Comment by fauigerzigerk
3 days ago
The defense analogy makes absolutely no sense. All the examples are of production shutdowns or reductions. Knowledge was lost because people retired and not replaced at all. None of it was lost to automation.
Automation is the exact opposite of tying knowledge to people. It's extracting knowledge from people and transferring it to a machine that can continue to produce the goods.
Yes, AI can lead to problems and some of these problems will be related to gaps in knowledge that was thought to be obsolete when it really wasn't. But that's a totally different problem on a totally different scale from what happened with defense production after the end of the cold war.
Nobody is shutting down or reducing software production. On the contrary, we're going to be making a lot more of it.
I'm also confused with that as well as the moral of the story as the whole. I get the sentiment but what is the lesson here, leave production capacity keep going as well as a "hiring pipeline" and just stock pile the output forever? Also, given article's take on the current situation of AI assisted coding, it seems to suggest that we need to apply that same logic to other industries too, so just don't let any industry/practice die and keep it alive? I would appreciate some inputs into some sort of actual solution or at least ideas of the solution but that is not present in the article.
Exactly. The US hasn't forgotten how to manufacture, in fact a ton of manufacturing happens in the US. What's happened is that it's been automated. And automation is one of the better ways to extract knowledge from a person who will one day switch jobs, retire or pass away.