Discussed at the time (of the article):
The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26238376 - Feb 2021 (218 comments)
The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)
31–40 of 240 posts
Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the "lump of labor" fallacy. If she turns up to work reliably, and stays on-task, there are no end of other things she could be doing that increase general welfare more than this.
Maybe, but I'm not sure everyone has the inclination to become a programmer. And the whole thread was about how computers should work for everyone, including this lady whose job could be automated. Which begs the question: do most people actually want general purpose computing? Or does the average human prefer "apps"?
Who said anything about her becoming a programmer?
An interior decorator, or a gardener, or a nurse aide, or a yoga instructor, or a nail technician: they all add more to human welfare than this task.
If she wants to become an architect, or a water system engineer, more power to her!
Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the "lump of labor" fallacy. If she turns up to work reliably, and stays on-task, there are no end of other things she could be doing that increase general welfare more than this.
Maybe, but I'm not sure everyone has the inclination to become a programmer. And the whole thread was about how computers should work for everyone, including this lady whose job could be automated. Which begs the question: do most people actually want general purpose computing? Or does the average human prefer "apps"?
In this scenario, she had plenty of other high-value work to perform if she never had to do this again.
Which is the other side of the coin of the ubiquity of this problem -- modern businesses are so optimized on the people side that roles are collapsed down to 1-2 people, and therefore those people inevitably catch "oh, and also do this" could-be-automated work.
Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)
#34I understand this is ACM, but I would say the decline has strictly been a failure of software . Specifically, corporate IT's failure to deliver general purpose development tools usable by anyone in a company to make computers do work for them (aka programming). There's still a ton of general value that could be delivered by general purpose processors/computers. But instead, most non-programmers live in a Kafkaesque r…
But surely she had the tools to do that in excel itself, no? This is something I see a lot in software, where people devalue and trivialize the skills and abilities needed to make software simply because they know something is possible to do in software and because, as a software worker, they most likely had a natural predilection towards the kind of thought processes that led them toward pursuing software work. I th…
You see this in manufacturing as well. You’d think robots would be everywhere but often, like way more than you’d imagine, it’s cheaper to hire a human to do it.
Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)
#35I understand this is ACM, but I would say the decline has strictly been a failure of software . Specifically, corporate IT's failure to deliver general purpose development tools usable by anyone in a company to make computers do work for them (aka programming). There's still a ton of general value that could be delivered by general purpose processors/computers. But instead, most non-programmers live in a Kafkaesque r…
This sounds like a perfect use-case for automation using recorded macros. The failure (or perhaps solutions exist) is lack of facilities in our desktop OSes.
Macros are generally locked down in enterprise network environments due to the risk of acting as a malware vector.
Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
But surely she had the tools to do that in excel itself, no? This is something I see a lot in software, where people devalue and trivialize the skills and abilities needed to make software simply because they know something is possible to do in software and because, as a software worker, they most likely had a natural predilection towards the kind of thought processes that led them toward pursuing software work. I th…
You see this in manufacturing as well. You’d think robots would be everywhere but often, like way more than you’d imagine, it’s cheaper to hire a human to do it.
The way fertility rates are going, not for much longer.
Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)
#37I understand this is ACM, but I would say the decline has strictly been a failure of software . Specifically, corporate IT's failure to deliver general purpose development tools usable by anyone in a company to make computers do work for them (aka programming). There's still a ton of general value that could be delivered by general purpose processors/computers. But instead, most non-programmers live in a Kafkaesque r…
Kind of a counterpoint: I've heard countless stories (albeit, in Japan) of people doing things like "manually" doing additions of numbers they already have in a spreadsheet instead of just asking Excel to do the addition in what, two clicks, because they "can't trust the computer to do it right" which sounds like a BS rationalization to justify that they wouldn't have much of a job if the computer was doing it.
IIRC, Excel uses floating point for calculations, so they're not wrong.
Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s basically a JOIN, the most fundamental data manipulation operator. If you can’t automate this, then you don’t “get” computers at all. I once had two guys arguing next to me about how it was impossible to produce a simple report about VM storage utilisation in under a month . I produced the report, printed it out, and shoved it in their hands just to shut them up while they were still busy arguing. A “month” of w…
> It's basically a JOIN The comment you're replying just explained why this is not "basically a JOIN." There are two unrelated systems (not SQL databases) which don't expose any APIs to the analyst.
It's still basically a join. If it's on a computer, it can be converted to text files, and then it can be JOINed, one way or another.
Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's many situations where manually dealing with 100+ records is a decent tradeoff. I feel people in our field overestimate the actual complexity of many dumb looking tasks. From your bank employee example, it looks like your solution would be to open the bank's internal tool to her excel instance, have it somewhat find the right records and inject the right value, while checking the listed codes. That looks like…
We were able to fix it up with some automation in a couple days. Critically, still running visually on her machine, and with internal resources for lifecycle support if the process changes.
> Critically, still running visually on her machine, and with internal resources for lifecycle support if the process changes.
That's such an elegant and perfect solution. She keeps track of what's happening, it all runs through her GUI so worse* case scenario she does it herself again, and she can get help if/when she needs it.
* actual worse case would be the script going berserk, but as she's not the one who wrote it, she should be shielded from the blame if that ever happens
Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
But surely she had the tools to do that in excel itself, no? This is something I see a lot in software, where people devalue and trivialize the skills and abilities needed to make software simply because they know something is possible to do in software and because, as a software worker, they most likely had a natural predilection towards the kind of thought processes that led them toward pursuing software work. I th…
You see this in manufacturing as well. You’d think robots would be everywhere but often, like way more than you’d imagine, it’s cheaper to hire a human to do it.
Yeah, it's easy to forget that humans themselves are pretty amazing technology. You can program them with relatively vague instructions using natural language, they come with built in general-intelligence so you can delegate things for them to figure it out and expect them to adapt their instructions according to their situation, and they come with amazingly precise and dextrous arms. They generally cost under $150k/unit/year for most manual applications and you pretty much know what you're getting up front vs hardware/software purchased off the shelf, not to mention the capital cost of acquiring one is pretty low because they already exist and just need to be hired.