Someone asked my thoughts this post..
Admittedly, I only read maybe 2/3rds of this… haven’t sent it to an LLM to give me the tl;dr. BUT… a couple things came to mind.
1. The cathedral and bazar talk about two ways to organize companies/software development approaches. In that era, neither are “wrong” or “catastrophic.” They produce similar results in very different ways.
2. Humanity is unequivocally better off today than it was 150yrs ago. Extreme poverty is down, famine is down, and education is up because of the past technological advances we have experienced.
This article tries to pick apart the shortcomings of Jack’s thesis, but references an argument like - smart phones have made humanity dumber because we can’t remember people’s phone number” It’s an old adage that misses the forest through the trees. We no longer NEED to remember these things. Instead we now fill that mental space with the incredible breadth of “news” we consume.
There is validity to the concerns, but the focus is in the wrong areas. The proposal from Jack is where (software development / technology) companies are going to head. Reduced headcount, living operating systems with strong LLM guidance/suggestions. The organizations that build out knowledge graphs RAG real-time streaming will be more agile and competitive than those that dont. They may not be “better”, where better is subjective (ie, “What’s the *best* blockchain?”)
So, I do believe there will be failures, I hope they are not catastrophic… (this article didn’t talk about what happens when governments adopt this approach for policing, trade negotiations, etc.) and I also do believe humanity will be better as a result of this technology. The same way any major technology has shifted humanity, AI will too (and the author notes this as well).
Thanks for writing this Micky :) tell your LLM to be more concise next time though 🙏