| I've thought the same way you did, how people are resistant to change, but eventually it's better for everybody. I do believe that GPS made people worse drivers. It made it so people lost sense of direction and distance. It has removed all critical thinking on the road. Plenty of stories where people drive over stairs because the GPS told them so. From a driver's ability to navigate, I don't think you can do more now with GPS than you can before with a map. It surely has made it easier, but at a significant cost. Now, of course, there are plenty of benefits, such as reducing time when getting somewhere unknown (e.g. ambulances), planes not flying over hostile territory (mostly), ability to be able to tell someone where you are when there no landmarks around etc. But the reality is that overall, a mistake of a GPS is usually rather localized, and the cost of the mistake is rather low. Books are interesting, instead of memorizing details we now memorize where to find information, little bits that help us get to the solution of the problem we're solving. But books themselves haven't replaced memory, otherwise no-one would read them anymore ahead of time. When we search something on the internet we are thought to apply critical thinking. What are the sources? [0]. But GPS? Just go with it. And AI is more like GPS than it is like books. We are being taught take it at face value, and to abandon critical thinking for the sake of speed. Worse yet, because of the enormous financial investments of companies, there is an incentive to lie about how useable it is. I'm not even talking about context windows. I'm talking about the endless minutia of languages, frameworks, and changes related to specific versions that you only learn by doing. Just the same way a resident does not become a doctor until they finish residency. They have to have done the work, and applied critical thinking. Software Engineering does not have such legal requirements, but we all learn on the job. AI, and the companies pushing for it basically tell potential clients that this is no longer needed. Would you want a gallbladder surgery done by someone who just read a Wikipedia page about it? Now, a seasoned developer who writes a crystal clear prompt will probably pick up on bugs, and tell the AI that they want edge cases A, B and C considered. But how did they learn that those exist? Right. By hitting the issues. Something that happens a lot in Software Engineer, due to the massive amount of things out there and no fixed specs/docs/etcs, is that your approach changes when you're developing a solution for a problem. But the need for those changes only become apparent when you're writing and testing code. You literally cannot front-load that into your prompt. Yet, reading the news here, we see that our future is writing prompts for a much lower wage. This is orthogonal as to why I went into Software Engineering. Prompts rob me of the ability to express something in an extremely well defined language. Clarity of rules. A syntax where you can express something without ambiguity [1]. You don't know what you don't know, meaning you can't prompt for what you don't know. Hence why they brought back a whole bunch of people out of retirement to build new manpads. [0] Interestingly when I was growing up a book quote was ok, but Wikipedia was not, even though it came from a book. That now definitely has changed. [1] A wife sends her programmer husband to the grocery store for a loaf of bread...
On his way out she says "and if they have eggs, get a dozen". The programmer husband returns home with 12 loaves of bread.... |