pjmorris
What must we do? First, we must not work or think on a heroic scale. In our age of global industrialism, heroes too lightly risk the lives of people, places, and things they do not see. We must work on a scale proper to our limited abilities. We must not break things we cannot fix. There is no justification, ever, for permanent ecological damage. If this imposes the verdict of guilt upon us all, so be it. Second, we must abandon the homeopathic delusion that the damages done by industrialization can be corrected by more industrialization. Third, we must quit solving our problems by ‘moving on.’ We must try to stay put, and to learn where we are geographically, historically, and ecologically. Fourth, we must learn, if we can, the sources and costs of our own economic lives. Fifth, we must give up the notion that we are too good to do our own work and clean up our own messes. It is not acceptable for this work to be done for us by wage slavery or by enslaving nature. Sixth, by way of correction, we must make local, locally adapted economies, based on local nature, local sunlight, local intelligence, and local work. Seventh, we must understand that these measures are radical. They go to the root of our problem. They cannot be performed for us by any expert, political leader, or corporation. This is an agenda that may be undertaken by ordinary citizens at any time, on their own initiative. In fact, it describes an effort already undertaken all over the world by many people. It defines also the expectation that citizens who by their gifts are exceptional will not shirk the most humble services.
I'm less than an amateur here, my recommendation would've been the first ~300 pages of Rhodes. Maybe re-reading that part for events and ideas rather than names would help, but hopefully someone more skilled can answer.
Also of note is Wellerstein's more recent 'The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age – The Anti-Nuclear President, the Bomb Decision, and Cold War History', which I read earlier this year and thought it was excellent.
A clipping from its closing pages:
> “What is the measure of a civilized man?” The proper answer, Lilienthal suggested, was to consider the sense that a “civilized man” was one who believed they had a responsibility to others. The invention of nuclear weapons had clearly magnified the problem: “One sees that the mark of a civilized man must be some quality that will help the world from destroying itself. He is most civilized who has those qualities and talents of leadership, by example and precept and character and ideas, that will help civilization to survive.”
To extend the reading list, I was completely floored by 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb', Richard Rhodes, but that was 20 years ago. I need to re-read it, and add 'Dark Sun' and 'American Prometheus' to round out that part of my picture of the military-industrial complex.
> "Over the course of this book, we have looked at some eighty years of this history. We have seen how the idea of nuclear secrecy was initially born out of a very specific fear—that the world’s worst nation could achieve nation-destroying power—that, over the course of many transformations, morphed into something more generalized. More than totalitarian regimes were the target of this secrecy: allied nations, private industry, democratic institutions, and “the public” more broadly became understood as targets as well, for reasons both justifiable and not. The secrecy problem moved wherever the problem of the bomb went, which was far indeed. The desirability of control over nuclear knowledge became totalizing because the threat of loss of control was tied to the almost unimaginable power of the bomb itself. These two forces—the desire for control, the fear of its loss—became locked in a vicious cycle, each driving the other."
I'd say society's, or maybe executive's, viewpoint has shifted on this.
I remember nothing of the books that were read to me before I was five. However, I was five when I picked up a book that my mother had been reading to me and found, for the first time, that I could read it myself. I suspect that it worked out that way for me because she'd been reading to me for years before that.
I've got a friend whose firm has started using 'cognitive surrender' to describe the habit of delegating thinking to the LLM in the way that we used to skim code reviews and say 'LGTM' while missing something important.
My take on that question is that programmers were in high demand because, for the last 60 or so years, it has been cheaper to write software for general purpose computers to automate things that were done by people and more rudimentary machines, e.g. accounting, manufacturing, music production, etc than it was to pay the people to continue doing those jobs. So, it continues a trend for programmers to be replaced by software, at least until something in the process breaks.
At its core, there is something difficult about programming. Fred Brooks talked about the need for perfection, Don Knuth about there being about 1 in 50 persons who had the mindset for computer science. But we haven't really been paid because it's difficult, we've been paid because we're cheaper than the alternative.
If so, how would an adult be treated while still expecting them to demonstrate mastery?
If not, what do you think a reasonable expectation for an adult should be?
He joined IBM in the 50's, led the design of the telemetry system for NASA's Mercury project in the 60's, aimed to put humans at the center of software development with 'The Psychology of Computer Programming', and spent the rest of his life working on helping people do software development well together. IMO, any time you spend digging in to his large catalog will be well repaid.
TBH, to me, this imagined future looks a lot like it'd have all the problems we already have.
I feel like the problem that Greenspan, Bernanke, and friends have found is that the problem with capitalism is that you never run out of the government's money.
"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” - J.M. Keynes
'We should teach our Students what Industry doesn’t want', Kevin Ryan, https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3377814.3381719
'Are you sure your software will not kill anyone?', Nancy Leveson, https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/136281.2
Related possibilities:
1. Dust off some DVDs and a DVD player, pop some popcorn and watch a movie or two. Explore the extended editions, commentaries, alternate scenes, etc.
2. Dust off some CDs and a player and jam. My 2008 Honda has a CD player, I'm not restricted to streaming Spotify through a Bluetooth adapter :)
3. Dig up an N64 console, Goldeneye, the friends you played against back when, and order some pizza.
4. Go find a local bookstore, new or used, and buy a book.
I'm sure there are a dozen ideas I'm not thinking of, feel free to plug them in.