Agreed. I've always thought the purpose of all automation was to remove needless toil. I want computers to free people. I guess I subscribe to the theory of creative destruction.
Agreed. I've always thought the purpose of all automation was to remove needless toil. I want computers to free people. I guess I subscribe to the theory of creative destruction.
Maybe it comes down to the definition of "toil". Some people find typing to be toiling, so they latch on to not having to type as much when using LLMs. Other people see "chores" as toiling, and so dream of household robots to take on the burden of that toil. Some people hate driving and consider that to be needless toil, so self-driving cars answer that—and the ads for Waymo latch onto this.
Personally, I am not stymied by typing nor chores nor driving. For me, typing is like playing a musical instrument: at some point you stop needing to think about how to play and you just play. The interaction and control of the instrument just comes out of your body. At some point in my life, all the "need to do things around the house" just became the things I do, and I'm not bothered by doing them, such that I barely notice doing them. But it's complex: the concept of "chores" is front and center when you're trying to get a teenager to be responsible for taking care of themselves (like having clean clothes, or how the bathroom is safer if it's not a complete mess) and participating in family/household responsibilities (like learning that if you don't make a mess, there's nothing to clean up). Can you really be effective at directing someone/something else without knowing how to do it yourself? Probably for some things, but not all.
> Maybe it comes down to the definition of "toil".
For sure.
I idealize a future where people can spend more time doing things they want to do, whatever those avocations might be. Freedom from servitude. I guess some kind of Star Trek / The Culture hybrid dream.
The world we have is so far from that imaginary ideal. Implicit in that ideal would be elimination of inequality, and I'm certain there are massive forces that would oppose that elimination.
And not just the definition, but the assumption that a specific toil is necessarily universal. I've had more than one conversation that started with someone else saying "using the LLM saves me soooo much time typing, think of how much time typing you'd save by using an LLM". But when I examine my processes and where I'm spending my time, typing isn't even on my list, so this claim is talking right past me and I can't see it all. Even when I was a hunt-and-peck typer on the c64 I didn't consider the typing to be a/the major factor in how long something took to program so much so that I continued with two-finger typing until I was forced to take a touch-typing class in highschool (back when that was still a thing, and we split the exercises between typewriters and computers).
"I'm able to put my shirt on so much faster with this shirt-buttoning machine, and I don't spend time tediously buttoning shirts and maybe having to rebutton when I misalign the buttons and buttonholes. You should get one to button your shirts, you're wasting time by not using a buttoning machine".
"I wear t-shirts."
(Obviously a contrived and simplistic example for fun)
Computers are definitely on the path to freeing programmers from programming