"It simply does not add up that someone who lacks purely technical skills in an area can make good decisions." I've been thinking about this and your related p

"It simply does not add up that someone who lacks purely technical skills in an area can make good decisions." I've been thinking about this and your related points, and I've been (with growing concern) instinctively in agreement. Another analogy has been coming up. I started programming (as a kid) in the late 1970s, first with BASIC (of course) but pretty quickly moved to machine language for obvious performance reasons, and then to C, followed by many other languages. In the late 1980s, at university, I learned proper assembly language, and used it quite a bit. Back then, I was pretty good with assembly/machine language. Not super star or expert level, but comfortably solid. Since then though I've spent very little time at that low level. Granted, such early exposure and experience has been a pretty big fairly indirect benefit. But over the years, I've met and worked with many really smart, productive people who have never had any experience at that low level, and that lack was rarely noticeable. For any given 'layer of abstraction', there is some use in being familiar with the lower layers. I think, in general, the closer the lower layer is, the more useful the knowledge is. For example, how useful is deep knowledge of CPU microcode to a Java programmer? Perhaps some, but not a lot. In the tech world, GenAI is likely to push most everyone quite a ways up the tower of abstractions. We're in the middle of that right now, and it certainly feels pretty alarming to me. The biggest uncertainty that comes into my mind is how insanely fast this change is coming upon us. My crawl up the abstraction tower happened over the course of about 12 or so years, from machine language/assembly to C then to Perl then to many other things. In retrospect, that felt pretty fast. GenAI is seemingly pushing us in that direction many times more quickly.