Have debated publishing this; it sat as a draft today and I’ve been chewing on it. Here goes:
I am pondering AI as a democratizing force (dare I say, a driver of accessibility) — enabling users to define the outcomes that matter for their work, without the barrier to entry of needing to be bilingual first. Knowing how to code has been a gatekeeping situation that prevents people from using computers to achieve the outcomes they care about for a long time. Every advancement that enabled more access to more users (from low level languages, to compilers, to the GUI, to auto-completing code editors and collaboration tools) has faced pushback. AI is unique from that list in its ancillary costs (which are very significant), but I think shares some of the general trend of the history of abstractions making computing more accessible to more people (and seeing pushback from the existing crowd of users who “did it the hard way”).