Claude helped me write this. Mostly quotes and fact-checking. I catch myself wanting to stress the “mostly,” and that is the whole subject of this essay. It’s September 2026. By September 2027 I don’t expect to be using Claude to write blog posts. Because I don’t expect there to be blog posts by me to write. I won’t be a writer. I won’t be a programmer either. And I don’t know what a man is for, after that.
In 1908, Alfred Adler suggested that contributing to others (a.k.a. Gemeinschaftsgefühl) is what gives the individual a sense of worth. Later psychologists, like Morris Rosenberg and Gordon Flett, called it “mattering”: the sense that one is significant to others. Adjacent to this, Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, authors of the Self-Determination Theory, identified “relatedness”: a psychological need to be bonded with others. Simone Weil in The Need for Roots (1943) listed “to feel one is useful and even indispensable” among the “vital needs of the human soul.” Moreover, Émile Durkheim in Le Suicide (1897) found suicide rates rise as social integration falls.
“The true joy in life,” according to Bernard Shaw in Man and Superman (1903), is “being used for a mighty purpose.” I believe that being needed by others is not only a joy, but the primary reason to exist.
There are nearly 50 million programmers like us in the world, by SlashData’s count. We are a small part of something larger: about 400 million people whom ISCO classifies as “professionals”—one in nine of everyone employed on the planet. Peter Drucker named us “knowledge workers” in Landmarks of Tomorrow (1959), before the personal computer existed. Robert Reich, in The Work of Nations (1991), called us people who “manipulate symbols,” and put us at a fifth of the American workforce. Counting managers and technicians alongside professionals, ISCO now finds 20.1% of the planet in that kind of work. The world looks the way America looked in 1989. We contribute by thinking, and that is what makes us needed.
However, LLMs already think better than us, and faster too. At the 2025 ICPC World Finals, Gemini solved ten of twelve problems. Had it competed as a team of humans, it would have finished 2nd out of 139. It also solved Problem C, which no human team solved at all. That was a year ago. I’ve been writing code for more than 25 years, contributing over 100K lines to my GitHub annually. Since March, not a single line of code committed under my name has been written by me. It’s all Claude Code. It was 4% in February.
And they are not only good. They are cheap, and getting ~13x cheaper every year—faster than computing or electricity ever fell. If all of us took a fifty percent pay cut tomorrow, the machines would take back the difference in ninety-nine days. Dario Amodei describes what is arriving: “millions of instances,” each thinking at “10x-100x human speed”—a “country of geniuses in a datacenter.” Thinking stops being scarce. Soon we won’t be needed.
Some expect a market for artisanal code: machines will write the millions of routine lines, and humans will craft the parts that matter, charging double for it. This won’t happen for the same reason nobody hand-writes assembly anymore. No law banned it. The compiler simply got better than we were. Every published study still says our code is the safer of the two.
I don’t believe them anymore. Since March I have shipped nothing else but LLM-written code, and the quality is higher than a year ago. Our code won’t be illegal at first—just something no reviewer approves. In mission-critical systems first, then everywhere. “Made by a human” will stop being a price premium and will become a disclosure.
None of this is new. Steven Pinker in The Language Instinct (1994) predicted this: “It will be the stock analysts and petrochemical engineers and parole board members who are in danger of being replaced by machines. The gardeners, receptionists, and cooks are secure in their jobs for decades to come.” He was writing about the future. Thirty-two years later it is career advice.
In May 2026 Jensen Huang a graduating class at Carnegie Mellon: “Electricians, plumbers, iron workers, technicians, builders—this is your time.” He meant it kindly. He was talking to people who had just finished four years of university. We will retire, or we will move to physical work.
John Keynes named it in Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1930): “technological unemployment,” he called it, “unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.” Yuval Harari named the people in 2017: a useless class that “will not merely be unemployed—it will be unemployable.”
A child born today will be obsolete before he finishes school.
Nick Bostrom declared a world of “deep redundancy” in Deep Utopia (2024): there is nothing you could do that anyone would need. He proposed “artificial purpose”—challenges designed for us by the intelligence that replaced us. Keynes already knew how that ends: the people who had money and no duties, he wrote, “failed disastrously.”
This already happened once, to people with less protection than us. From 1999, middle-aged Americans without a degree started dying faster than their parents’ generation—the first such reversal in a century. Drugs, alcohol, suicide. 151,845 of them in 2017 alone. The suicide rate was the highest since 1938. Deaths from alcohol were the highest since the First World War. Anne Case and Angus Deaton found the cause was not poverty. It was the sense that “their ability to contribute to society has been terribly thwarted.” We read about it, called it their problem, and went back to work. Now the same thing is coming up the ladder, for the people who have the degrees.
Hannah Arendt saw the shape of this in 1958, before programming became a profession. “What we are confronted with,” she wrote, “is the prospect of a society of laborers without labor, that is, without the only activity left to them. Surely, nothing could be worse.” And she saw no way out: no class left, “no aristocracy of either a political or spiritual nature from which a restoration of the other capacities of man could start anew.” The next sentence of her prologue is the one I keep returning to: “To these preoccupations and perplexities, this book does not offer an answer.”
Neither does this one.
