Think of DeepDream x 1000. First, start with self-driving cars and semis cutting out taxi and freight services. Then, move on to musicians and composers no longer being hired to do mundane (90%) work, or video game levels being procedurally generated with intelligent design. From there, go on to everything that could be automated today, but requires a little bit of human ingenuity.
Economic transactions will start to look very different than what's normally accepted today.
Not that I'm a futurist, but I predict that 2020 will be the decade where AI becomes unsettling (beyond image recognition, which is already becoming unsettling), and that 2030 will be the decade where AI has serious economic consequences.
In pre-Copernican astronomy, where the Earth was considered the center of the cosmos, the erratic orbits of the other planets relative to us were explained away as epicycles within perfect circles. Later, closer examination of the orbits required modeling the orbits as epicycles within epicycles, exactly as depicted in the rotating circles above. In the end, it turned out that there aren't epicycles in the orbits, they were just creating a Fourier transform to explain the orbital paths. We now know that you can create a Fourier transform to generate any arbitrary path.
I sometimes wonder how many of our modern physics models, such as the standard model, differential geometry, and M-theory, are just highly sophisticated versions of the Fourier transform.
Not all code is server-side code that can be addressed by elastic computing. Most C++ programmers work on desktop, mobile, and embedded programs. In such a domain, it is very likely that your code will be running on more than 10,000 cores on launch day (and with little or no intercommunication between the cores).
Security theater. sigh If the government was actually serious about protecting women and children from people with malicious intent, terrorists would be toward the bottom of the list, just above school shooters. Domestic abuse far outstrips any news-worthy outrages, but you don't get many votes talking about that.
I like to code with about a 9 point font, in order to maximize the amount of code per screen without going too far into the illegible. At that size, the proportions of even a single pixel are large enough to make any anti-aliasing annoying. You lose the sharp contrast that every good font needs to have along its edges.
> Why would anyone trust one of them going forward?
The same reason people trust the Dollar as a reserve currency. Yeah, it sucks, but better than any of the alternatives.
Fortunately, there exist open-source/public-domain alternatives for security products. (Doesn't mean that contributors can't be coerced with the equivalent of a Nation Security Letter, though.)
I can't count the number of times my coworkers have said something along the lines of, "What are you talking about? I never saw anything about... oh, wait... I didn't realize it was scrollable. Never mind."
After that happens a couple of times, they eventually find their way to the System Preferences.
I find it telling that not so long ago, "Human Resources" used to be called "Personnel". I'm still curious as to what caused the change from persons to resources...
I do agree that that form of leadership is necessary. I was inferring a more literal interpretation of leadership, though, considering the associated word, "potential".
> [he] believes every phase of the process needs to be meticulously designed to drill deep into skill sets, ... and leadership potential
Ugh. I hate this. For a technical interview, why is leadership potential a priority? Speaking for myself, I've done the leadership thing and don't care for it. People tell me I'm good at it, but I still prefer dealing with algorithms over humans, and I actively decline offers for "promotion". (I already have my very own batch of little humans of to deal with, thank you very much.)
Unfortunately, no matter where you go, there's always the deep-seated cultural mindset that manager > worker. In terms of the corporate efficiency calculation of effectiveness/hour, I suppose that's still true. But for me, personally, that's not the equation that I care to maximize.
> While offices for everyone sound good on paper, moving everyone out of cubicles destroyed a culture of tight-knit interaction and communication.
Please, no, do not fall for this misconception. I've worked in several "tight-knit" environments. Invariably, everyone starts wearing headphones to tune out the distraction and also starts communicating via IRC/messaging so as not to cause distraction. Completely negating any potential for the mythical spontaneous communication.
> Further, what if you prefer 2 or 3 space indentation?
This, alone, is why I always use tabs, no matter what any style guide says. People have different tastes. Using tabs allows any editor to indent according to personal tastes.
Regarding the title of his article, as a someone who routinely uses TCP/IP for tasks other than transmitting HTML, I find his concept of "internet" to be rather myopic.
Economic transactions will start to look very different than what's normally accepted today.