Preface
Imagine you have a discussion with someone and they manage to destroy the fundamentals of your belief system. You lose the beliefs you had based your whole life and character on. Why do you get so overwhelmed in such a scenario? Well, it's because it feels exactly like when someone betrays you. You can't trust yourself anymore. How did you mess up that bad? What if your other beliefs are wrong too?
In such a scenario, the state you find yourself in is rather rational. When you question some of the fundamentals of a system, you're naturally questioning a lot of things at the same time. The other fundamentals must be questioned with this new mindset to find the hidden flaws.
Some industries, most especially the tech industry, have gone through an extensive overhaul due to the introduction of generative AI. Workflows are changing drastically. Being a software engineer is barely like what it used to be even one year ago. This would naturally cause a lot of headaches, most of which require philosophy to handle. Philosophy is the way of thinking about the world; it's not something you can choose to equip yourself with. There are a lot of things about AI and this new workflow that we don't know. The tool itself is indeterministic, and everyone's experimenting with it. We need years, maybe even decades, to understand how AI is truly useful. But we can't wait that many years and risk ruining our future and brands with false expectations. We HAVE to guess.
This is what this book is trying to achieve. You may think of this book as a very long article. It's like a collection of all the different thoughts and beliefs, gathered in one place with a consistent story to connect all of them together. I initially started writing this book because I was feeling very overwhelmed and burnt out. I needed to bring my thoughts to the surface and understand where I stand. I had enough consistent thoughts to put them in a book, and this book was the consistency test. I'm glad I passed. This is my first book, and I hope you like it as much as I did.
But if you don't, I would gladly listen to your opinions! I would love to know what you think of this book, what your experiences were, and where you think I'm falling short. I am just as keen as everyone else to figure this new era out, even though I just wrote a whole book about it. Feel free to contact me via my email:
Other formats
The website version, genai-book.kyrovert.com, is one way to read the book, but you can also download and read the book in two other formats:
- PDF: click here
- Markdown: click here
Who is this book for?
Even though the title of the book sounds like it's only for programmers, it really isn't. I tried my best not to use technical terms and to keep the book purely logical. This helps people in other fields relate it to their own expertise. It also helps me write more clearly and logically, without throwing in examples here and there and thinking I've made a proper argument.
Programming is perhaps the most mechanical field you can find. This means that you can easily find the equivalent of the concepts I give you in your own fields to some degree. The reason why I didn't make this book truly generic and profession-agnostic is that it would've lost its touch. I'm a programmer, and I know many things about my profession. It's really hard to make the whole book generic and not miss some points, especially since some aspects and issues are truly limited to fields like programming and mathematics.
But I did try my best to avoid any technical detail in it. There are only a few technical words, and I have explained them in Terminology. Those are all you need to know to be able to read the book.
Disclaimer
I'm no AI expert. I'm no computer scientist. And I definitely have no degree in philosophy. I'm just a human being who thinks a lot, and I have enough coherent thoughts to put them on paper. If you catch me claiming something that looks professional, it's simply because I reasoned through what I believe anyone should be able to reason through. I wouldn't put my foot in a shoe that doesn't fit. So feel free to judge me as much as you want.
Not AI generated
All of the em dashes and en dashes are handcrafted. This book has only been edited by AI. None of it is generated from scratch, simply because that wasn't possible at the time and I had to find out what I'm thinking by typing it. I had to connect my different thoughts carefully so I wouldn't get lost again. This book itself proves to you why I couldn't trust AI to write this article for me.