| I guess all vaguely bait-level articles will be about AI now. Well, so much questionable here. First of all abstraction. Everything is an abstraction to programmers. It’s not, please. The author even was kind enough to contrast it with an old school bona fide abstraction. Garbage collection eliminates memory unsafety. You just don’t have to worry about it. That’s a real abstraction. It takes power away and streamlines the whole experience since you don’t have to worry about certain variables any more, they are just gone. What does AI do? It’s leverage. It might help you do things whatever factor of times faster that you insist. Completely unevenly. There is not one thing it reliably abstracts away. Please use precise words. You’re supposed to be technologists/technicians. Then there’s the old looking to the past in order to lecture about what is hyped as completely unprecedented space-age technology. Okay to be honest this isn’t inconsistent if you merely think that AI is a great technology but not a revolution, not even a “silver bullet”. But anyway I see no reason to slavishly look to the past. The past is in fact tiny. WWII ended one person’s lifetime ago. How much oil was in the Earth 150 years ago? How much now? How reliably could you say that we could just expand economically forever 80 years ago? With climate change and whatnot, how is that looking right now? Why not be a little cynical and pragmatic and consider that everything might not play out exactly like they did in a person’s lifetime kind of timespan. The worst could happen. What’s a billionaire with both a robot workforce and a robot army? That’s you getting discarded like the useful idiot that you are, or were. Just someone who dutifully built the whole world up for a little wage so that it could all be taken away. Maybe you think economists are smart because they have quips against “finite piece of pie” so-called fallacies. Maybe you think that the best programmers are the ones who hustle along to the next paradigm, well those are after all the real go-getters, the ones who just get on with business. I think those are tunnel-visioned specialist fools. Dig yourself into your specialist niche, aspire to be the hacker among hackers. Revel in embodying the values that only other members of your professional/hobbyist group respect. Meanwhile ignore the sharks of the world circling around you and get taken advantage of without any recourse or even notification. |