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The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

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Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#111

Post by zozbot234 »

pixelsort wrote: post #85

> There is every reason to believe that those who invest in deep understanding will continue to be valuable, regardless of what tools emerge. I don't take issue with this, except that it's a false comfort when when you consider the demand will naturally ebb and individual workload will naturally escalate. In that light, I find it downright dishonest because the rewards for attaining deep knowledge will continue to ev…

Bridging software with domain-specific needs of its professional users is nothing new: that is how domain-specific professional software gets built. What is new is that the people doing this are being referred to hysterically as "class traitors", when the improvements they're working on will bring massive and widely available benefits to professionals the world over.

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#112

Post by ekidd »

getnormality wrote: post #96

I find it so fundamentally unhinged that people think things will get fully automated to the point that humans no longer matter. We are centuries into the deep automation of certain things, like looms, but people with deep understanding of those things are still needed to guide the automation and keep it working to meet human needs. To ignore that pattern and say everything's going to be automated and humanity will b…

> We are centuries into the deep automation of certain things, like looms, but people with deep understanding of those things are still needed to guide the automation and keep it working to meet human needs.

The difference this time is that the thing they're trying to automate is intelligence. The goal is a machine that's as smart as a Nobel Prize winner or a good CEO, across all fields of human intellectual endeavor, and which works for dollars an hour. The goal is also for this machine to be infinitely copyable for the cost of some GPUs and hard drives.

The next goal after that will be to give that machine hands, so that it can do any physical labor or troubleshooting a human can do. And again, the goal is for the hands to be cheaper to produce and cheaper to automate than humans.

You may ask yourself, who would need humans in a future where all intellectual and physical tasks can be done better and cheaper by a machine? You may also ask yourself, who would control the machines? You may ask yourself, what leverage would ordinary humans have in a future that no longer needed them for anything? Or perhaps you would not ask those questions.

But this is the future investors are dreaming of, and the future that they're investing trillions of dollars to reach. That's the dream.

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#113

Post by mjevans »

debo_ wrote: post #99
getnormality wrote: post #96

I find it so fundamentally unhinged that people think things will get fully automated to the point that humans no longer matter. We are centuries into the deep automation of certain things, like looms, but people with deep understanding of those things are still needed to guide the automation and keep it working to meet human needs. To ignore that pattern and say everything's going to be automated and humanity will b…

I think people feel that once the pool of humans required to do a thing diminishes to the point that their occupation is rare enough to be invisible, that is essentially the same as "fully automating" it. I have certainly never met anyone who works in "loom engineering" in my entire life.

Are they a rare artisan rather than a commodity? Maybe a subtype or cross-trained variation of some other wider job role?

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#114

Post by getnormality »

ekidd wrote: post #112
getnormality wrote: post #96

I find it so fundamentally unhinged that people think things will get fully automated to the point that humans no longer matter. We are centuries into the deep automation of certain things, like looms, but people with deep understanding of those things are still needed to guide the automation and keep it working to meet human needs. To ignore that pattern and say everything's going to be automated and humanity will b…

> We are centuries into the deep automation of certain things, like looms, but people with deep understanding of those things are still needed to guide the automation and keep it working to meet human needs. The difference this time is that the thing they're trying to automate is intelligence . The goal is a machine that's as smart as a Nobel Prize winner or a good CEO, across all fields of human intellectual endeavo…

This author is pointing out that the fraction of the tech dream du jour that is actually realized is consistently about 1%, so taking tech dreams du jour seriously is guaranteed to give you a false world model. Which is unhelpful and maladaptive, unless perhaps your goal is to make money off of other people with that false world model.

I believe that full automation of the mundanities of human life is coming in the fullness of time. But for that insight to be helpful to me, I have to get the timing right, and the data suggests I should be extremely skeptical about excitable tech guys predicting big things in short time frames.

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#115

Post by nz »

ahsteele wrote: post #82
nz wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quasi-relevant excerpt from an odd essay (footnotes and references omitted). ``` My own eyes spent countless nights observing, with curiosity and wonder and delight, the responses of a computer, as I commanded it with code, like a sorcerer casting spells. I could not have known, that this obedient machine, this silicon golem, was also, slowly and imperceptibly, enchanting me, and changing how my eyes would see. At th…

Did you write this? Do you have a link to the entire essay? I enjoyed the excerpt.

Yes, I wrote this, and you can find an intro/context to the _UNFINISHED_[1] essay here (https://www.galacticbeyond.com/a-bridge-to-everywhere/), with a link to the PDF at the bottom.

[1]: what you see is the first 5% of the essay, based on the notes that never made it in. Many topics are untouched, such as cults, caves, imagination, conspiracy, paranoia, fear, wakefulness, blindness, hallucinations, altering consciousness, notations, etc. And other topics are mentioned but not explored deeply (taoism, buddhism, prophecy, trust+belief[2], mnemonics, dreams, metaphors, etc). So it's mostly setup, with planned payoffs and epiphanies in the latter unwritten parts[3]. And some of the transitions between topics are in need of deburring.

[2]: note that many languages use the same word for trust and belief. In Indo-European languages, the root is the same root as tree and true. Relevant to the unwritten parts of the essay.

[3]: so you'll just have to imagine the unwritten parts, until I actually get around to writing them ;)

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#116

Post by hearsathought »

PeterWhittaker wrote: post #62

One important and often overlooked democratization is spreadsheet formulas: non-programmers began programming without knowing they were, and without concern for error and edge cases. I cannot find the reference right now, but I recall seeing years ago articles about how mistakes in spreadsheet formulae were costing millions or more. I see an analog with AI-generated code: the disciplined among us know we are programm…

> non-programmers began programming without knowing they were

Using excel in the traditional sense isn't the same as programming. Unless they were doing some VBA or something like that which the vast majority of excel/spreadsheet users don't.

> spreadsheet formulae

formulas. We aren't speaking latin here.

> I see an analog with AI-generated code: the disciplined among us know we are programming and consider error and edge cases, the rest don't.

Programming isn't really about edge cases or errors.

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#117

Post by zozbot234 »

symfrog wrote: post #32
empath75 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not my experience with claude code. It does forget big picture things but if you scope your changes well it’s fine.

I would estimate that out of every 200 lines of code that Claude Code produces, I notice at least 1 issue that would cause severe problems in production. In my opinion these discussions should include MREs (minimal reproducible examples) in the form of prompts to ground the discussion. For example, take this prompt and put it into Claude Code, can you see the problematic ways it is handling transactions? --- The invo…

And that's why you ask for a high level plan for something like that before you let the agent write any code. Then you review the plan for flaws, revise it, and prompt the system to fill out more details for each step. Repeat as necessary. Yes it's slow, but it's the best way of using this "glorified autocomplete" to ease and speed up real work.

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#118

Post by benj111 »

ekidd wrote: post #112
getnormality wrote: post #96

I find it so fundamentally unhinged that people think things will get fully automated to the point that humans no longer matter. We are centuries into the deep automation of certain things, like looms, but people with deep understanding of those things are still needed to guide the automation and keep it working to meet human needs. To ignore that pattern and say everything's going to be automated and humanity will b…

> We are centuries into the deep automation of certain things, like looms, but people with deep understanding of those things are still needed to guide the automation and keep it working to meet human needs. The difference this time is that the thing they're trying to automate is intelligence . The goal is a machine that's as smart as a Nobel Prize winner or a good CEO, across all fields of human intellectual endeavo…

Talking heads reference?

Part of me thinks that we're already reaching peak stuff/employment/the current system.

We are currently churning out graduates who work in coffee shops. More and more employment is make work. The issue is can we carry on requiring work, making it a moral requirement.

I suspect it'll be like the industrial revolution, when the average labourer moved to a factory in the city living in a slum, they were worse off. It took time for the conditions of the working class to improve.

Basic income is touted as the solution, but then globalisation means workers are moving much more and I'm not sure the 2 are compatible. Not that I have a better idea.

I do think we need a cultural change decoupling work from self worth. It's becoming less and less defensible to require everyone to work to be 'deserving'.

All that being said, there will still be jobs, there will always be demand for hand made, or something that isn't soulless corporatism. Although I'm starting to sound like Star Treks view of the future, which may not achievable

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#119

Post by rented_mule »

debo_ wrote: post #99
getnormality wrote: post #96

I find it so fundamentally unhinged that people think things will get fully automated to the point that humans no longer matter. We are centuries into the deep automation of certain things, like looms, but people with deep understanding of those things are still needed to guide the automation and keep it working to meet human needs. To ignore that pattern and say everything's going to be automated and humanity will b…

I think people feel that once the pool of humans required to do a thing diminishes to the point that their occupation is rare enough to be invisible, that is essentially the same as "fully automating" it. I have certainly never met anyone who works in "loom engineering" in my entire life.

Randomly, I spent an afternoon with a team of loom engineers long ago. In 1989, I took a month-long trip to the USSR. Trips for Americans back then were guided / chaperoned by the Soviet government, with the clear intention of showing off what the Soviet system was capable of. To see their manufacturing prowess, we spent an entire afternoon touring an automated bed-sheet factory and talking with the team that designed and maintained the machines. I don't remember much other than the intense noise and the large number of machines with white cotton sheets coming out.

All the sheets we saw in that factory, and in our hotels, were noticeably thicker and stiffer than American sheets, somewhere between American sheets and denim. When we asked about that, they seemed to feel sorry that we only had thin, flimsy sheets.

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#120

Post by wincy »

simonw wrote: post #58

I recently stumbled upon this delightfully titled book from 1982, "Application development without programmers": https://archive.org/details/applicationdevel00mart Which includes this excellent line: > Unfortunately, the winds of change are sometimes irreversible. The continuing drop in cost of computers has now passed the point at which computers have become cheaper than people. The number of programmers available p…

In 1989 or so the man who later became my programming teacher at community college night school was at a party and a man who he knew came up to him and told him he was a programmer now too!

This confused my teacher as he knew this guy wasn’t super technical, and asked him more about it. I may have the details not exactly right but the man said something like “I use lotus notes every day!”

The word programmer had a very different meaning 40 years ago.

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