Here’s how cars were made in 1960:
Here’s how they’re made now:
The only real work for humans in the modern factory involves judgment. They inspect what the machines have done to make sure it’s correct. Later on in the process, some people crawl around in the passenger compartment to install the electronics and the trouble lights I’ll be looking at when I buy the car second hand in fifteen years or so. It’s not automated, but it sure is mechanized to a fare-thee-well. Again, they are relying more on judgment and experience than a strong back.
It’s 1960 in software. People who push a little javascript around on a virtual desktop, in a fit of self-importance, call themselves engineers, and they think they’re immune to the same forces that made all those thousands of blue-collar workers superfluous in the space of a single lifetime. Open AI or LLMs, or whatever you want to call almost-thinking-bots are going to perform all the IT drudge work going forward. This is not conjecture on my part. This website uses seven plugins I installed that I coded using AI. They all work better than the human-coded plugins they replaced.
The only thing that will be really valuable for computer coding is going to be judgment. And if you’re wearing wool socks and sandals, a man bun, and a neckbeard, I’m afraid you’ve already demonstrated exactly how valuable your judgment is going to be going forward.
2 Responses
A man with a ponytail or man bun does not look like a horse’s head.
In a manufacturing operation, the only place for judgement is in planning. Once you plan your process, all results, whether done by man or machine, need to only be capable of providing a correct result, with no other outcome possible.
Back when I was writing CNC programs, the operators used to joke about how my instructions in the header of the programs kept getting longer and longer. My personal best was 6 pages.
It’s really difficult to write a set of instructions that can’t be misinterpreted. Particularly when most of the guys are ESL (english second language), and those split between Spanish and Vietnamese.