Software Is a Superpower | Hacker News Reader

Software Is a Superpower

flaviocopes.com

28 pointsflaviocopes13 comments

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Boring advertisement blog full of choppy dreamy sentences.

The tiny paragraphs are really jarring to read.

These are not paragraphs.

They are lonely disjointed sentences.

Floating freely.

In a sea of whitespace.

It’s a draft for the blog post the author never wrote.

+1 on this, paragraphs are meant to group ideas. The way they’re used here, there might as well be just a wall of text with no paragraph delineations at all.

Not every new line must have the same meaning. Do you also look down on James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound?

This wasn't poetry.

I agree with the underlying sentiment and even find the subject matter inspirational, but the post falls pretty flat.

I disagree with the article, for thousands of years slavery was how you automated tasks at scale, and you could build massive impossible things this way.

Software is the tech equivalent, except the slaves are machines and tiny shell scripts.

By definition, machines (at least any built so far) cannot be slaves, so this is not a great equivalency.

At the very least it's a sign of amazing social and technological progress.

It really is pretty great. Getting automated out of a job sucks, but it beats being a slave forced to do that same job by a country mile.

It's interesting that as machines have become more powerful, slavery has become less and less profitable---but so has employment!

The logically conclusion is either mass starvation or abolishing wages.

Basic income is just a stopgap. In a hundred, or two hundred, or five hundred years, if technology continues apace, basically all work that is not science/caregiving will be done by machines. How can an economy based around wages exist in a world where humans don't work?

There's something of a Scylla and Charybdis thing going on, where if humans become too valuable, it becomes worth it to exploit them, but if they're not valuable enough, it's not worth it to pay them.

Tech can move things either way---automating things can make people worthless, but providing new tools (Engelbart's "bicycle for the mind") can make them more valuable.

Formula 1 drivers are valuable athletes, but in 1850 they'd just have been guys with slightly better reflexes.

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