Tag: Reflection

A few days ago I watched a video that has given me a lot to think about. Jeffrey Way, founder of Laracasts and one of the most influential people in the Laravel/PHP community, shared a brutally honest reflection on how artificial intelligence is transforming his business and his profession.

The video starts with a phrase that leaves you cold: “I’m done”. It’s not a goodbye to programming, but an acceptance of the reality to come.

Lately I’ve been following a discussion that worries me quite a bit: to what extent are we delegating our thinking to AI. It’s not an abstract or philosophical question, it’s something very real I’m seeing day to day in our profession and in society in general.

Recently I read an article by Erik Johannes Husom titled “Outsourcing thinking” that, among other things, discusses the concept of “lump of cognition fallacy”. The idea is that, just as there’s an economic fallacy saying there’s a fixed amount of work to do, some believe there’s a fixed amount of thinking to do, and if machines think for us, we’ll just think about other things.

I wouldn’t know where to start but I do know how to end this reflection, and it’s so simple that it would be summarized in two phrases, “It’s not a country for programmers” and “Being mediocre is more relaxing and will bring you more”.

When one has been developing for more than 20 years and has always filled their mouth saying that they have enjoyed, enjoy and will enjoy programming, in the strangest or most common languages, with the most peculiar and strange technologies, the most cutting-edge and the most “old-fashioned”, but each one in its moment and only for the most (as much as possible) precise implementation, one should better keep quiet.