Does anyone else find it incredibly ironic that this website won't load with JavaScript disabled? Perhaps some people should stop writing software, on that I fully agree . . .
Therefore, IMHO, we should not stop writing software on that basis alone.
I agree with many points put forth, I really do, but I don't come to the exact same conclusion. I believe we as a society shouldn't stop making software. But I believe there needs to be a better filter. Far, far, far too much shitty, pointless software is out there. The author cites Java as a pinnacle; funny, some people have said similar things about Lisp[0].
Perhaps some people should stop writing software. Just determining who is allowed to write software or what software is allowed to be written is the hard part, and is ripe for abuse. Perhaps this discussion should be centered more on the why a particular piece of software is being written. But then we get into ideology, and even ideologies that are destroying the physical planet are staunchly defended when they are obviously having measurable harm on our information systems.
[0] - Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. Also a quote from many moons back on slashdot: "Lisp was a simple, elegant language that demonstrated that almost any language written after 1961 was unnecessary, except for demonstrations of concepts like Object-Oriented programming that could then be re-implemented into Lisp, and that any code written in older languages could be replaced with something better."
The horse analogy in the video you linked doesn't consider the fact that while the population of horses is much lower today, the ones that exist today don't all live as slaves. A portion of them live in the wild, some others are pets and some others actually are for "work".
He seems to suggest that having billions of wage slaves is somehow better than having fewer happier people.
In seriousness, we don't have this kind of AI yet: https://youtu.be/7Pq-S557XQU
Therefore, IMHO, we should not stop writing software on that basis alone.
I agree with many points put forth, I really do, but I don't come to the exact same conclusion. I believe we as a society shouldn't stop making software. But I believe there needs to be a better filter. Far, far, far too much shitty, pointless software is out there. The author cites Java as a pinnacle; funny, some people have said similar things about Lisp[0].
Perhaps some people should stop writing software. Just determining who is allowed to write software or what software is allowed to be written is the hard part, and is ripe for abuse. Perhaps this discussion should be centered more on the why a particular piece of software is being written. But then we get into ideology, and even ideologies that are destroying the physical planet are staunchly defended when they are obviously having measurable harm on our information systems.
[0] - Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. Also a quote from many moons back on slashdot: "Lisp was a simple, elegant language that demonstrated that almost any language written after 1961 was unnecessary, except for demonstrations of concepts like Object-Oriented programming that could then be re-implemented into Lisp, and that any code written in older languages could be replaced with something better."