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If the software made by my company ceased to exist, every government in the US, federal, state, and municipal, every construction company, plus most governments worldwide would be unable to build roads or houses until they were able to cobble together a replacement.
The entire world runs on software. Software controls our banks, flies our planes, decides what happens when you press the brake pedal in your car. The bridges you drive, walk, or ride across were modeled in software and simulated to determine whether they needed to be built stronger. The power companies use software to route power across the grid. Software drives servos which determine how much natural gas and air get pumped into our power plants. Every day, power producers and power consumers bid on how much they will pay for electricity at certain times tomorrow, and all of that is automated by software. Judges and lawyers file motions electronically, routed through software. Two weeks ago, US President Donald Trump, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif signed a memorandum of understanding, opening the Strait of Hormuz. Trump was in Versaille, Pezeshkian was in Tehran, Sharif was in Islamabad; the agreement was signed digitally, with software.
If every computer on earth stopped working tomorrow, we wouldn't notice the lack of cat videos, but we would notice the complete collapse of civilization.
I am sure someone is going to dwell on that if not fixed.
If you want to be reductive, we’re all going to die due to entropy anyway, it will all balance out so there’s no point in doing anything at all.
We've quietly gone from it being a research project, to a cool toy, to something most people had but that definitely wasn't essential, to a world where it is just as crucial as lightning or electricity.
I bet many farming and food distribution operations just wouldn't be able to function without a connection to AWS.
IMO what we really need in software is something like the various codes which govern fire safety, efficiency, etc of modern buildings. It exists in some safety critical domains but should be more widely applied.
The safety codes are where we accumulate the hard-won knowledge over time. Many of the rules in the codes were paid for with human lives lost.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Code_Council
There were roads built before your company's software and I'm sure if your company disappeared that ultimately roads would get built with or without their software.
It would be interesting to look at all the technological advances of the last 60 years and break them down into categories based on what happens if they went away though (category A: the field just goes back to 1950s and we more or less get by vs Category B: society utterly collapses).
We objectively don't need credit cards. We could do with cash just fine. If we were told that Visa / Mastercard were shutting down in 5 years, we'd manage to muddle through. If they suddenly vanished off the face of the Earth? People would definitely die due to starvation.
The internet as a whole can arguably be all three at the same time.
Software does more than cat videos.
Examples that may be relevant:
- CAD and simulation tools that physical world engineers use
- telecommunications (not just programmers, but programmers are vital for the current ultra-cheap generation)
- CT and MRI data processing
- alphafold
- scheduling systems for universities and other schools (makes education more scalable)
- infrastructure/systems programming (OS, web browser, etc.)
Furthermore, no one would claim that civil engineering is useless just because a certain class of billionaires liked to hire them to design silly structures. So, the prevalence of the less useful things speaks more to priorities as a society than anything about software engineering itself
> - CT and MRI data processing
> - scheduling systems for universities and other schools (makes education more scalable)
Those two read as if they are of different urgency (#1: whoever needs it urgently is at risk of dying, schedules for "non-urgent" cases will be affected for months, turning many into urgent cases; #2: the education systems will suffer, but it only gets dire after multiple days), until you realize that #2 also applies to e.g. hospitals.
Medicine at scale is already barely scraping by as it is (see: overworked staff etc. etc.), but disrupt the internal IT working of hospitals and the indirect body count will rise fast.
Which, really, implies that 90% of people in this industry work in bullshit jobs that don’t require real engineering skills. You could even spout any BS about architecture in Medium.com and then asked to speak in a conference if it gets enough views.
C and the various C++ subsets called "C with templates" would be much less common than they are if "deep understandings of CS and DS&A" were required in day to day work.
And honestly software engineers don’t need roads anyway working a tough four-day work week with long commute into the basement.
Jokes aside, innovation comes at a price. Every great thing will be turned into a weapon so just wait until the alpha-fold mutants start crawling out of a nearby sewage treatment plant.
That basically never happens because the license wouldn't be worth the paper it's printed on if it didn't essentially protect you from your own stupidity. Any credentialed professional basically has to be farcically negligent for anything to stick and even if it does damage is usually limited by statute.
That's the whole point. The industry basically strikes a bargain with government to it's benefit. Government lets me run a supply cartel, I promise to enforce minimum standards along the way. Government gives me favorable treatment in court, I do whatever the government's rules say to the detriment of my customers. Society gets just enough scraps to provide the political will to get it done.
This is a fundamentalist perspective; it's hard to dispute that if we didn't have any roads, houses, or cat videos, we would need new roads more than we needed new cat videos.
It's much easier to dispute the idea that we currently need new roads more than we need new cat videos; we already have a lot of roads.