5 ms·
I can't wait for the new generation of lawyers to save us from the old generation of lawyers that set our policies without knowing much about how technology wor
by jart 6y ago
I can't wait for the new generation of lawyers to save us from the old generation of lawyers that set our policies without knowing much about how technology works. Doesn't congress have like 5 people out of 500 with an engineering background? If you want to save us, give us representation.
- rhooke 6y agoWhat makes you think that will happen? A lot of young people I know seem to understand just as little about computers as the older ones, on average. Younger people use technology a lot, but what is being used tends to require much less understanding of any of the underlying tech. The level of abstraction is a lot higher now.
- WalterBright 6y agoSo true. They laugh at me 'cuz I know nothing about the latest app. I laugh at them because they have no idea how their computer works. How many times do I advise: "Just unplug it and plug it back in." P.S. for non-digital electronics, the cold reset doesn't work. P.P.S. My skill at writing programs took an enormous discontinuous leap forward when I learned how transistors worked, how to wire up a transistor to make a flip flop, and how to hook up flip flops to make registers, adders, etc.
- bryanrasmussen 6y agoAny sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic is generally used to talk about how it works for a less developed civilization meeting a more developed one, but perhaps it also pertains to the non technicians in the magic civilization. At a certain point of specialization and advancement it no longer seems productive use of your time to try to understand it, leading to large portions of the population who view the technicians holding things together as inscrutable magicians.
- jart 6y agoIt'll happen incrementally. Each time the lawyer ruling class does something bad, like build a website that doesn't work, they'll need to give us a little more power in order to save them. Then after a long enough timeline, we'll win, and legal code will be executable.
- elliekelly 6y agoI’m not sure it’ll work out this way because a lawyer can become a coder much easier than a coder can become a lawyer. Then again, lawyers are notoriously allergic to all-things-technology, so who knows.
- oblio 6y ago> Then after a long enough timeline, we'll win, and legal code will be executable. Awesome, I was looking forward to Kafka running on EC2 instances.
- oblio 6y agoAnd I meant Kafka as in Kafkaesque, not Apache Kafka.
- voidfunc 6y agoWhat % of the population is engineers? 1% representation doesn’t feel that off.
- jart 6y agoNot if you consider that 66% of the people who sit in congress are lawyers and they're only 0.36% of the population.
- sofixa 6y agoBut a decent part of congress' job is around laws ( writing or sponsoring them, arguing for/against them, etc.) it makes sense that lawyers are overrepresented.
- elliekelly 6y agoIt would make sense that Congress hires a lot of lawyers but since Congress is supposed to represent the people I don’t think having one profession so heavily over-represented is beneficial. And I say that as a member of the heavily-over-represented profession.