I can create things in a few months that would have taken years of work by a small team to do before, for less than the cost of buying pizza.

For me it’s as wonderful as good compilers. Today reminds me of when it was no longer necessary to hand code machine language, then it was assembly that winked out in favour of strong compilers. Those skills were all superseded by higher levels of abstraction, just like coding is giving way to system engineering.

Of course if you don’t keep ascending the abstraction ladder, or your vision doesn’t accommodate the requirements of the next rung up, I guess that must feel more like an end than a beginning.

One day, I suppose, there won’t be any more rungs to reach for and we will all be truly be obsolete. At that point, we will have achieved and suffered the goal of all life, to give birth to a generation that replaces us and makes us irrelevant, I suppose. That will be, I think, both a triumph and a tragedy. A disaster if we don’t make sure it isn’t, if we lose our humanity in the becoming.

But I think we aren’t quite there yet.