I’ve got this friend, he has been working as a software engineer for nigh on 30 years now and has steadily accumulated an arguably impressive amount of knowledge about the workings of computers and programming languages and software design. He tends to be good at what he does and the amount of experience he carries is invaluable when setting up teams and systems. This is recognized and also monetized by his employer accordingly, i.e. he is compensated sufficiently but more importantly, his services are correspondingly expensive.

Which brings us to today’s conundrum: He is too expensive to be left to play at the ever-changing, deep detail, niggling problems of today’s computing. That shit takes time, a lot of frustrated hours cursing at the computer, up to the point of the a-ha moment that resolves the issue.

The expectation that is attached to “expert” or “experienced” is that due to the aforementioned expertise you should take almost no time at achieving anything within your area. You should know already, as you are the expert. Which disregards a lot of facts about the pace of change in technology, the way we learn things, the way we age.

And in the capitalist system we move in, the expectations on expertise coupled with the directive for maximizing profit forms an inevitability of obsolescence: maximizing profits means that assignments will be limited to the core area of expertise which means you will not learn new things on the job. Even if you encounter new areas, the time allocated will be insufficient for deep study.

Or maybe that is just me and my impression that the world has become obsessed with speed. An ever increasing pace and no regard for direction, no plan beyond being the one to comment “first”. I see that everywhere nowadays, but then again my sample is vanishingly small and there is no denying my biases.

And to once again touch on the ever present subject of our time: AI promises speed above all. Not quality - quality is good enough for now and the thing is fast enough to let you think that it is simpler to replace everything broken in the future than to devote the time to ensure it is going to last. It is seductive, especially since against all indicators, the promise is that in the future, the thing itself will be better, even though it was built and trained on the same shoddy foundation.