Comment by Kon5ole
13 hours ago
>This is false. There absolutely are people that fall back on older tools when fancy tools fail. >They other week I finished putting holes in fence posts with a bit and brace as there was no fuel for the generator to run corded electric drills and the rechargable batteries were dead.
It depends on the task though. If you are in a similar scenario as with your fence posts and want to edit computer programs, you can't. (Not even with xkcd's magnetic needle and a steady hand). ;-)
As technology marches on it seems inevitable that we will get increasingly large and frequent knowledge gaps. Otherwise progress would stop - we need the giant shoulders to stand on.
How many people in the world can recreate a ASML lithography machine vs how many people are surviving by doing something that requires that machine to exist?
> If you are in a similar scenario as with your fence posts and want to edit computer programs, you can't.
Solar panels charging old thinkpads suddenly doesn't work, or are we reliant upon software that requires cloud services to function in your scenario?
> How many people in the world can recreate a ASML lithography machine ..
Some .. are you advocating the answer should be none, in your future?
>Solar panels charging old thinkpads suddenly doesn't work, or are we reliant upon software that requires cloud services to function in your scenario?
It's your scenario, you said you had no batteries and had to drill holes by hand, I'm saying that's fine for drilling holes but if you have no batteries (or solar panels, those could charge your power tools as well so they're not in the scenario!) you can't alter computer code by hand.
Leaving computers aside, we can take a piano player - can play a piano but he might not know how to build one. A doctor can interpret X-rays but he can't build an X-ray machine.
And so on. We are living in the reality where many, many people are using tools they don't understand how to make already, and have done so for 100+ years.
>Some .. are you advocating the answer should be none, in your future?
I'm not advocating anything, I'm just saying that this is the reality already, it's not new with AI.
Ideally we'd forever keep a chain of key people who know how to make everything from atoms, but realistically that's a chain that will break. It's happened before, medieval dark ages for example.