[Opinion] The erosion of critical thinking
The erosion of critical thinking. To be fair, this started long ago in software engineering through tool vendors and their 'empowerment' of engineers. It wasn't empowering. In a physical world, I'll use a kitchen blender when making soup. The kitchen blender is a tool. I wouldn't use it for digging a deep shaft mine. I'd use a different more contextual tool.
We do the same in software with tests. If I have a problem, I'll write a test. I might do this before writing the code (test driven development) or after. The test is focused on my problem, my context. I don't start by buying an ACME general purpose application test suite. Tests are small tools.
But when it comes to development, most people don't build tools for their context. We should. If we have a problem, we should build the tool for it either before we've written the code (development) or after (legacy). Yes, our tool will contain many common micro tools, in the same way that blenders have bolts, same as deep shaft mining equipment.
Instead we buy the 'ACME general purpose application' tool which has been designed to help solve generic problems, just not your problem. In software engineering we use the kitchen blender to dig a deep shaft mine because it was good at making soup. And this is in a world of symbolic instructions where tools are easy to build, except the tool vendors tell us they are not. Buy our 'ACME general purpose application tool'!
Our AI comparisons are normally of the form that robots are better at digging deep shaft mines with kitchen blenders than humans are. It's fair enough. But maybe, we should be questioning the tools we're using? We are nowhere near the actual capability of humans to explore. We've just hampered them in generic tools under the slogan of 'empowerment'.
As I said back in Jan 2023, 'It's only a matter of time before OpenAI (ChatGPT) is tightly coupled into Azure's development environment and programming will start to look more like a conversation between an engineer with an AI (as per Nicholas Negroponte's vision) making recommendations for changes and addition of services'
Well, we have co-pilots as add-ons into our tools, we even have people touting agents as the solution to software development. This is about as surprising as our willingness to hand over our decision making (what software development is) to a machine. Our ability to understand the systems will atrophy as we charge toward EM Forster's 'The Machine Stops'.
Hey, but it's all about 'empowerment'!
Alas, no. It's all about robbing you of reason.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a technophobe. I was talking about the potential for AI at conferences back in 2004. I was speaking at events on conversational programming (or what we call CHOP) in 2016. I use numerous AI systems on a daily basis. I'm a fan.
I'm just not a fan of not thinking and of unquestioning, which is where we are heading like a bunch of happy Eloi. Pity.
Originally published on LinkedIn.