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Do you think this necessarily sends us as a society (as a species) towards a future where we eventually stop understanding technology and science itself? Like

Do you think this necessarily sends us as a society (as a species) towards a future where we eventually stop understanding technology and science itself? Like in Asimov's Foundation or Liu Cixin's 'Taking Care of God'. Maybe we need two tiers of technology. Human in the loop up to the point of AI, and then the AI layer which depends on the human stack.

nomel 2mo ago
As knowledge progresses, less and less people will be able to understand it, as has always been the case with the progression of technology. This is an inevitability since intelligence is something that can only be slightly learned [1]. The passionate, high intelligence, nerds will continue to do what they've always done, being the only, very very small, percentage of society that bothers to understand any of it. Most humans are dumb, from a science perspective. The ability to be successful in science has an intelligence threshold of somewhere around 120 [2], with true innovation requiring much more (as history has shown). Do you see any alternative to 'Taking Care of God', if we continue progressing? But, for coding specifically, coding as an unfortunate consequence of working with computers. We've been increasing abstraction since their inception, so we can do the actual work with them that we're trying to implement with code as a means to implement it. Go ask and older programmer, and he'll say the same sort of "kids these days don't understand computers", because he had to wire up the logic on a breadboard and write machine code in a hex editor, where you use a javascript library without even knowing how to implement an adder!!! [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/mp2014105 https://www.nature.com/articles/mp2014105 [2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6480791/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6480791/
- hermitShell 2mo ago
  I take your point, statistically we're already there. Unless humanity was to bootstrap its own biological intelligence to be consistently higher, there's little point in any individual attempting to safeguard the tech stack to first principles. Accept AI or don't accept AI, history tells us that if it works, people will move to the higher abstraction layer. I can imagine an organization that devotes itself to preservation of the history of technology... like monastic groups that copied texts endlessly. In a post-scarcity world, that would be a sensible outcome... people are free to devote themselves to art or science or debauchery as they please...
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]

nomel 2mo ago

As knowledge progresses, less and less people will be able to understand it, as has always been the case with the progression of technology. This is an inevitability since intelligence is something that can only be slightly learned [1]. The passionate, high intelligence, nerds will continue to do what they've always done, being the only, very very small, percentage of society that bothers to understand any of it. Most humans are dumb, from a science perspective. The ability to be successful in science has an intelligence threshold of somewhere around 120 [2], with true innovation requiring much more (as history has shown). Do you see any alternative to 'Taking Care of God', if we continue progressing? But, for coding specifically, coding as an unfortunate consequence of working with computers. We've been increasing abstraction since their inception, so we can do the actual work with them that we're trying to implement with code as a means to implement it. Go ask and older programmer, and he'll say the same sort of "kids these days don't understand computers", because he had to wire up the logic on a breadboard and write machine code in a hex editor, where you use a javascript library without even knowing how to implement an adder!!! [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/mp2014105 https://www.nature.com/articles/mp2014105 [2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6480791/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6480791/

hermitShell 2mo ago
I take your point, statistically we're already there. Unless humanity was to bootstrap its own biological intelligence to be consistently higher, there's little point in any individual attempting to safeguard the tech stack to first principles. Accept AI or don't accept AI, history tells us that if it works, people will move to the higher abstraction layer. I can imagine an organization that devotes itself to preservation of the history of technology... like monastic groups that copied texts endlessly. In a post-scarcity world, that would be a sensible outcome... people are free to devote themselves to art or science or debauchery as they please...
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]