Kartik Agaram
01/21/2022, 1:25 AMTom Larkworthy
01/21/2022, 12:07 PMJimmy Miller
01/23/2022, 8:59 PMKartik Agaram
01/24/2022, 4:11 PMJimmy Miller
01/24/2022, 5:44 PMKartik Agaram
01/24/2022, 5:59 PMJimmy Miller
01/25/2022, 5:33 AMKartik Agaram
01/25/2022, 6:13 AMWe rely on way more people for all the things we do day to day. We will historically always end up relying and vast numbers of people.I think software is fundamentally different from physical stuff. Societies have relied on fewer people so we know it's possible. I don't even think it implies a reduction in standard of living or quality of life when you can have vast quantities of automation managed by a small number of people. But I'm starting to repeat myself, so I'll stop there. Like I said, we understand each other.
• the division needs to be made deliberately
• the division of labor must be chosen because it benefits the end-user of the software
• the persons/people the labor is divided with must be trustworthy and there must be oversight
• a division of labor must only be made as a last resort when all other means have been exhaustedAwesome start! I obviously agree with the fourth point but with much higher standards 🙂 The other bullets I proffer the following criticism to: when I say "division of labor" I'm talking about a certain social organization that's more than just the combination of the words. Based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_labour and so on I weakly believe (I'm not a Marxist scholar) division of labor is by definition decentralized and emergent. There's no central entity being deliberate about decisions or deciding what benefits end-users. (Which is why I prefer the framing of end-user programming and dislike the word 'end-user'. Teaching people to locally help themselves and stop being users seems to go better with the grain of history.) Finally, oversight over programmers is a huge unsolved, likely intractable problem. I know because I'm a programmer 🙂 and I run rings around my "supervisors." I try to make ethical decisions but I'm also constantly making trade-offs that benefit me over the org, the org over the company, the company over its customers. It's very hard to believe some self-interest isn't creeping in. We need to think more decentralized. What does a cellular automaton where people make localized specialization decisions look like? How can we judge if a model is emergently yielding good or bad division of labor? If we could answer these questions we could run some experiments.