11–20 of 430 posts
Can we change direction on how things are going? Yes, but you must understand what means the "we" there, at least in the context of global change of direction.
> The Apple Vision pro was not inevitable I don't get the reason for this one being in the list. Is that an abusive product in some way?
>Garbage companies using refurbished plane engines to power their data centers is not inevitable Was wondering what the beef with this was until I realized author meant "companies that are garbage" and not "landfill operators using gas turbines to make power". The latter is something you probably would want.
I’m all for a good argument that appears to challenge the notion of technological determinism.
> Every choice is both a political statement and a tradeoff based on the energy we can spend on the consequences of that choice.
Frequently I’ve been opposed to this sort of sentiment. Maybe it’s me, the author’s argument, or a combination of both, but I’m beginning to better understand how this idea works. I think that the problem is that there are too many political statements to compare your own against these days and many of them are made implicit except among the most vocal and ostensibly informed.
However AI is the future for programming that’s for sure.
Ignore it as a programmer to make yourself irrelevant.
Everything is inevitable. If it happened, then it couldn't have happened otherwise. "Your computer sending screenshots to microsoft so they can train AIs on it" was inevitable, because that's what incentives pushed them to do. Vocal opposition and boycotting might become a different kind of incentive, but in most cases it doesn't work. The fact of the matter is that corporations are powerful, shareholders are powerfu…
To better the analogy: I have a wood stove in my living room, and when it's exceptionally cold, I enjoy using it. I don't "enjoy" stacking wood in the fall, but I'm a lazy nerd, so I appreciate the exercise. That being said, my house has central heating via a modern heat pump, and I won't go back to using wood as my primary heat source. Burning wood is purely for pleasure, and an insurance policy in case of a power outage or malfunction.
What does this have to do with AI programming? I like to think that early central heating systems were unreliable, and often it was just easier to light a fire. But, it hasn't been like that in most of our lifetimes. I suspect that within a decade, AI programming will be "good enough" for most of what we do, and programming without it will be like burning wood: Something we do for pleasure, and something that we need to do for the occasional cases where AI doesn't work.
I do not think that the current philosophical world view will enable a different path. We've had resets or potential resets, COVID being a huge opportunity, but I think neither the public nor the political class had the strength to seize the moment.
We live in a world where we know the price of everything and the value of nothing. It will take dramatic change to put 'value' back where it belongs and relegate price farther down the ladder.