Stack overflow didn't create a positive feedback loop where the solution to having to deal with an obscure, badly written, incomprehensible code base is creating an
more incomprehensible sloppy code to glue it all together.
Neither did intellisense. If anything, it encouraged structuring your code better so that intellisense would be useful.
Intellisense does little for spaghetti code. And it was my #1 motivation to document the code in a uniform way, too.
The most important impact of tools is that they change the way we think and see the world, and this shapes the world we create with these tools.
When you hold a hammer, everything is a nail, as the saying goes.
And when you hold a gun, you're no longer a mere human; you're a gunman. And the solution space for all sorts of problems starts looking very differently.
The AI debate is not dissimilar to the gun debate.
Yes, both guns and the AI are powerful tools that we have to deal with now that they've been invented. And people wielding these tools have an upper hand over those who don't.
The point that people make in both debates that tends to get ignored by the proponents of these tools is that excessive use of the tools is exacerbating the very problem these tools are ostensibly solving.
Giving guns to all schoolchildren won't solve the problem of high school shootings — it will undeniably make it worse.
And giving the AI to all software developers won't solve the problem of bad, broken code that negatively impacts people who interact with it (as either users or developers).
Finally, a note. Both the gun technology and the AI have been continuously improved since their invention. The progress is undeniable.
Anyone who is thinking about guns in 1850 terms is making a mistake; the Maxim was a game changer. And we're not living in ChatGPT 2.0 times either.
But with all the progress made, the solution space that either tool created hasn't been changing in nature. A problem that wasn't solveable with a flintlock musket or several remains intractable for an AK-74 or an M16.
Improvements in either tech certainly did change the scale at which the tools were applied to resolve all sorts of problems.
And the first half of the 20th century, to this day, provides most of the most brilliant, masterful examples of using guns at scale.
What is also true is that the problems never went away. Nor did better guns made the lives of the common soldier any better.
The work of people like nurse Nightingale did.
And most of that work was that the solution to increasingly devastating battlefield casualties and dropping battlefield effectiveness wasn't giving every soldier a Maxim gun — it was better hygiene and living conditions. Washing hands.
The Maxim gun was a game changer, but it wasn't a solution.
The solution was getting out of the game with stupid prizes (like dying of cholera or typhoid fever). And it was an organizational issue, not a technological one.
* * * * *
To end on a good note, an observation for the AI doomers.
Genocides have predated the guns by millenia, and more people have died by the machete and the bayonet than by any other weapon even in the 20th century. Perhaps the 21st too.
Add disease and famine, and death by gun are a drop in the bucket.
Guns aren't a solution to violence, but they're not, in themselves, a cause of it on a large enough scale.
Mass production of guns made it possible to turn everyone into a soldier (and a target), but the absolute majority of people today have never seen war.
And while guns, by design, are harmful —
— they're also hella fun.