[ExI] self driving truck

[David Lubkin]

Spike wrote:

>I have lived to witness the science of 
>aerodynamics become completely encoded; so much 
>theory became obsolete.  Humans do not need to 
>master the intricacies of the science.  Correct 
>aerodynamic calculations can be done by people 
>who know not what a shock wave is or why a shock 
>wave can reflect off of an oblique wave.  A 
>person with a solid high school education can set up the model and run it.

What can humans do to earn their keep is unclear. 
I'm only marginally confident that I know what 
*I* can do for the next two or three decades.

My father was world-class in designing analog 
circuits. Then all everyone wanted was digital, 
even where analog could be 10^6 times faster for 
the problem. So the kids stopped learning 
professional-grade analog design. Which meant 
that when it became clear that analog was a 
better answer in some context, there was no one to hire.

I spent many years acquiring prowess in (among 
other skills) precision programming. Squeezing a 
flagon of performance out of a shot glass. Then 
no one cared about saving space or time. Just 
throw more compute power at the problem. And it 
did make sense. People-time cost more than 
hardware. But it doesn't always. Especially as 
you go either bigger (exabyte analysis, trillion 
device networks) or smaller (molecular-scale 
computing) in your problem domain, you need 
people who appreciate bit tricks, instruction 
timing, etc. And most who know this stuff have left the field.

This pattern may apply to you, Spike.

The answer for us, specifically, and for segments 
of the larger population that are seeing the 
demand for their competencies disappear are maybe in asking:

• Who still needs what I've been doing all my 
professional life? In what ways am I a better fit than a punk kid or robot?

• What else am I good at that may be of longer-term value?

One likely answer for me: Write more stories and 
less code. It's harder to find gigs in any kind 
of engineering the farther you get from forty. 
But I know personally several sf writers who did 
or still publish into their nineties.


-- David.