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

This is not certain except for single threaded programs not accessing main memory, for which this claim is trivial and mostly academic. It is well-known that increase of frequency of CPU by a factor of k does not always result in equal factor k for increase of performance, mainly because of memory access speed not increasing in the same way.

"Appear faster" depends on instruction translation, exploitation of paralelism and memory access speed getting faster in some commensurate way, and nobody has yet built a machine doing those all those things at close to 30GHz to see how fast they are. It's possible that while very small CPU can possibly run at 30GHz, other bigger and more distant ingredients can't, e.g. main memory (heat and frequency causing too many errors to be practical). Already the present-day CPUs are too fast for the main memory they use. In intensive data processing, often CPU wastes most of the time waiting for memory. Making it wait faster won't help performance.

That isn't how the economy works. Bob, Carol, Alice and the boss are now collectively making $40,000+/year more than they did before. Where does this money go? To buy something they couldn't previously afford, made by Don at his new job somewhere else, which was created to meet the increase in demand caused by the increase in productivity.

The only way automation reduces employment is if it makes goods cost less and then people choose to work less because working less still allows them to buy everything they want. But in general people don't do that. Given the choice between having the same stuff they have now and working fewer hours or having more stuff than they do now and working the same number of hours, they pick the second one.

And yes, baby sitting is a big part of the package that schools do provide in practice.

> In that case, might as well also do some programming classes, right?

I don't think programming classes would do any more damage than the current curriculum.

> If the other option is learning nothing.

Well, giving the kids free time or more physical activity might also be useful?

This has nothing to do with actual robots, which can make it confusing if you come across this without having the right context. What they mean by this is they have a commercial tool that implements a very simple scripting language, often in a structured way so you can edit it without using an editor. The tool has lots of commands for automating GUI actions like "find this window by title", "click that button", "load this web page", "find text that looks like this", "loop" and so on.

The idea here is that a lot of processes involve moving data from one app or window to another in a repetitive manner, so if you have a programming language optimized for that and designed for beginners, you can automate a lot of stuff. It's not a scripting language like Python, it's totally focused on driving GUIs. And it works! Robotic automation is a huge deal in some companies.

I helped an ex-girlfriend learn this stuff at one point. She sort of bluffed her way through the interview, they were looking for people with more computing experience but she was a woman so the hiring was more or less automatic despite her knowing nothing about computers at all (woke companies ...) Despite the tool being designed for such people she still found it really really hard though! Some people just really struggle with structured thinking of any kind. Writing down instructions in a formal way was just totally alien to her. The tool tried its best to help users avoid mistakes but fundamentally you still have to be able to think in terms of loops, lists, multi-step processes and so on. I think she did eventually get there but it took a long time and she failed the internal exams the first time.