[ExI] self driving truck

[Dan TheBookMan]

On Oct 31, 2016, at 5:48 PM, David Lubkin <lubkin at unreasonable.com> wrote:
> 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.

Excellent observation! And one reason why we should be a little humble when trying to come with top-down policy solutions.

Regards,

Dan
  Sample my Kindle books via:
http://author.to/DanUst


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