The Foreshadowing
Where the Hammer and Anvil series is going
This series will take some time, largely because we are faced with some very non-trivial economic and career challenges. I don’t want to drag out the “so what?” indefinitely so I’ll summarize where we are at and where we are headed. As this is just an act of literary mercy, the points made in this post will lack deep development. Substance will follow later.
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So far we’ve covered:
The economic and career landscape is changing.
Whatever the substantive story about AI at present, the simple reality is it is—and will continue to be—a growing factor in those changes.
The easy view on AI is that it will provide valuable performance benefit to those employees using it.
The subtler view on AI is any such benefit experienced by an employee may be short lived; that very use case identifies the next likely target for an even better AI.
The impacts may be less about AI itself, and more about how large companies view it as a staff reduction tool.
Government is unlikely to do anything to protect employees, and even if it did, it would be unlikely to take such action in a timeframe that matters.
Ok, so much for the sounds of feet marching to the drum-beats of doom. We’ve only outlined the problem, not dictated humanity’s future as some unavoidable fate.
The thesis that will be explored is straightforward to articulate, but the details and the supporting arguments will take work. It will be a bit of a “tough love” process, but reality is what it has been shaping up as, not as we would have it be.
We’re going to have to “up our game” just to stay in the game at all. That applies to any dimension where AI is weaker, but those dimensions will be a moving target as AI improves.
Even if AI wasn’t a factor in the change we are experiencing, the economic position of the workforce has been eroding for a long time. We need to clearly understand that and tackle it directly as a problem in its own right.
Social media, traditional media, and the political landscape all provide a nightmare landscape of distraction. It is critical to reduce the impact of that so we have the bandwidth to tackle the first two points. The man behind the curtain would rather we not twig to the distraction dynamic, but we must manage it.
If we can pull all of that off then maybe we make a better, stronger human experience out of this. I believe there are past models we can look to for ideas. That will be explored in later articles.
Finally, I have my own “up my game” journey that will result in other entire series of articles. For all my data engineering and observability buds, I haven’t forgotten you. I’m hoping that, to some degree, these articles embody elements explored in Hammer and Anvil.
There is your ten-thousand-foot view of where we are in this series now, and what is to come. Thank you for allocating your reading bandwidth and being part of the journey. Now, as every great journey deserves a proper soundtrack, enjoy!
The Experimentalist : The Foreshadowing © 2025 by Reid M. Pinchback is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0