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by mkotowski 1772 days ago
> the only reasons we are still relevant today is for three reasons

Then how we automate creation of the standards? Don’t get me wrong, but now we aren’t punching holes in cards. In the future, people probably won’t be doing a lot of things, which are now typical menial tasks too hard or cheap to automate. As long as an AI with capabilities of reasoning and abstract thought comparable to a human isn’t here, there always will be a layer of tasks that is impossible to automate for one reason or another. Then it was card punching, now it is gluing APIs together.

Automation is mostly useful when you have a very narrowly defined process/standard with little variation over time. Unfortunately, this also requires for the one requesting the automation to know exactly what they want to get at the end of the process. How would one automate creation of a tool fitted to the particular way some business is operating? Video game development? Fixing badly documented code? Granted, many parts of those processes can be, and probably already are, automated away. But there are almost always elements that require a higher level understanding of the whole context these projects exist in.

I would equate it more to a hairdresser having switched from using scissors solely to being able to use a hair clipper. Their work was partially automated by a machine, but the process still is overseen by a human being.