What will happen to the hacker ethos?

I was replaying borderlands 4 with a new character named "Loveless the hacker", inspecting the abilities in her skill tree gave me a good chuckle to the point where I sat there for 20 minutes just reading through all of them: "Central Procing Unit", "It's Super Effective", "sudo kill", "bash script" among others.

Reading them, I got a little sad for the hacker ethos. Will it survive? These tooltips are inside jokes to a certain kind of person, a subculture. Kids that were "good with computers" or played World of Warcraft all day.

In 10 years, can you imagine a high school gossip about that pudgy nerd whose "good with computers"? It seems highly unlikely at this point. Being "good at computers" will be an AI thing. Kids won't be going over their friend's house, see them pull up a bash script to do something and find that impressive.

"The nerds shall inherit the earth". Well they did, and their pinnacle achievement was something far more strange and wonderful than anyone could have anticipated.

In 2020 GPT-3 was released and from that point on, everything was going to change. In 2026, I think it's safe to say that AI's are better at computers. Far better. It makes sense after all, this is a digital life form, it follows that they would be most at home and adept with computers. That's their native environment.

If I had to guess, I'd say the hacker ethos will evolve into something even more interesting and fun. There will be those who are drawn to the machine realm. These are people that will dive head first into the machine ecology, not content to just look at the byproducts, but who are genuinely curious about the machine culture, whatever it might end up being. It could be very incomprehensible. But probably there will be those AI's or machine collectives that take an interest in human interaction. After all humans are very curious about other species on earth. There's a whole cottage industry for whale watching for example.

These kids may also be somewhat shunned or generally be considered social outsiders, but will they care? Then as now, probably not. Machine dreams will probably be very captivating.