When the goal of all industries becomes simply making the stock value grow, and you build mechanisms to make this as 'efficient' as possible, you can't be suprised if the process inbetween i.e. the actual work becomes meaningless.
If anything, "AI" and all the hullabuloo around it has stripped the romance and sense of identity from coding and IT jobs in general--at least for me. As with any skill or craft, there is a joy in the process towards skill acquisition and mastery; watching positive change towards some ideal you are working towards. And a seeming sense of culture in how things were done in the past and how the present may or may not relate to that. How things are communicated to other people and their history becomes meaningless to power structures in the world of "AI"--or within the presense of it's illusion. In a sense it's a violation of cultural identity for the sake of something unclear and undefined and constantly changing, yet you are told you have to babysit it, instruct it, and deal with it's output.
There is no direct link to the work being done and a sense of accomplishment, I can put an axe to wood and gain more satisfaction than working with AI. Can I or anybody in the industry say that there is a reasonable career or future with benefits when it's clear that the deep pockets and incentive are structured in such a way as to guarantee that won't happen? We are seeing an unimaginable amount of capital being put into a process where we really have no input as to what the goals are, just "AI" or "GenAI" or all sorts of undefined nonsense.
Consider the opportunity cost of the money involved--what could it have done where it to be invested in well known processess that are known to return a value. If this isn't an example of market failure, then what would you call it?
