[solveit]

> This is unique to programming as a discipline - programmers have historically unprecedented power to turn fuzzy, implicit ideas into concrete reality that affects people at massive scale.

Politics? Economics? Writing?

I don't necessarily disagree on the dangers, but they're certainly not unique to programming. Some German guy wrote a few thousand pages of fairly dense and convoluted economics/philosophy and ninety years later an eight-digit number of Chinese people died as their nation Greatly Leaped Forward.

How? A cascade of people having "historically unprecedented power to turn fuzzy, implicit ideas into concrete reality that affects people at massive scale".

I don't think programming has fucked up anything near this scale yet. I'm sure it will eventually, but it hasn't yet.

[Sirened]

It's not that other paths are not powerful but rather that its relatively rare for someone to fuck things up catastrophically with said career paths because society doesn't quite enable philosophers in the same way as SWEs. There is so much money being thrown around, so much critical infrastructure is digitized, and we're increasingly trusting models to make critical decisions.

One dude in a cardboard box down by the river with PyTorch on his laptop can convince your local court to contract with him for a model that predicts recidivism, and then suddenly your county is rejecting bail for black people at an alarming rate because said guy trained his model wrong. Achieving a similar fuck up with a degree in philosophy or polisci would require a _lot_ more work (you'd have to get elected to office or create _more_ racisim!). Software and the power we entrust in it has made fuckups faster and easier than ever, and it's only going to get worse.

[JellyBeanThief]

> Politics? Economics? Writing?

A good shot, but I don't think good enough. All of those still involve humans changing each other's thoughts by communicating with each other.

A computer program replaces human thought. Depending on the application this may be good or bad, but the point is that once the program is in place, humans don't need to think or talk about it anymore.

I mean, they do, but they won't. After all, there's so much other stuff to think about, talk about, and then replace with software.

[solveit]

As opposed to laws and policies that control the lives of millions? It's not possible for human thought to work at the scale of modern society. Software is not special in that it replaces human thought. Something must 'automate' human decision-making, whether it be software or a civil servant looking at a spreadsheet going through a checklist.