The thing is, most of the time, you can actually have both. You just have to spend the time to build systems that way. To use the example from the article: spr

The thing is, most of the time, you can actually have both. You just have to spend the time to build systems that way. To use the example from the article: spreadsheets could use strongly-typed columns, but guess the column type automatically based on the values entered. When things go right, it'd be just as easy as today, but if things go wrong, you always have an escape hatch: with a little more work, you can manually specify the column type. Problem solved. That gives you the increased productivity you want for the happy case, without the frustration of trying to find a workaround for the corner case. This kind of approach needs more architecture work at the beginning of a project, but it's almost always feasible. That being said, I think your frustration is warranted, although I think it's much more pervasive than tech. At its core, I think the problem is that, in your example, the CEO and the programmer are having two different conversations without really realizing it. The CEO wants a problem solved, but the programmer wants the tools to solve the problem themselves. The CEO thinks that ML should be able to solve their problem, but the programmer sees that ML as a tool has serious limitations, and won't help solve under-specification. And then they both end up talking past each other. It seems that a lot of (at least western society) is built around the idea that when someone asks for help, what they "really" want is, metaphorically, to be given a fish for dinner, instead of learning how to fish. That's the CEO in your example; the presumption is "I want help" means "solve my problem", not "make it easy for me to solve my problem myself". It's one of my biggest frustrations, because it inherently robs you of agency and in many cases can be downright condescending -- for example, when I was working as a mechanical engineer, there were shop floor guys ignoring the tolerances I specified on my drawings because they assumed I was over-specifying them, because they lacked the context of the rest of the design, and weren't willing to sit down to hear the bigger picture. But when I had to send the parts back for re-work, they acted like it was my fault. Anyways, this is all a really long-winded way of saying, I think this is largely a social problem, not a technological one. But I don't think it's inherent in humans; I think this is something we've learned as a part of our culture.