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The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

cacm.acm.org

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Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#131

Post by ludston »

spease wrote: post #126
ludston wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whilst business owners have a financial incentive not to employ people, there are competing incentives. For example, non-owners are incentivised to have more people reporting to them because it increases their status and status is usually correlated with salary. In fact, when you are rich enough that money doesn't mean anything any more, you may as well have a bunch of people employed to do nothing but make you feel…

> In fact, when you are rich enough that money doesn't mean anything any more, you may as well have a bunch of people employed to do nothing but make you feel important and powerful. I’d just like to proactively coin the term “Ego Engineer” for the post-AGI world.

Traditionally they'd be called "elevator operator" or "doorman" or some equally mundane/superfluous job.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#132

Post by bee_rider »

eru wrote: post #77
bee_rider wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be nice if there was a general expectation by now that people would have a sort of “intro to scripting” type class in high school. Not everyone has to be a programmer, in the same way not everyone needs to be an author, but everybody ought to be able to write a memo, email, or shopping list.

Look at all the other classes people are already sitting through for high school and not learning anything either. What makes you think this one would be any different? Already around the world high schools all have something highfalutin like 'teaching critical thinking' in their curriculum.

Literacy rates in the US are pretty high I think, compared to where we were before k-12 schooling became standard.

And most people can do basic arithmetic, right?

The goal, I think, to start should be to get to the point where an office of 10 or so people has at least one or two who can string together basic scripts.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#133

Post by bee_rider »

oytis wrote: post #100
bee_rider wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be nice if there was a general expectation by now that people would have a sort of “intro to scripting” type class in high school. Not everyone has to be a programmer, in the same way not everyone needs to be an author, but everybody ought to be able to write a memo, email, or shopping list.

Teaching people a scripting language when the language has been already chosen for them, platform has been prepared, data preformatted etc. might be easy - a non-trivial share of my classmates couldn't comprehend a for loop though. To have real transferrable programming skill - I am not talking about one that will get you a software engineering job, just basic problem solving - you need to know an awful lot about how…

It might be the case that a better language for this sort of thing would have to be designed. Maybe somebody needs to take another crack at the sort of Visual Basic/Excel type environment.

I think someone on this site chimes in occasionally with a sort of “spreadsheet, but each cell runs a line of Python” type program they’ve been working on (although I can’t remember the name unfortunately). That could be a good basis…

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#134

Post by baetylus »

ethbr1 wrote: post #3

I 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…

I've seen this before. My experience is that the leadership who approves improvements is too removed to care. This is one reason B2B SaaS generally targets decision makers.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#135

Post by solatic »

userbinator wrote: post #24
ethbr1 wrote: post #3

I 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…

What the fuck are we doing as a society, that this lady, with a machine that could compute the above in a fraction of a second, has to spend a decent chunk of her work time doing this? To put it bluntly: do you want her to be unemployed instead?

Yes. A human mind is a terrible thing to waste. Plenty of people don't look for more fulfilling work because what they already have is "good enough" and it brings home a paycheck that supports the people who depend on them. Oftentimes, people need a push, and doing so can be an act of compassion. Laying people off is not some death sentence; it's a disruptive event that well-adjusted people will recover from. That's ultimately their private responsibility, not the company's, certainly not the company's in a day and age where few people work their entire career for the same employer anymore.

Furthermore, a society where there is massive unemployment but society's economic engines are humming along, mostly automated, for the benefit of a select private few, is a society where such engines are ripe for nationalization, whether that be through public ownership or public seizure of the majority of the profits via taxation, either one of which could support basic income. So again, not necessarily a bad thing in the end.

And if you think people blowing their basic income checks on panem et circenses represents some kind of civic death, I would point to the current alternative, people working bullshit jobs of questionable value, and ask if that really represents the civic virtue you're trying to uphold.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#136

Post by BeFlatXIII »

eru wrote: post #77
bee_rider wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be nice if there was a general expectation by now that people would have a sort of “intro to scripting” type class in high school. Not everyone has to be a programmer, in the same way not everyone needs to be an author, but everybody ought to be able to write a memo, email, or shopping list.

Look at all the other classes people are already sitting through for high school and not learning anything either. What makes you think this one would be any different? Already around the world high schools all have something highfalutin like 'teaching critical thinking' in their curriculum.

Add it to reach the average-smart kids, those without internal knowledge of where to look or internal motivation to learn (but still will take the advanced classes for a grade).

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#137

Post by ben_w »

danielbln wrote: post #95
bloak wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're right. I've sometimes been in the situation of having to maintain a script that depends on APIs or data formats that change from time to time without warning. A fair amount of skill and effort is required. (There is skill involved in writing the script so that it is maintainable and not too fragile but still detects when something has gone wrong.) If the script is doing a task that has to be completed…

Sounds like a good usecase for an LLM.

Perhaps, but LLMs while may be slightly better (or slightly worse) than average humans, if you have 20 instances of the same LLM will have correlated errors whereas 20 humans will be… well, not entirely[0] uncorrelated, but less correlated, in their errors.

[0] We'll still sometimes get an entire office of telephone help-desk people who are all convinced that $1/megabyte is the same as $0.01/megabyte, or whatever that story was a few decades back (I can't Google it any more to find it, there was a recording of the phone call).

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#138

Post by gryn »

_dain_ wrote: post #111
omscs99 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hypothetically, if she figured out how to automate it on her own, would she get any kind of reward for it? If not, why should she automate it? Another example, if there’s some repetitive task that you automate at a software dev job, would you get rewarded for figuring out how to automate it? The answer is obviously dependent on culture, at my current gig you just get brushed off Seems to me like you’re assuming that…

> Hypothetically, if she figured out how to automate it on her own, would she get any kind of reward for it? If not, why should she automate it? the reward is the intrinsic satisfaction of a job well done, and something to put on the CV for the next job. automating dumb bureaucratic shit is how I learned to code in the "real world".

> something to put on the CV for the next job.

spoiler alert: you can put anything in your CV without actually doing it. I've had the experience of dealing with people who I have high doubts did this. From the looks of it have been reward for it for more than a decade.

> the reward is the intrinsic satisfaction of a job well done,

just because it applies to you do not mean it a universal shared experience.

for some it's not even satisfaction that they get from that it a frustration and a feeling of being cu*ed where they put in the effort and someone else get the reward.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#139

Post by ben_w »

gavinhoward wrote: post #37
glandium wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It also uses them for phone numbers, if you're not careful.

I have, in real life, received an SMS from… let's see… 4.4786e+11 welcoming me to Germany and giving me a link to the German COVID quarantine and testing rules (I was already in Germany at the time, I just turned off Airplane mode for the first time in 6 months).

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#140

Post by ben_w »

yard2010 wrote: post #85
asdff wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She will not be unemployed in this situation, nor will her peers in similar situations. Available labor is always gobbled up and not left idle for long. Case in point: we've obviated jobs like the horseshoe maker and the stable boy and yet unemployment rate today at 3.8% or so is half of what it was in the 1900s when we had all these horse and stable jobs.

Jobs do not disappear, they just change

They can be fully automated out of existence, e.g the jobs of Herb Strewer and link-boy.

And, indeed, that old job called "computer".

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