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Staying Stagnant

Like many I have mixed feelings about the wisdom of Peter Theil. There are some germs of truth there ofcoure and there is no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater just because you don't agree with all that he says. This essay for example brings up several arguments that a reasonable person with commonsense would tend to agree with. The conclusion is poignant too

The first step is to understand where we are. We’ve spent 40 years wandering in the desert, and we think that it’s an enchanted forest. If we’re to find a way out of this desert and into the future, the first step is to see that we’ve been in a desert.

In light of reading this essay, I thought of a recent conversation I had with a developer friend. He is close to retirement age and has been a programmer all his life. Learned from the best and brightest and honed his skills over the years. I would describe L as a craftsman - he takes pride in his work and he treats code as a writer would treat writing. I have known others like L over the years - this is the type of programmer people of my generation aspired to be if they were inclined to make a career out of it. All that as I understand has now changed. 

L's view of what ails the programming world aligns with what I have heard from others as well. Compute and storage is virtually infinite and that seems to have promoted bad architecture, design and programming - at scale. Combined with that is a proliferation of programming languages designed for those who want to take short-cuts not bother with theoretical concepts and jump into coding something that works. Crafts people are no longer required. Highly-specific and just-in-time skills are what get rewarded in the job-market which has no need or use for big-picture thinking. I would imagine this will be an accelerating trend with AI-driven programming getting the proverbial lazy programmer half the way there for doing nothing. 

So looking back at Thiel's comments over a decade ago about computers being the only bastion of progress, I would say that will change too. There will be highly skewed progress in pursuit better more capable AI but the rest of the programming world with get lazier and not in a good way. 

The zenith of optimism about the future of technology might have been the 1960’s. People believed in the future. They thought about the future. Many were supremely confident that the next 50 years would be a half-century of unprecedented technological progress.

But with the exception of the computer industry, it wasn’t. Per capita incomes are still rising, but that rate is starkly decelerating. Median wages have been stagnant since 1973. People find themselves in an alarming Alice-in-Wonderland-style scenario in which they must run harder and harder—that is, work longer hours—just to stay in the same place. This deceleration is complex, and wage data alone don’t explain it. But they do support the general sense that the rapid progress of the last 200 years is slowing all too quickly.


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