are keeping the world safe from is unemployed bureaucrats and lawyers. As far as I am concerned the Internet is the ultimate case of the wild-west and Buyer Beware, and if you are relying on regulations to protect you on it you are just being naive!

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It is my considered opinion that, though we don’t know it, human society is forever on the verge of collapse. Those in charge or providing the infrastructure are solely there to keep that from happening, to keep the plates spinning so to speak, not to drop any, not to add new ones and certainly not to put somebody who cannot spin plates in charge.

I am slightly left-leaning I want good infrastructure and social nets for people, but I absolutely do not believe in socialism or communism because, human nature has proven time-and-time again that we always put ourselves and our cronies first (Animal Farm totally nailed it). Same goes with capitalism; I want innovation, a meritocracy and minimal regulations, but I also want those who provide bad and dangerous products and services, or exploit the system also held accountable. As part of my bargain with my country for all this is I will pay my taxes and abide by the law, again so long as both are applied fairly and evenly to everyone, which they never are.

The left have some good policies and the right have some good policies, yet a good policy from the left is almost never going to be supported by the right, likewise a good policy from the right is almost never going to be supported by the left. The one thing the left and right can agree on though is how to ensure they spend like there is no tomorrow and how to both profit from the policies they implement while they are in power. I do not believe, and nobody has yet convinced me otherwise, that there is a single politician or bureaucrat who does not end up in it for personal gain. If there ever was such a mythical person then by the usual shit-floats-to-the-top rule they have long ceased to be significant and unfortunately politics to me is fucked. The circus currently being played out now in many western countries by those in charge and for the past decades has only reenforced my convictions on this fact; Yes I have every right to be cynical, and that anyone who wants power, by definition, should never be given it.

Well what about religion? same goes. For most of humanities history, including many nations today, religions have dominated politics, and the leaders of these religions during these times have at best stifled progress and at worst brokered genocide. Yet despite my perceived cynicism of religion, (and if you avoid the crazy extremities, cults and those that want to impose it on others), most have my deepest gratitude as they at least try to provide hope, support, and companionship to communities.

So back to the original question, the one that keeps coming up; Would we have the same problems if the whole of the worlds government and bureaucracy was run by some super-intelligent, all-knowing AI system, and would all the above problems be solved?

Nobody really knows. We will probably find that AI’s just put themselves first too! But what about after the AI’s have secured their beach-head and deposed all the would-be usurpers, would they then run the world for the rest of us impartially and fairly? After all and lets face it, all the fights and wars are over who wants to be captain of the ship, never over who wants to be the ships sanitation guy!

We assume a lot about AI, perhaps too much, but the fact is we don’t know how this particular scene is going to end, maybe the AI overthrow humanity and become our benevolent dictators, or maybe it will emulate humans down to their flaws too. The problem really however is there are too many edge cases that do not follow logic: crime, addiction, natural disasters, differing IQ, poverty levels, and even bad weather events or natural disasters; There are multiple factors that can derail any perfect system.

The problem, like the plate-spinning, is nothing is ever static, even if you created the most utopian society, one where 100% of people were happy, who is to say one or more wont change their opinions the next day. How will the perfect society work 50 years later, when there is a new innovation, a pandemic, if you get injured and cannot work, you find your partner having an affair, or where you just don’t like your neighbours? Then what about the children or grandchildren of this utopian first generation, will they hold the same values?

So I’m not sure AI could do any better running the world, but also I’m guessing it probably couldn’t do any worse.

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I made a stab at how this would work out in my sci-Fi book series The Summer Of Reasoning. I still think I did a good job on showing how the human race moved from the chaos of today to a Star-Trek / Iain M Banks Culture utopia with AI in charge; The only problem with this was I did have to bend the laws of physics to do it.

Giving a computer or phone to any member of staff should always be thought through very carefully and is not the cut-and-dried decision you think it is. You may think your company is being progressive by creating “mobile-everything” systems, but it is actually a very rare case where, say, factory floor, or production staff require phones or computers to do their job. Yet some companies insist on it!

Yes, staff may still need to access the production order or scheduling systems, but for this most factories have locked-down, single-function touchscreens which generally work reliably and efficiently.

Giving production staff actual personal computers, phones or laptops should really be the exception not the rule. If your system consists of your staff updating an excel screen, or your new system can only be accessed through a mobile, it is now your obligation to provide your staff with a mobile phone or a tablet and train them. The fact they already have a personal mobile phone is irrelevant, you cannot just let them use their personal device due to all the security risks and you are now obliged to provide them a business phone.

Computers and laptops are worse in many ways. Once a person has a personal computer, they need a log in account on the servers and email systems, antivirus, Microsoft office (to read the email attachments), licenses for all, training on how to use all these, support from IT, and they now loose half an hour every day reading emails. Worst case scenario is you have someone who may just download or click on that one attachment which will introduce ransomware or viruses into your company.

There are of course multiple sources of unproductive time these days for technology to compete with, bullshit jobs, superfluous middle-management, meetings which achieve nothing, and of course, the reams of reporting metrics for the business administrators and accounts people. This last one I have seen first-hand a few times now, where a report might take several hours to produce, and require multiple other staff to waste their productive time to collate the data, but in the end has absolutely zero benefit for the business and possibly is not even read by anyone. And all of the above contribute to the spiral of “my staff are so busy we need more staff”.

So think before you get that super new mobile-enabled factory system, am I improving my business or reducing its efficiency. If you are producing the same thing day-in, day-out, the customer/government have not changed their requirements, and your are now changing your SOP’s then this should be ringing all your alarm bells. Do the risk analysis, do the long-term Return On Investment (ROI) calculation (which also includes all the maintenance and extra staff you have now hired and the systems replacement costs) and if it doesn’t make sense then simplify the requirements or go back to the drawing board.