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To me, bikeshedding is a signal from politicians, judges, and other public servants, that they don't feel the problem is important enough for them to understand

To me, bikeshedding is a signal from politicians, judges, and other public servants, that they don't feel the problem is important enough for them to understand. Like us, they have limited cognitive resources (processing time, calories, actions-per-day, etc), so they have to be cautious about how they budget it. How do we force technical information into the brains of our government employees? OR What incentives do we need to provide tech workers to be more politically active?

Karunamon 14y ago
As far as incentives for tech workers getting active, the recent spate of badly-written legislation (SOPA, CISPA, etc) has been acting as a great motivator. I literally do not personally know a single technology professional who isn't aware of these laws and their ramifications. The great majority of them have informed their congresscritters and helped get the word out in some way as well. Now if only there was a way to parlay that short term political interest into something more long term and substantial..
maxwell 14y ago
Eventually, it appears most jobs will be replaced either by computers or people who program them-- in the same way that most work from before the Industrial Revolution has been replaced by mechanical machines or literate-and-numerate-people. "Non-technical people" will be replaced by ones who don't think of computers and programming as technology, any more than we do books and math. Programming magnifies individual task completion potential, allowing one person to accomplish through scripted automation what would otherwise require manual delegation. It's not software that's eating the world, it's programming. Software is computational state, but programming is a state of mind. The "Computer Revolution" has happened, but programming illiteracy is still very high, programming fluency very low, and programming languages very primitive. Around the French Revolution, over 200 years ago, when the modern printing press had already been around for almost 350 years, the literacy rate in France was just crossing 50%. [1] And world illiteracy has over halved since the Unix epoch, 43 years ago. [2] The only solution I see is to help spread "programmacy". 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Illiteracy_france.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Illiteracy_france.png 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_illiteracy_1970-2010.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_illiteracy_1970-2010...
- msellout 14y ago
  And as machine learning grows more popular, perhaps many programmers will be replaced as well.

Karunamon 14y ago

As far as incentives for tech workers getting active, the recent spate of badly-written legislation (SOPA, CISPA, etc) has been acting as a great motivator. I literally do not personally know a single technology professional who isn't aware of these laws and their ramifications. The great majority of them have informed their congresscritters and helped get the word out in some way as well. Now if only there was a way to parlay that short term political interest into something more long term and substantial..

maxwell 14y ago

Eventually, it appears most jobs will be replaced either by computers or people who program them-- in the same way that most work from before the Industrial Revolution has been replaced by mechanical machines or literate-and-numerate-people. "Non-technical people" will be replaced by ones who don't think of computers and programming as technology, any more than we do books and math. Programming magnifies individual task completion potential, allowing one person to accomplish through scripted automation what would otherwise require manual delegation. It's not software that's eating the world, it's programming. Software is computational state, but programming is a state of mind. The "Computer Revolution" has happened, but programming illiteracy is still very high, programming fluency very low, and programming languages very primitive. Around the French Revolution, over 200 years ago, when the modern printing press had already been around for almost 350 years, the literacy rate in France was just crossing 50%. [1] And world illiteracy has over halved since the Unix epoch, 43 years ago. [2] The only solution I see is to help spread "programmacy". 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Illiteracy_france.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Illiteracy_france.png 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_illiteracy_1970-2010.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_illiteracy_1970-2010...

msellout 14y ago
And as machine learning grows more popular, perhaps many programmers will be replaced as well.