[satisfice]

This argument holds no water at all. You've modeled the situation incorrectly.

The shape of labor is not the same, today, as it was 50 years ago, and the project of technology is not to automate things we were doing 50 years ago. Let's see. 50 years ago my family had a black and white television and a rotary phone. Has telecommunications and media changed at all in the last 50 years which might have created not just new work but dozens and dozens of new industries? Why, yes. Yes that has happened.

You must be pretty sad that the Unabomber is dead, because, like him, you don't see the value of new technology. Okay, that's fine. But it seems like your arugment falls apart for anyone who does appreciate the value of DNA testing, MRI scans (which identified my wife's life threatening condition), the Davinci robotic surgery system (which saved my wife's life), etc.

We are having this conversation on Hacker News. If you read Hacker News, then you are already undermining your back-to-nature street cred, pal.

Anyway, I've never been on a bullshit project. And the reason we hire engineers is because important work needs to be done. For instance, I'm working on a system that brings medical care to impoverished people in the middle of nowhere. No bullshit there. Another client is an insurance software company. You don't think people need insurance? You don't want them to be able to buy it online because "50 years ago" it was perfectly acceptable to use a telephone to call an insurance broker? Another client creates test tools. You think testing software is bullshit?

You have a fluid rhetorical style that speaks on some cleverness. Imagine if you put that cleverness to work on something other than bullshiting about this topic!

[efields]

I appreciate the compliment at the end. I like to deploy it especially when I don’t know what I’m talking about and I don’t want the replies to take me too seriously, but I gotta work on that obv.

The bullshit is not in the fact that we use a web form to buy insurance instead of a rotary phone or telegram or passenger pigeon (RIP), it’s that such a construct exists as insurance. Humans should just be making food, clothing and shelter and spending the rest of the time dancing and making babies.

[satisfice]

Okay, this might sound sarcastic or something, but I'm perfectly serious: thank you for making your position clear. There's a lot to be said for living like the First Peoples of Earth, eschewing technology. If humans hadn't adopted city living and other trappings of civilization there would be no global warming and we would have a world population of a couple hundred million.

Of course, that chariot has already left the barn, along with the plow, roads, underfloor heating, glassware, steel, explosives, medicine, computers, networks, etc., etc.

Relative to life as a Serengetti hunter, most of modernity is bullshit. But none of us come from that point of reference. My point of reference tonight is that I'm writing code to automatically create all combinations of symptoms to help me brute force test a system that diagnoses illnesses. Relative to the fact that we want to release next week and we want it to work, this testing needs to be done and so this code needs to be written.