Karp is likely aware of all this. You are right about genetics vs memetics difference but the point here is that genetic differences can affect us at memetic level. People with certain genetic aberrations have ideas that might win the memetic lottery

One could have said the same things when calculators were invented. Is routine suffering by adding numbers by hand required? Or is it more important to delegate simpler things and focus on complex problems.

Certainly practising mental arithmetic helps in capability of doing mental arithmetic. Doing adding by hand probably also improves mental arithmetic.

The again we are not that far off from time when your AI glasses will read the price label. And then automatically add up total for you. Hopefully you then each time ask what does that total mean in context of your finances...

The fellowships mentioned in the post probably select for such traits. At some level I agree that maybe line workers at big companies may need to be of stable and predictable mental character. But entrepreneurs may not be held to that standard.

I have a feeling that a lot of entrepreneurs start businesses simply because they don't fit into the modern work environment.

Strong agree with Karp that people with different thinking will be rewarded.

But strongly disagree that humanities will be automated or become less popular. It will just take a new shape. What I mean is humanities will no longer be gatekept by elite academics with fancy degrees but rather take a new form. What the form would be I don’t know.

I think you're right about the humanities. If you want to talk humanities with an LLM, they're more than capable. But that doesn't mean they're going to take the humanities from humans, all they'll do is make the humanities more accessible to normals. They're great at breaking down complex subjects without feeling judgemental or elitist. They're also excellent for extremely personalized recommendations, not just explanations. I've gotten amazing book recommendations over the past year or two, discussing in detail what I liked, didn't like, didn't understand, etc.

Why is it promoted then?

IC's can cry about it because they did the exact same thing to the people they replaced.

I disagree because I use it in a pretty huge codebase and it definitely saves time.

The thing is for most places the kind of code they write is good enough. You have painted an awfully pessimistic picture that frankly does not mirror reality of many enterprises.

> What does it say when a compiler expert that knows multiple compilers pretty much by heart, with access to thousands of tests, can't even write a C compiler?

It does not know compilers by heart. That's just not true. The point of the experiment was to see how big of a codebase it can handle without human intervention and now we know the limits. The limitation has always been context size.

>By which I don't mean they never do, but you really can't trust them to do it as you can a programmer. Knowing to code, like knowing to fly a plane, doesn't mean sometimes getting the right result. It means always getting the right result (within your capabilities that are usually known in advance in the case of humans).

Getting things right ~90% of the time still saves me a lot of time. In fact I would assume this is how autopilot also works in that it does 90% of a job and the pilot is required to supervise it.

I liked the article but it misses one point. ICs take pride in some types of expertise they have accumulated over the years. AI kinda nullifies this. For instance, if I worked with Python/Django for ~5-10 years I might have become a sort of expert in Django. I know exactly the utility methods, conventions to use etc. But there's little need for such expertise with AI.

> When you analyze this as "Management loves AI" and "workers hate it" goes completely back to 'who owns the means of production?', and can be clearly seen within Marx's critique.

How? Marx's critique doesn't land here at all.