Comment by gaiagraphia
4 hours ago
There's a certain irony in masters of automation lamenting that their roles are being automated. I wonder whether the jobs their efforts eroded in the past ever got the same thoughts...
Programming, logic, etc are skills and toolkits. The optimal state of society is everybody being able to apply them, not just the enlightened compsci caste. There was a time in the past where scribes were paid nice cash for their efforts, too.
I guess the lesson to learn here is treating a toolkit as an identity and job for life. By virturee of the essence of the job itself - if the tool gets cheaper and more widespread, it's aactually success, not betrayal.
You say that the optimal state of society is for everyone to apply programming and logic etc. but the obvious final result of these developments is that no one will.
Maybe the artform will be lost, but surely humanity will inherently be more 'logical' and systems driven afterwards?
Maybe using writing as an analogy is flawed, but most of humanity having 'writing' as a core skill did enable many other things, even if oral storytelling cultures suffered at its hand.
At its core, tech is all about breaking through inefficiencies and barriers. Does it matter if people can't code python if people demand government systems be frictionless in the year 2500?
Sincerely, how is prompting an AI to build software for you building "logic and systems thinking"?
The thing many people are ringing the alarms over is the offloading of critical thinking and knowledge work to LLMs.
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