And it’ll be used to suppress wages, because “you’re not making new stuff, just fixing some problems in existing code.” That you have to rewrite most of it is conveniently not counted.

That’s at least what was tried with movie writers.

With the way things are going over there, the whole thing falls apart soon enough and this issue can be fixed in the rebuild.

Much of the craze is almost religious. You have for example Singularitarianism. Basically “Man creates AI, which will create artificial general intelligence, which will create artificial super intelligence, which will bring us the singularity, release us from drudgery and give us eternal life.”

Garbage in, garbage out. These logos represent the latter.

Lactose for me. No more cheese or ice cream or it’s also back to 6/day. Luckily there is medicine for the occasional treat.

Then twins walk into the airport and the system crashes.

And facial recognition has been known to fail with very dark skin so that’ll turn into a racial issue real quick.

Amazon of the “just walk out” shops powered by AI, that turned out to be s lot of Indian workers in the background.

Popular media doesn’t really investigate other ways of organizing society. It’s always the standard job, shop and money with only rare exceptions. It just swaps dollars with credits, uses hovercars instead of normal cars and calls it a day. Hell, they were shoveling coal into a reactor in Rebel Moon to power their space ship. I don’t expect that much from entertainment and can live with the black mirror doom porn. Maybe I give writing my own stuff another try, but I’m not a good writer.

Honestly I’m with black mirror. These days when a new tech appears, the mind immediately wonders how this will be abused it obstructed by other parties. That’s not the show’s fault but of what keeps happening in real life.

Black Mirrors shows the future, extrapolated from current systems and events. It’s not about new paradigms that might be possible.

Well, often they know it´s hard to estimate, but the entire corporate system is built around having things done by a certain date, your time costs money and payments are usually linked to those dates. They don´t really have a choice but to make a planning based on the estimates you give and monitor the progress so they can give the proper level of panic to their bosses. Of course, software has always been a disaster with estimates and attempts to tame the chaos haven´t been that successful.

I usually make a ridiculously detailed list of all tasks. ¨Add button A on screen. Discuss details: 2 hours. Interface work: 0.5 hour. Code work: 2 hours. Database work: 2 hours. Testing: 2 hours. FAT: 2 hours. Changes after FAT: 1 hour. SAT: 2 hour. Test script: 1 hour. Update documentation: 2 hours. Add button B … ¨ Put it all in an excel sheet and summarize. Most PMs don´t even want to start arguing a list like that, and it seems to make a reasonably good estimate for me.

Sorry, you are cursed to live in interesting times.

It’s an attempt to get a handle on things and trying to avoid situations such as:

“Oh, I was struck on that point for the last 3 months. I reinvented the wheel 2 times and now it works.”

“And now we’re 3 months behind schedule. Why didn’t you ask anybody?”

“Yeah, I didn’t want to bother anyone. But I did put in on the timesheets.”

“It says ‘working on project’.”

And that’s how regular project update meetings get scheduled, and a bunch of messages asking for updates.

And it will say people of lower economic classes and foreign origin are the biggest risk. Will action be taken to help these people? Nah. This is just going to be a technological excuse for some good ol’ repression.

how you never have anyone who can actually “manage” the AI workers.

You just use other AI to manage those worker AI. Experiments do show that having different instances of AI/LLM, each with an assigned role like manager, designer, coding or quality checks, perform pretty good working together. But that was with small stuff. I haven’t seen anyone wiling to test with complex products.

From a European perspective, USA only had a right and far right party. Anything on the left side was killed long time ago.

Where is the tech?

In China.

A man is flying in a hot air balloon and realizes he is lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts: “Excuse me, can you help me? I promised my friend I would meet him half an hour ago, but I don’t know where I am.”

The man below says: “Yes. You are in a hot air balloon, hovering approximately 30 feet above this field. You are between 40 and 42 degrees N. latitude, and between 58 and 60 degrees W. longitude.”

“You must be an engineer,” says the balloonist.

“I am,” replies the man. “How did you know?”

“Well,” says the balloonist, "everything you have told me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I am still lost.

"The man below says, “You must be a manager.”

“I am,” replies the balloonist, “but how did you know?”

“Well,” says the man, “you don’t know where you are, or where you are going. You have made a promise which you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. The fact is you are in the exact same position you were in before we met, but now it is somehow my fault.”

This Is Extremely Dangerous To Our Democracy

I love that in Cyberpunk 2077 they’re is often a channel on called “just ads”. Of course in pure cyberpunk style those ads can be horrific.