I thought the same thing. School kids would be interested if there were a space drone they could see and control from the classroom. This is definitely possible and far cheaper than Artemis. If we wanted kids to embrace STEM, you could have these available to every classroom year round.
Right? Some of us used to read hex digits off printed paper dumps to debug mainframe memory (like me), but we can be excited about AI and embrace it, too.
From my perspective, knowing how it gets down to machine code makes it more useful and easier to control, but that doesn't mean I want to stop writing English now that we can.
Alex Karp needs to read Richard Dawkins. Neurodivergence is a chromosomal aberration that shows up in the phenotype. It takes evolutionary time scales to affect chromosomes through evolution. Launching a new tech isn't going to do it.
Dawkins also writes in The Selfish Gene that memes, a word he coined, are faster than DNA evolution because we can transmit "better" ideas (through language and art) that lead to better behavior. This kind of memetic transition is what AI is bringing. We're seeing it already. The communication around AI causes fights among friends (pro gen AI vs against, esp in the arts) and layoffs from VC-led companies, as well as spawning all kinds of new business ideas as the article mentions.
Karp is likely aware of all this. You are right about genetics vs memetics difference but the point here is that genetic differences can affect us at memetic level.
People with certain genetic aberrations have ideas that might win the memetic lottery
That's a good observation. Dawkins might characterize that as a generic advantage that's only expressed in a particular environment. That is often a trigger for a successful change in the downstream DNA.
I can think of at least 5 prominent and very wealthy "leaders" who show signs of neurodivergence, including the negative aspect of decreased empathy. Their power and money magnifies those ill effects as well. Perhaps through neglect rather than ill will these people effect the death of many conspecific individuals.
If that succeeds in preventing those (large) populations from competing for resources with the elite rulers or, more likely, alleviates the need to care for them though programs like UBI, then it's an advantage of that "selfish gene." All of these outcomes map nicely to Dawkins's writing.
It's a dashboard tool for working with multiple models, agents, chats, files, repos, and rulesets. Since the actual day to day dev environment is exactly that, it turns out to be very helpful. There is no context switching. All of my AI assisted work happens in the same UI.
It's very compelling. The UI and your familiarity and productivity with it are the primary most. I'm not the only one who crossed over!
This is the seminal work by John Backus that introduced the idea of functional programming style.
I met John when I was a mainframe developer at IBM. Although he didn't live to see the advent of AI agents, I think he'd push even harder for functional style now, in the age of AI assisted programming. While harder to write initially than imperative or object oriented code, functional is more bulletproof in practice and "frees us" from the problems of those other styles, as he tries to explain in the paper.
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