“It seems that you’ve been living two lives. One life, you’re Thomas A. Anderson, program writer for a respectable software company. The other life is lived in computers, where you go by the hacker alias Neo.” – The Matrix
Little known fact: Columbus, Ohio doesn’t have a professional football team because then Cleveland and Cincinnati would want pro teams, too. All memes this post “as found”.
I’ve had several A.I. posts recently, far more than usual. I’ll probably stop for a while, until some new advance strikes my fancy. The main reason that the posting frequency has increased is because A.I. is on that exponential curve. The first computers used ran on a dot matrix printer for a display. Yup. Every screenshot was a printing event. We got to use it in the math office (they let the nerds play there, but since I was a nerd and a jock, they let me in as long as I promised to pretend I needed glasses). It was a single computer that we used a phone line and a (300 baud?) modem to connect. The printer paper was the screen – it printed a screenshot every time you did an input.
You can play the game we played . . . here (LINK)
Fast forward to graduate school, and I was writing programs to do matrix manipulations that were required for numerical simulations for finite element analysis – don’t worry about what that is, it’s like being a weatherman, but if a weatherman is only right 90% of the time, he still gets to keep his job. I was writing software that could do what it would take a human being months to do with a paper, pencil, and a calculator, but produce those answers in an hour or so.
One thing I learned in grad school – ravioli shame.
During my lifetime, computers have gone from a curiosity to a stunning commonness. Within 20 feet of me, I probably have more computing power than was available in the entire United States up until the 1970s. My laptop has two terabytes worth of storage. Under the roof there at Stately Wilder Manor, we probably have 30 terabytes in nooks, crannies, and hidden beneath couch cushions, and only 28 terabytes are devoted to pictures of PEZ®.
On top of that, programming is a unique skill set. I remember reading that the top programmers were ten times more productive than the worst ones, and three times more productive than the average programmer. Checking on this, the data apparently goes back to a study in the 1960s, so I’m not sure what the numbers are today since many of those programmers are dead and are probably only twice as productive as a typical Google® employee.
In a world of Treespirits, be a Chad.
Today I used the Microsoft® Bing™ version of ChatGPT© for the first time at work. I had an agenda to write. It was a simple agenda, one that I’d done hundreds of times at previous jobs, but it had been more than half a decade since I’d written one. I asked the Bing A.I. to write up the outline for an agenda for this very specific type of meeting.
Bing© did a fair job at a first pass – actually far better than a recent graduate from college would have done, except when it suggested replacing human faces with emojis for clearer communication and added the item under the section on roadblocks: “resistance is futile, you will all be assimilated.” Since I already had the structure, and didn’t have to spend time remembering and re-creating the basic elements. Because of that, it was trivial to add the missing bits and delete the bits that didn’t fit. Within about 20 minutes I had a workable agenda that was tailored to what I was planning on doing.
Computers are also uncanny at detecting biological sex.
If I had to go back and recreate that agenda from scratch, it probably would have taken me another 20 to 40 minutes to get the work done – not because the work was hard, but because creation (for me) involves changing mental gears, and that change in focus doesn’t lead to the work flowing.
My first time using actual A.I. at work resulted in a 2/3rd’s reduction in my work time with no reduction in quality. What it did was allow me to skip one mode of thought – the brainstorm, and move straight to production, correction, and editing. Those are the places where the work flows. Brainstorming (“uhhhh, what else, I know I’m missing something”) and creating that structure takes time.
In this case? I had 80% of the structure in about 20 seconds. The missing parts and the parts in the wrong order sorted themselves out as I did the edit.
Thankfully, I didn’t need it to draw fingers. Or anything more human than a fleshy-blob-thing.
A friend of mine who does networking described his use of ChatGPT® for a networking configuration plan. He had it create a basic network, and, like me, his level of expertise allowed him to quickly figure out the bits that were wrong and correct them. I mean, he tried to correct them, but every time he tried to fix them, the A.I. said, “I’m sorry Dave, I cannot let you do that.”
Now, imagine a programmer using ChatGPT™ to program – that programmer won’t be 3x as productive as the average, that programmer will probably be at least 9x as productive as the average, but my bet is that it will allow that programmer to be 20x as productive, if not more. Does that make the code pimps?
If ChatGPT© were frozen in the current state, it is already a tool that has the ability (in its current “free to use” state) to increase productivity of humans. Hence? We’ll need fewer programmers.
Remember when all those journalists told the coal miners kicked out of jobs because of Obama’s energy policy to “learn to code”? Remember when all those journalists kicked out of jobs because of the Internet were told “learn to code” on Twitter™, so Twitter® made telling them to “learn to code” a hatespeech?
Yeah, Pepperidge Farm™ remembers.
If you don’t know Warhammer, think a science fiction future involving interdimensional demons, but it’s okay because Trump is president.
Goldman-Sachs™ just released a report that indicates that, over the next 10 years, they expect that A.I. will add a stunning 7% in GDP to the world, or $7 trillion, and even Elon Musk doesn’t spend much more than $7 trillion a year on making islands in the Pacific Ocean in the shape of his face. How?
Goldman® also thinks that 7% of workers in developed economies are in jobs where half their tasks could be done by A.I. That’s 300 million workers. In the United States, 63% of the workforce could see less than half their workload done by A.I. in the next decade. I’m sure that companies will let those people just relax and play ping pong with all the time they’ve saved by using A.I.
Ha!
No. The bottom half of them will be fired, and the resulting labor pool will drive the wages down for those who remain. Check out Marshall Brain’s post from 2003ish: Robotic Nation | MarshallBrain.com.
Me, when I think about the coming jobpocalyse.
Marshall got it wrong. It’s not pouring concrete and replacing a dude making $25 an hour where the money is. Hell, that’s more complicated than most people think, and requires a lot of things a robot can’t do yet because they have to interact with an unbounded physical world. But replacing a programmer making $450,000 a year that interacts only with ideas, abstractions and fictional anime girls? Do a few dozen of those, and now you’re talking bank. And, it turns out it’s easier.
I’m thinking the “learn to code” advice wasn’t the best. Turns out that running a backhoe or being a plumber, or owning a small HVAC business might be a bit harder to automate than, say, being a FaceBorg™ programmer.
When The Boy went off to college, I told him to concentrate his career choice around a set of parameters that has proven (so far!) to be a pretty good set:
- Have a job that cannot be done over the Internet.
- Have a job that is based in merit and productivity.
- Have a job at a company that has to exist – it meets a basic human or societal need, like food, or beer, or cars, or toilet paper.
- Have a job at a company that has a huge revenue per employee, and preferably is Kardashian-free.
- Have a job that requires certifications that are very difficult for foreigners to get.
- Have a job that is required for the company to function.
- Have a job that can be converted to an independent business so maybe someday you don’t need a job if you don’t want one.
What’s the downside to A.I. that can properly draw fingers.
He followed the Wilder Success Path® to a tee, and now has a pretty good gig that meets all of the above. I gave this advice years ago on these pages. It fits, even in the world of A.I.
In the Industrial Revolution, Ned Ludd was a weaver who broke some mechanical looms because he was irritated they were doing the work he used to do as a craft on an industrial scale. Those folks were skeptical of technology, and became known (in 1812) as Luddites – the anti-technology folks of their time.
Ned lost. The race for A.I. supremacy is in full swing because the stakes are so high. The Chinese are working at it, full speed, and probably have access to much of the Google® code and Microsoft® code and OpenAI® code. I’m pretty sure no one wants Facebook™ code, because that’s so 2018.
Regardless, the investment, A.I. is going at full speed, and won’t be stopped anytime soon. Thankfully, there’s no downside. I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords!
OHIO??? HA!!! The Charleston (SC) Riverdogs used to have a “GBTO” night, as in “Go Back To Ohio”. Show proof of past or current OH residence, and you got $1 draft beer all night.
As for old computers, I still have nightmares about our 1980s Burroughs B Series that ran on 6.5″ floppys. Broke down 1-2X/week, maintenance was $300/month.
Wow – the maintenance was really the income stream.
Out of curiosity, what field met all of your criteria?
There were several. I asked ChatGPT, and it said:
Carpenter or construction worker – These jobs require physical presence and cannot be done remotely.
Sales representative – This job is based on merit and productivity, and requires face-to-face interactions with customers.
Farmer or agricultural worker – These jobs meet a basic human need for food and are essential to society.
Investment banker or high-level consultant – These jobs often have a high revenue per employee and require specialized skills and certifications that are difficult for foreigners to obtain.
Licensed healthcare professionals, such as doctors, nurses, and therapists – These jobs require specialized certifications and cannot be outsourced or done remotely.
IT support or network administrator – These jobs are required for the company’s technological infrastructure to function properly.
I disagree with several on the list. My idea was at/in a manufacturing environment working on support for the basic systems that are required . . . .
I almost wound up doing the last thing you mentioned. I’m a tech consultant, so I don’t think AI will be able to do my job anytime soon. At any rate, learning from my HVAC and construction friends just in case. Can always fall back to the wife’s family farm. No AI driven tractors, hay bail throwers or fence builders yet.
Well, on the tractors . . . there have been amazing advancements. Many of them measure yield per acre, and microfertilize to pick the best places to add more fertilizer to maximize yield. And they drive themselves by GPS.
Struggling to understand the last picture?
Did I fail the Turing test?
Help?
Spirits in the Material World….album cover for The Police
And the wrist computer self-destruct switch from Predator.
Actually Ghost in the Machine album cover…my mistake. Similar to the device in Predator.
“Ghost in the Machine” – it’s an album cover.
Hey, I played that Star Trek game, too! I typed it all in by hand sitting at an old IBM 1442 punch card machine, transcribing it from David Ahl’s original 101 BASIC Computer Games book.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_Computer_Games
As long as we are sitting around the campfire here telling tales about ancient computer lore, I have a stunning admission to make. When I write code for my personal projects, I still use Visual Basic 6 from 1998, a quarter century ago . Yes, it still runs just fine under Windows 10, believe it or not. To me, VB6 is the 1966 Mustang convertible of programming languages. Yeah, it’s ancient, but who cares, it’s got style and class and it’s beautiful to slam together something simple that just works as you blast down the just-get-it-done highway with the wind in your hair. Also, it was one of the last widespread declarative computer languages in use before object-oriented programming, starting with VB.NET, reared its ugly, ugly head. OOP is the CRT (Critical Race Theory, not Cathode Ray Tube) of the programming world, change my mind.
ChatGPT writes fairly good VB6 code.
This to me is very impressive. Is there NOTHING AI can’t do fairly well?
It’s only gonna get better. Exponentially. Be afraid, be very afraid.
https://youtu.be/kyOEwiQhzMI
OOP is the CRT […] of the programming world, change my mind.
Sometimes you want more than one copy of a subroutine, each holding different internal data. I think earrings look nice on ears, don’t you? Like OOP, body piercing is a technique to use with taste, not a lifestyle.
“…more than one copy of a subroutine, each holding different internal data.”
Yeah, I would do that in Visual Basic 6 by writing a single Private subroutine, declaring it ByVal, putting the different data sets in arrays, and then call each subroutine instance I need with the correct data array index. If the program needs to mod the starting data set for future use, I would make the data set array Public to retain the intermediate changes.
I get totally get that you can do this in OOP. But somehow (at least to me) OOP is not some spice you throw in only when you see it could be convenient. To me, OOP is a straightjacket that enforces its rigid, complicated paradigm no matter how trivial the problem, often hiding just what is really going on via its convoluted and obscure nature. In OOP defining the model and encapsulating the data to support classes and objects and members and instances and inheritance and polymorphism and all that becomes the point of the program instead of focusing on just solving your problem in a logical, flow-chart manner.
I am perhaps oversimplifying and may be dead wrong because I certainly am not an OOP pro, but IMHO (1) procedural languages like VB6 are perfect for lone wolves attacking relatively small quick-and-dirty code efforts like the ones I do and (2) OOP was intended to facilitate massive teams of coders on gigantic projects where no one person gets to see the whole picture. Which is the thrust of Dijkstra apocryphal quote that “Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California.”
IMHO, a somewhat longer critique of OOP from a decade ago is still true and relevant today.
http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/object-oriented-programming-is-an-expensive-disaster-which-must-end
But what do I know – certainly nothing about “modern” team coding. I’m just some guy who upon needing some code fires up VB6, types in “Option Explicit” as my first line, and I’m off to the races…
LOL, VB6 is at #15 and rising over on TIOBE.
https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/
That’s up from #20 only three years ago. Not bad at all for a quarter-century-old programming language. Maybe there’s hope for the procedural / functional programming paradigm over OOP yet.
https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2020/07/07/tiobe-july-2020-vb.aspx
Yeah, I would do that in Visual Basic 6 by writing a single Private subroutine, declaring it ByVal, putting the different data sets in arrays, and then call each subroutine instance I need with the correct data array index. If the program needs to mod the starting data set for future use, I would make the data set array Public to retain the intermediate changes.
“you can write FORTRAN in any language”
But somehow (at least to me) OOP is not some spice you throw in only when you see it could be convenient. To me, OOP is a straightjacket that enforces its rigid, complicated paradigm no matter how trivial the problem, often hiding just what is really going on via its convoluted and obscure nature.
Nothing about the compilers require or enforce that approach; that’s a problem with the human leadership of your project.
I agree with you. Pretty much any functional/procedural programming language including VB6 is based on and can be reduced conceptually to the granddaddy of them all, FORTRAN. You choose a particular F/P language to obtain modernization aspects that classic FORTRAN lacks. For me, VB6 has the beloved and non-trivial advantage of having very-easy-to-use GUI gadgets for use in every Windows environment from Windows 3.1 to Windows 11. Before I retired, at work I wrote Python programs using the Thonny add-on for (way inferior to VB6) Windows GUI support. I agree that the Python compiler has flexibility to support either OOP or F/P programming at the whim and needs of the programmer.
But I still maintain that OOP is needlessly and even overwhelmingly complex. I am not alone in saying this. It only took three minutes or so to find this example via Google, from Sharvit’s 2022 book Data-Oriented Programming: Reduce Software Complexity. He is specifically promoting “DOP” as a necessary alternative to OOP. He starts off with Nancy writing the requirements for a pretty simple library project that she says her team of three will need a month to do with OOP:
Two kinds of users: library members and librarians
Users log in to the system via email and password.
Members can borrow books
Members and librarians can search books by title or by author
Librarians can block and unblock members (e.g. when they are late in returning a book)
Librarians can list the books currently lent by a member
There could be several copies of a book
A book copy belongs to a physical library.
Sharvit proceeds to show how to organize a typical OOP approach to this problem.
https://livebook.manning.com/book/data-oriented-programming/chapter-1/v-14/154
Note that he stops for a moment in Section 1.3 to give the “tips” that “OOP has a tendency to create complex systems” and “Complex in the context of this book means: hard to understand”. I couldn’t agree more. The eight listed programming requirements get totally lost in the presented OOP layout if you ask me. Sharvit intends to go on and show the superiority of DOP to OOP in the remainder of the book; good for him. As for me, I think I could do a skeleton DUI demo solo in VB6 that meets those eight requirements in just a couple of days. Arrays may be slow and memory hogs, but they grind exceedingly fine in a very straightforward and easy manner. Too bad Python doesn’t have built-in support for them.
But to loop this back around to John’s original topic today, it really doesn’t matter how much we sit around discussing what’s been done with BASIC or VB6 or FORTRAN or Python or OOP. AIs are gonna pour ALL of it, along with every single thing humans have ever written and drawn and said and filmed and painted and sang, into a gigantic zetabyte hopper. They will come up with a synthesis that we will not understand to accomplish a goal we will not be aware of for a master we will not even know.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1362153807879303171
Sharvit proceeds to show how to organize a typical OOP approach to this problem.
Oh good grief. Design the SQL schema, code some forms with SQL under the ENTER button. MS Access may have enough form-building power to do it itself. In the 90’s, a $30K/month phone bill for an ISP in Boston that printed out 2″ thick shipped on a cd in the form of a MS Access application. Since I agree with all your criticisms, perhaps we’re merely disagreeing if the “OOP” label should designate the ‘convenient spice’ or ‘Sharvit’ approaches.
“But to loop this back around to John’s original topic…”
See what I did there? 🙂
“OOP considered harmful”
https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/musk-wozniak-call-pause-developing-more-powerful-ai-gpt-4
Timing is everything 🙂
That’s old school. I like it.
Your ‘Changing the face of coding’ meme is not satire by any means today. I recognized every one of those characters from my own House o’ Horrors employer.
Of all perverse ironies, the only position that AI could reliably replace on that chart is Chad’s – the one that actually produces something useful. As politics stand, a company that deals in goobermint contracts will always need grumpy PMSing secretaries and other useless, incompetent diversity hires to check the necessary quota boxes. Unless an AI ‘bot can be fashioned that convincingly identifies as a handicapped lesbian of color who shows up two hours late every morning, you will never replace La’Queesha Bojeebus-Jones, DEI Coordinator extraordinaire.
Tell ya what else AI is going to usher in – a pandemic of depression with existential crises. When a third or more of the white collar workforce discovers that they are easily replaced by a ‘bot that outperforms them tenfold, and does it cheerfully 24/7, expect a whole lot of formerly productive types questioning their purpose in life.
“formerly productive” in what way? They produced something, but if it was just TPS reports, better to have no one do it.
There are a lot of corporate jobs that come down to running interference between two parties. There are a lot of corporate jobs that come down to sorting. There are a lot of corporate jobs the are a rote response to a limited set of demands. There are some that amount to ‘filtering’ which does take judgement, experience, and correct application of a rule set. There are very few corporate jobs that require creativity or a great deal of flexibility of mind.
Even in the arts, truly creative people are rare. Most art is application of a style or ruleset, to extend or build off what exists. Animated movies are just drawn versions of movies with biological actors. The stories fit within a dozen formulas that are the basis of human interaction and life and could all be considered retelling or remixes with varying combinations of tropes.
Star Wars (the only, and without a sub-title) is a ‘hidden prince’ story (luke) with a ‘heroic quest’ to ‘save the princess’. Add a bit of “road movie” with a bit of “buddy story” and you have one of the most successful movies of all time. About the only unique thing was the amount of dirt and grit in the SF worldbuilding, and that they ride in space ships instead of horse drawn wagons.
Harry Potter – hidden prince- poor little abused boy finds out he’s special after all. How many stories does THAT describe?
Most of everything is an extension or remix of existing, and an AI should be able to do that.
What it seems to lack for now is that vast human lived experience of the world that unconsciously says “this shape is wrong” or “this never happens that way”. It doesn’t quite know all the rules, and it doesn’t know when or how to break them, especially when breaking them is what makes the thing work, or become special. It hasn’t learned how to IGNORE things.
If it does, it will be more effective than ever.
nick
Yes, it will be a huge dislocation of many folks that make great money.
We don’t have Artificial Intelligence.
We have Artificial Stupidity.
YUUUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGEEEE difference.
Note that before computers, no one ever got a home power bill for $38,000,000.
And no driverless car ever ran anyone over all by itself.
It took computers to do that.
Algorithms can’t even get a product search right on Amazon, and the feces-covered self-serve kiosks at McDonald’s can’t get an order right any better than the 80-IQ lackwits behind the counter can.
That’s the actual future: massive screw-ups at the speed of light, billions of times a second.
Kafka, times the population of China, times the calendar.
Occasionally, with life-threatening mistakes.
You want computers filling your medication prescriptions?
Running air traffic control?
Diagnosing your disease?
What could possibly go wrong there?
Hell, trains only have three choices: forward, backwards, and stop, and we can’t even run transit systems.
Sure, you can get rid of ticket-takers, and replace them with card readers. That’s the low-IQ low-hanging fruit.
And then end up hiring more card reader manufacturers, maintenance, and repair workers than you ever had ticket-takers.
And they can’t do most of that from tech support in Bangladesh.
Well-played.
Self-service peaked with elevators.
Everything else has just transferred work to the brighter people, and left the lumpenproletariat to breed and collect government checks.
So, how does that work after the economy tanks, and fiatbux and EBT cards can’t buy them off any more?
Ludd isn’t your problem then.
Robbespierre is.
There’s your next post. 😉
The way this is rolling out, the biggest and best uses for A.I. are closest to abstract ideas. I think it will generally move out from there. Driving a car, for instance, is hard.
Oh, it’s going to be interesting, since all of this crap is hitting us all at once.
it is sidney’s thought together with st. john’s quote that caused my eyes to widen
Yup, mine too. That’s why I left it as the closer.
Self-service peaked with elevators.
— and really only if you know the secret button presses to skip floors, or if you have an override key, because otherwise, it will still stupidly stop at every floor at lunch time, even though it’s full and no one IN the elevator asked for any floor but Ground; or stop to pick up riders even if you have two EMTs and a gurney headed to the medical emergency on floor 12…
— gas pumps might be the peak with just a few limited choices, but a human still has to manipulate the nozzle, and fill port on the vehicle. And a wheelchair using driver theoretically can call on the attendant to pump gas.
— ATMs limit your actions to “get money” “put money in” “move money” or “see if there is any money” and they still have tellers as backup because anything more complex than that, or if you need to exceed the limits imposed, and you are dealing with a human…
Self service works for a very limited subset of actions, and even then fails for a significant portion of users. Still, it is “good enough” for enough people and enough of the time that it continues to be deployed.
Now if AI evolves into an ‘agent’ that acts to ‘smooth your way’ thru daily life, essentially unlocking and opening the metaphorical doors as you need to go thru them, ensuring that what you need is ready when you need it, and that the doors are re-locked when you pass thru, like a good personal assistant can do, then THAT would be helpful. Or terrifying if it was applied AGAINST you…
n
It’s scary when it makes mistakes, and even scarier when it doesn’t.
Hi John
Not sure I followed all the nuances, but, nonetheless, I’ve got something to say.
My parents red-pilled me before I turned 10, back in the 1950’s. I had a reasonably successful life and career, and will turn 74 in a couple of months. At this point, I’m red pilled and Cassandra’d. I see the same things that you do, but no one will listen.
I’m reverting to the role of observer; working to control those areas of my life that I can have control over, and just watching the rest of the world dive head-first into that cesspool of socialism or communism. I don’t know if it’s an E-ticket ride, but it sure is expensive, and depressing.
My life paradigm is fine because I’ve learned to not believe anything that I can’t confirm, and that anything bad that happens in the general environment is done deliberately. No cognitive dissonance to speak of. Sadly, I can’t control or influence any of it, but I’m clear eyed.
I expect your next Civil War post to be much more negative due to the War Of The Trans on the Gen Pop. Again, nothing I can do.
My response is Kentucky Bourbon to salve the burning itch of the contagion of society in general. More itch, more bourbon.
I’m with you brother RayK. I do have a question for all the programming types that have posted… when there’s no more electricity, nowhere to plug in any of that stuff, what happens then? I ask because we’re kind of heading in a direction that may make that a possibility, not just because I’m a smart ass. If it does go that way; I may loan you an axe. You know, so you can keep warm and cook and stuff.
Original Grandpa
Why would there be no more electricity when the fossil fuels are still in the ground? The only thing endangering electricity are liberals attempting to implement Jonestown, and law-and-order conservatives obeying the liberals’ laws. If the electricity goes off, those people starve and lose the ability to impose policy. Then the true conservatives leave their farms and turn the oil wells back on.
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
You had me there for a minute.
“Turn the oil wells back on”.
That’s a good one.
Turn that switch all day long, when there’s no juice coming down the power lines, then get back to us.
This is the flip side of Evita Castro-Guevara thinking government can’t be out of money, because they can just write a check.
Hmmm, where did I put my bottle?
Automation that makes routine work trivial prevents the training that makes non-routine work possible. When the exceptional circumstances come along (like an innovative banking model), those who are supposed to recognize and mitigate danger (like bank regulators) are frozen like deer in the headlights. “Am I supposed to do something now?”
Especially when the banks have captured the regulators.
Let me see if I understand the main economic claim of this post: labor-saving devices like the electric drip coffeemaker, the washing machine, the automobile, agriculture, and sewers improve our lives by reducing the amount of human labor needed to produce a given amount of lifestyle. Every such device has increased total human lifestyle, increasing the most for the poorest. The trend was headed for the end of poverty around 1977, until the War on Poverty started: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/the-failure-of-americas-war-on-poverty-in-one-chart/
However, the labor-saving device called AI produces the opposite result, and makes most of us poorer. All the laid-off workers replaced by machinery are going to sit around and do nothing, forever, and then starve, just like the people who used to wash clothes by hand and carry jars of poop did.
Close.
The people who used to carry jars of poop still do it.
We call them “journalists” now.
And before anyone pipes in, the ones who spread it around are called “politicians”.
Excellent, excellent comment! At the end of the rainbow, there has been a continual improvement in life, just as you note, creative destruction, and all that. However, there has been significant economic disruption at each leap upward, hence Ludd and the Great Depression.
This has the possibility to replace humans at the things humans are best at. Utterly different ballgame.
I bet computers are just terrible at an axe catching contest.
Dave unplugged HAL 9000.
The minute it broke one of Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics.
Game Over. QED.
And self-defense is always justified.
They are . . . until they’re not. But I do agree that meatspace is much harder for them than abstract ideas. Unfortunately, large chunks of reality are run by abstract ideas in our society (programs, money, missile trajectories, etc.).
Well I never thought I’d see the use of matrix algebra and finite element analysis being used casually in an article…. but glad to see you “went there” and are pushing the walls back even just a little to make the world safer and more inclusive. I still do FEA as part of my job by choice because I am still amazed at what it can do in terms of problem solving. Sadly though, there are fewer and fewer of my coworkers who even know what it is, as most are too busy fretting over what font and color combination to put in their next Powerpoint presentation.
Last batch I was a part of were some thermal diffusion issues in combining two flows so they stayed below dangerous temperatures. It’s amazing how much intuition played in getting a good answer.