My plumber never tried to build God
Published on 2025-06-23
Before we get into this article I have to tell you a story, and the story goes something like this:
A year or two ago I was living in this apartment that had all kinds of issues—the kinds of issues I couldn't fix myself. I loathed having these issues because when my landlord sent anybody, he always sent these really strange characters.
One time, my dishwasher stopped working. I'm not a plumber so I begged and I pleaded until one day, I woke up to a text message saying a guy would be on his way over. When I opened the door, it wasn't entirely clear what his credentials were but he had a toolbox and said he's a plumber so I let him in, and he got to work. I left home and when I got back in the evening he was still working on the dishwasher. As the sun set he was still working on the dishwasher. When I finally crawled into bed, I could still hear him working on the dishwasher. At this point I was getting a little worried—I did really need that dishwasher, but he seemed to be handling it fine. My walls were well-insulated and I wouldn't need to listen to him all night, so I let him be.
When I woke up the next morning I crawled out of bed, put on my bathrobe, and walked into the kitchen. The site was now clean, except that my dishwasher had been replaced by a sleek, chrome box that fit perfectly where my dishwasher used to be. It was totally sealed except for a small square opening at the top. The plumber was sitting on my couch with a bottle of my wine already open, pouring himself a glass with one set out for me on the coffee table. I asked him what happened to my dishwasher and he told me, "That thing? Your dishwasher was obsolete. I've given you something much better."
As I sat down he started speaking to me in a language I didn't understand. Matrix transformations, pre-trained aquatic flow networks, liquid modality… His lecture seemed to go on and on until eventually I asked, "can it wash my dishes?"
To which he replied, "Let me show you."
We walked over to the kitchen, he handed me a glass of water and said "Clear your mind of any distraction. Take a few deep breaths, and concentrate on the task at hand. Visualize the process of dish washing, of lifting the dish, of scrubbing off the dirt and grime with a towel, of rinsing it… and once you feel you've fully isolated this mental representation, hold it at the forefront of your attention as you gradually pour your glass into the opening."
And so I did, straining to focus on the image of a dishwasher washing their dishes, and I poured the cup into the opening. Suddenly, my apartment started to shake, and the lights flickered. I asked if there was supposed to be a brownout this morning, and he said "No, the machine is working."
After about three minutes, the quake subsided, and nothing happened. My dishes, stacked in the sink, remained unclean. I asked the plumber if something went wrong, and he told me "This is a skill you will have to cultivate. I will leave you with a discount code for my virtual course to help you learn. In the meantime, I must leave; I have another client lined up in an hour."
I stood there, confused, as he packed up his things and left. After I'd come to my senses, I was reminded that my dishes were still dirty from the other day, so I grabbed my dish cloth and cleaned them by hand.
You can probably tell this story never happened, because unlike computer programmers, plumbers are relatively normal people. I've been thinking a lot lately about why that is. What circumstances led to plumbers being normal while people like me are so weird? Both programmers and plumbers perform a skilled trade that involves building things—connecting things to manipulate flows. Most of the work we do involves fixing things that used to work but are now broken; rarely we'll build things from scratch. Yet, somewhere along the way, my colleagues decided that one day we might be able to build God, and my plumber didn't.
Part of the problem—the obvious part of the problem, is that I personally, or for that matter most "regular" programmers, did not decide for themselves that they could build God. Artificial Intelligence has always been a buzzword to make real foundational research in logic and statistics more friendly to its benefactors. Somewhere along the way, a subset of those people reckoned "I'm pretty smart; so I bet I could make something even smarter than myself." And then they got really afraid. So afraid that they started doing religion with it. This idea—that one day, somehow, if we kept doing the stuff we're already doing, we could build a "superintelligence" (or for the purpose of this blog post, what I'll be calling God)—seemed extremely lucrative to some very wealthy people, because if they could build God, they figured they wouldn't need to pay their employees anymore.¹ They could just make God do the work for them. This, or these people, seem to be where the notion that programmers are building God comes from. You see this every year The Verge or Tech Crunch uncritically republishes an OpenAI press release where Sam Altman claims we're one year away from ChatGPT developing an immortal soul.
It doesn't surprise me so much to see regular people go around acting like ChatGPT is God, or that it's going to be. My partner and I rewatched Avengers: Age of Ultron recently and I'm reminded that the media has been priming people to accept computer God for decades. It does worry me, however, when I see programmers who really should know better vastly overestimate how good things like ChatGPT are at doing their job. Like, I'll grant that an LLM could be useful for something like refactoring if you're very comfortable doing code review,² but LLMs have no capacity to reason. That's intrinsically not what they're designed to do. And so, whoever is employed to clean up after them in the future will be liable to set things right. ChatGPT probably won't eliminate your job, but it will make your job a lot more miserable.
Ultimately I do think this comes down to a culture problem, and I think fixing that culture problem means we're going to need to make an active effort to not portray our job as some sort of privileged, priestly class of labour. I firmly believe most people could have achieved some level of technical competency with computers if the last two decades of advancements in HCI weren't dedicated to disempowering users. I can imagine a world in which a prideful person tries to fix their computer themself before calling in the IT person for help, as they would if their sink started to leak. But it's hard to do that when the whole media complex has been working tirelessly to convince you that computers are magickal objects that demand your worship, rather than tools you can easily learn to repair.
So if there's a thesis to this post it's this: we need to make computer programming more like plumbing, because my plumber never tried to build God.
Footnotes
¹ You can see this in the obsession with "agentic AI." The goal is to replace all labour with the computer.
² Just because you can doesn't mean you should, either. Every once in a while I'll see a major edit on Wikipedia that's summarized as something like "Restructure, improve flow" and the text is all clearly AI-generated. When you cut and paste a Wikipedia article into ChatGPT, or your code base, and say something like "make this better please, I have no hands, I will die if this isn't done immediately," it touches every last token. Every token is an opportunity for something to go wrong, and if something can go wrong, it will go wrong. Fixing that problem is a whole other competency from what we're used to.
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