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Comment by tarkin2 | Hacker News Reader

If the chauffeurs' power came from the inability for the driven to maintain and drive their cars, and that power was reduced when cars become more reliable and understandable, then I'm not sure how that is applied to modern developments: computer and software are as complex as ever, and we're understanding them less and less in favour of letting the computers themselves understand themselves. Are we not then creating a new chauffeur problem, and this time those who control the LLMs and the infrastructure for the LLMs hold the power after we intentionally cede it?

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How is it different from relying on the internet, when most people don’t know what a routing table is, let alone how to manage one? Or from relying on word processors that the average user could never write themselves?

Civilization has always been about upwards abstraction, with a small number of specialists understanding the lower levels that everything’s built on. From sewer systems to cobol in banking, it’s always been this way.

I think the reason we see these reactions on e.g. HN is that we are the class of people going from “we understand the pinnacle of tech” to “we need to rely on opaque tech to do our jobs” and it’s kind of scary and personal because of the change.

I guess by practising the lower level things less and less we become less able to understand and maintain them, whereas any profession that required continued practice kept you sharp enough to learn things like networking.

This is how we got cars that require visiting the dealership to get serviced, because they have total control over the ecosystem.

Yes, exactly. As compared to 70 years ago, when cars came with a manual on how to adjust the spark gap, and buyers were expected to do so.

It turns out most people don't want to be under the hoods of their cars, so cars are optimized for that, and the few people who do want to do that maintenance (me included) are no longer the target market.

Meanwhile, everyone else can think about other things.

Many early cars used a hand crank to start the motor. If you don't do it correctly, it was possible to break your arm.

My grandmother was impressed by the (female) movie stars who had chauffeurs. As a consequence she refused to drive (or even have a driving license) for the remainder of her life. She was focused on "status" and "class". She lived to age 98.

> If you don't do it correctly, it was possible to break your arm.

Yup if you did not anticipate correctly where the spark plug would fire.

> Many early cars used a hand crank to start the motor. If you don't do it correctly, it was possible to break your arm.

I daily drove for years a motorbike with a kickstart (and also rode MX bike with a kickstart but these were 2-strokes and the kickstart on 2-strokes wasn't that violent). Still have a scar from one kickstart gone wrong on a rainy day (my foot slipped and the crank violently went back up and damaged my leg).

Now we have Uber and Lyft. You can have a chaffeur on call.

It's almost as if proving you are technically competent is the new problem.

You can prove that you are a mechanic and driver, since the car obviously works and gets from A to B.

Now anyone can call themselves an expert because AI makes it easy.

As engineers we know that understanding fundamentals of these complex systems is essential but the average person only sees that Bob built an app for the back office and it seems to work. At best they understand that tech is complex and maybe there's a security flaw in his app.

Ultimately shiny things win, people don't want to hear that anything is hard and they will generally take a risk until something fails rather than pontificate on the best way to do it (unless of course they are in architecture, compliance or security in which case they will complain but leadership will already be showing off the cool new thing)

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