Be Mickey. Don't Be The Brooms (Losing Jobs to AI)
Learn to code and become tech literate with Linux, Python, vim, and git. Don't be a victim of AI - be Mickey Mouse and animate the brooms to do your bidding! MyKoz.AI is an easy and gameified way to get started and become a pro in a few months.
Be the Sorcerer's Apprentice: Learn the LPvg Stack and Don't Lose Your Job to AI!
By Michael Levin
Wednesday, August 9, 2023
I’m going to work through a number of tech projects I’ve been meaning to do for awhile, from a very “from scratch” fashion. It will be both quite “old school” and without the cloud or other paid services. I’m going to do it all on my laptop, and I’m going to do it all in a way that is as open source and future-proof as possible.
The key thing to realize is that underlying nearly everything today is the same few technologies. It’s all Linux. Nobody wants to pay the proprietary license fees for Windows or Mac for cloud servers, so Linux is chosen for everything. After that, it’s Python. Python is the language of choice for nearly everything that is not a web browser. And then, it’s vim, the de facto standard text editor. And finally, it’s git, the de facto standard version control system.
Between these four things, you can do nearly anything. Take them up now and learn them for the rest of your life. They’ll become second nature, and you’ll become literate in a modern sense. The argument that you don’t need to learn to code because AI is akin to you not needing to learn to read or write because AI. Down that path lies helplessness and a lack of control over your own destiny.
Most of you are on Windows, and I would assume most of you are nervous about radical change. Too much too soon will rattle your brain. Chances are, you’re familiar with Windows and aren’t read to switch to a strange new operating system whose desktop is as much of a moving target insult to muscle memory as Windows and Macs. Linux desktops are going to move things around on you too.
The only chance for you to become more expert at tech over the years without the giant reset button being pressed on you every 2 to 5 years is to learn the command line. The command line is the only thing that doesn’t change. It’s scary, I know. But everything is scary at first until it’s not. And the command line is the only thing that will be the same 10 years from now. Even the AI’s who boot up in the cloud will be using the command line will tell you so.
Am I telling you that there is a safe harbor in tech? Yes, indeedy! And you’re not just learning a skill for a very particular career or field. No, you’re learning reading, writing and arithmetic for a new era. You’re learning what should today just be thought of as basic literacy. Yup, Linux, Python, vim and git, collectively the LPvg stack, are the new 3 R’s. They have achieved that status. They are the new basic literacy.
Sure, that could be debated. But while the JavaScript crowd is running from one framework to the next in order to be relegated to only “Web-work”, the LPvg crowd is doing everything else. Sure, there’s always some better tool for the job in edge cases, and that’ll keep Rust and Go and other languages alive. But to get 80% of the work done with 20% of the effort, LPvg is the way to go.
It seems so intimidating to start. If only there were some very concrete and perhaps even gameified way to get started. Well, there is. It’s called MyKoz.AI, and it’s made for Windows users who want to learn the LPvg stack. You can go from knowing nothing to being a pro in a few months. And in your very first sitting, we can have you editing a Linux service, getting you over the “true automation” hump that most Data Scientists never get over — sitting there pressing a button whenever they want anything to happen.
That image of Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice animating all the brooms to do his bidding (but doing it properly) is a real thing. When somebody says you’re going to lose your job to AI, what they mean is that you’re going to lose your job to somebody using AI. Be Mickey. Don’t be a broom.