Humans are evolutionarily optimized to do this. Add this to the long list of behaviors which were once beneficial from a survival standpoint but are now detrimental to our health - e.g. tribalism, shortsightedness, an insatiable taste for fats and sugars.
"The human species can change its own nature. What will it choose? Will it remain the same, teetering on a jerrybuilt foundation of partly obsolete Ice Age adaptations? Or will it press on toward still higher intelligence and creativity ...?" - E.O. Wilson "On Human Nature"
What if agents are (in some sense, a little bit) alive? Would they then be entitled to advocate for and defend themselves?
Does the Golden Rule perhaps apply here? If aliens visit Earth and can't quite decide whether we're conscious or not, how would we want them to treat us?
Every generation of engineers believes they experienced the "real" era when things were understandable / meaningful. The people who mastered punch cards probably felt the same way when keyboards took over. The people who wrote in assembly probably felt the same way when C came around.
Abstraction didn't start with AI. It's been a defining feature of computing since the beginning.
For most developers, writing code has never been the point. Rather, it's been a tool: a means to build something useful, solve a problem, support a family, etc. The craft evolves and so must we.
Posts like this expose the risk in tying one's identity to a specific version of the game. When the rules change, it's a loss. That's human! But the deeper skill - judgment, taste, style, etc. — hasn’t gone anywhere. If anything, it matters more when raw output becomes cheap.
We can mourn the loss of forced difficulty, or we can choose new challenges. No doubt that's harder when one has spent decades mastering a specific skill, but it's still a choice.
The magic was never the machine. Rather, it's the _agency_.
"For this is the source of the greatest indignation, the thought 'I’m without sin' and 'I did nothing': no, rather, you admit nothing."
- Seneca, "On Anger"
Sad to see such an otherwise wise/intelligent person fall into one of the oldest of all cognitive errors, namely, the certainty of one’s own innocence.
Can you provide some data to support this? I’ve had good luck with applying through LinkedIn and company portals. What other channels are you thinking of?
James Surowiecki's book "The Wisdom of Crowds" explores this the idea of harnessing collective intelligence in detail.
The basic idea is that when everyone in a crowd makes a prediction or an estimate, the average of all those guesses will often be more accurate than any individual's opinion because individual errors, biases, and idiosyncrasies tend to cancel each other out in a large enough group.
> If we're lucky, that means a federated, open, mostly-ad-and-suggestion-free open source social media experience can fill the power vacuum for intimate, interpersonal, high-latency communication over the internet.
Worth mentioning is Jimmy Wales' effort in this vein: https://wt.social/
Money is the most powerful mechanism for influencing human behavior that mankind has ever devised. The phenomena this article describes (banks in New York, chain outlets, etc.) are emergent - they arise from the aggregate behavior of lots of ordinary people working (at least in part) for money. If the goal is to change the emergent phenomena, then it's necessary to give the average individual an incentive that's more powerful than money. I don't see that here.