Why We've Tried to Replace Developers Every Decade Since 1969
3 points by laktak
3 points by laktak
Because of the AI banner art, I have no trust that the article itself wasn't written by a clanker too.
I believe the problem with this article is that it does not seem to point out the problem (which is not the replacement itself) that's the decay of entire field (and a craft) and the treatment of intelligence as a commodity
Visual Basic when it came, didn't claim to be replacing human intelligence, same as for CASE tools or even COBOL, it seems like the entire article cherry pick a few examples (everyone now mention these ones as "cornerstone" examples of why AI will fail to replace us)
Anyone that used AI nowadays knows already our entire field had significantly changed already, and of course no replacement has been done yet, but...are we sure about this? are we sure the crisis of entry-level jobs is not because of AI?
I believe the best to point out is an speech, Roadkill on the Information Highway [1] where Nathan Myhrvold points out in 1994:
There are a few bottlenecks. We talked about enormous exponential growth. Turns out there's a key network that is not gonna grow fast enough. It will become a major bottleneck for some things. It won't be a bottleneck for others. The network I'm talking about isn't the phone network. It isn't the cable network. It's the human nervous system.
You see, our input and output is limited, and we're not growing our capabilities exponentially. Human beings only take a certain amount of information in and a certain amount of information out, and that's a fixed number. It's one of those fixed thresholds that computing is just gonna blow by.
Sounds familiar? so, yeah, replacing developers it's quite a funny phrase in a practical sense, it's effective, but we, developers, should not be solving the Zero Theorem [2] for the sake of it
[1] https://jamesclear.com/great-speeches/roadkill-on-the-information-highway-by-nathan-myhrvold