scroot

The fact that companies are organized the way they are today is not some fact of natural law. There are legal structures of ownership that have been put in place by real people, which means there are the means to completely change those ownership structures.

Allowing outside shareholders in combination with private ownership is going to result in the kinds of short term thinking that lead to the "exits" and other profit-maximizing behaviors.

One "way out" is to make laws that give good public incentives / allow people to easily incorporate as organizations where the employees are the sole owners of the entity (co-op).

The book is a history of the ancient near east, and the quote is from a scribal student describing his experiences in school thousands of years ago

I am reminded of a line from Ulrich Beck, who said that real risk comes "on cat's paws"

To what end?

"giving up" in this case would be to stay the course, to ignore one's own considered ethical obligations.

Who could have seen this coming?

It's pretty much the best "devil" character in any movie I've ever seen. Perfectly executed

> I genuinely do wonder why that has been the trajectory.

The simple answer here is still likely the best one: Smalltalk and Lisp Machine systems were expensive and proprietary right at the same time that Unix and C became free (and therefore ran everywhere)

Man, I would love an up to date version of Cyberdog!

I didn't mean "like hypercard" so literally in this manner. What I meant was, a computing environment that seems to blend seamlessly into the wider operating system, and that is able to sufficiently blur the line between end users and "programmers" (here called "authors"). Critical to this capability was the ability to "pop the hood" easily and mess with what was going on underneath.

All of today's computing is fundamentally based on a strong division between programmers and users. That division has only grown more stark with time. The dominance of Unix is partly to blame, in my view.

I knew I could get Don Hopkins to show up!

Imagine if computing had continued down the path laid by systems like HyperCard

It's the "no stopping it at this point" that always sticks out to me in these discussions. Why is there no stopping it, exactly? At this juncture these systems require massive physical infrastructure and loads of energy. It's possible to shut it all down. What's lacking is the political will.

These posts claiming that "we will review the output" etc., and that claim software engineers will still need to apply their expertise and wisdom to generated outputs, never seem to think this all the way through. Those who write such articles might indeed have enough experience and deep knowledge to evaluate AI outputs. What of subsequent generations of engineers? What about the forthcoming wave of people who may never attain the (required) deep knowledge, because they've been dependent on these generation tools during the course of their own education?

The structures of our culture combined with what generative AI necessarily is means that expertise will fade generationally. I don't see a way around that, and I see almost no discussion of ameliorating the issue.