The problem here is that this whole angle on human life seems to have forgotten that efficiency, productivity, etc are all there to help us find more time to live in a world where those things don't matter. To have leisure. To think unstructured, non-goal directed thoughts. You don't need "programming" to be human.
The other thing here is that this stuff is just what humans in all societies and organizations have been working on forever. We have collective and personal goals and we have all sorts of systems to reach them. We do research on how effective they are already. We do A/B testing. Not sure what calling this collective activity "human programming" accomplishes.
In reality, it’s there to help capital owners not care about these things anymore.
The problem is that it’s quite difficult, and machines decades ago simply couldn’t do that, so now we all type on keyboards all day (digital or physical). It’s reached the point where my children no longer have to learn cursive handwriting in school, because what is the point since everything goes into the computer via a keyboard? This strikes me as incredibly short sighted and backwards. I think it’s hurting us long term.
Nope, nope, nope. Keyboards are a great thing that save a lot of effort and muscle strain. I did my fair share of handwriting, and I experienced the strain and tiredness firsthand (ha). This is to say nothing of the speed.
Ergonomic keyboards make things even easier.
So no, we don't always want faster horses, and the heritage of thousands of years often happens to be a yoke.
Your argument about keyboards struck me in just this way - it's a mistake to assume that we should stick with the status quo and have machines adapt to us. After all, writing on paper (or with a digital stylus) is just another iteration of improving the technology. Nobody wants to pound symbols into stone with a chisel, for example.
I can type much faster than I can write cursively and it would be incredibly painful to revert to such writing. Natural language speech input can improve a lot of things vs typing, but I think writing code - for as long as it lasts - would be tricky to implement well using our voices.
natural language interaction is perhaps the main focus of modern machine learning research.
What to do when everyone can have survival and their material needs met is, I think, actually not something people agree on at all.
(And personally I don't think we are at that point yet, in terms of health and medical understanding.)
They’re not the only animals doing this kind of thing. Animals not in captivity generally seem to enjoy their lives. Deprive an animal of dopamine and it will surely start to wither away.
If you’re talking about humans, i find it very difficult to believe governments predate chilling with your friends with some palm wine or something.
Pleasure was an integral part of life until the accidental AI that is capitalism started manipulating human behavior for its own survival.
This is patently untrue. People in rich countries work the same or more than people in poor countries. Most people working full time could live perfectly well on a tenth their wage. Its a human condition that people want more.
Now that is patently untrue. For most people 10% wouldn't come close to paying the rent alone.
When was the last time an automated flowchart script help line actually helped you?
If something is hard it's probably because one or more steps are hard by themselves, or because actually doing it requires multiple simultaneous actions in real time without gaps to look things up, or because there's an insane number of steps. People have learned from books for centuries, if you can't learn it from existing media,it's probably just a really hard task.
Like, guitar is hard because it's all about repeatable physical motions, you don't have time to carefully inspect your fingers to see whether it will sound acceptable when you strum.
Drawing is hard because it seems to involve a mental image that is so clear and stable one can use it as a reference, plus the ability to translate points in (Real or imagined 3D) space to points on a page.
Troubleshooting tech is hard because of the number of things to go wrong, almost always not covered in the manual, because if the designers knew they couhave prevented it, leading to Google being the best tool, and full teardown, deep understanding, and reverse engineering often being needed if that fails.
We have a water dispenser at work which can dispense regular, chilled, carbonated and cooking water. It has a printed out laminated instruction sheet next to it, because it all works with a combination of twisting a ring left or right, pushing it up or down, and I believe there is a handle too. That's bad design.
This is the reverse of "automate anything that can be automated", this is bringing the humans back in a step by step process.
The coffee machine is just an example, don't get hung up on it. If you think all possible coffee machines should be made so simple that they don't need instructions (1), then mentally replace it with a machine that you can accept will need instructions, like a 3D printer or a CNC lathe or whatever.
(1) a fallacy in itself because even if you are a genius who finds every well designed machine obvious to use, there are plenty of us who are not geniuses and require instructions even for the simplest of mechanisms.
A product team and dev team encode business knowledge and flows into code and leverage a human to make judgement calls when necessary. The outcome is a program that can either be used by skilled workers to multiply their output or allow unskilled workers to perform tasks that would have formerly required a skilled worker to accomplish.
There are already (arguably) optimized flows and design patterns for application UX. Companies have already spent years trying to build and optimize this "human programming". Dev teams have developed many DSLs to make it easier to encode business logic into their applications more quickly.
I am not saying line of business applications are good or near some optimal final form, but to call "human programming" untapped is taking a very narrow view of the definition.
Isn't some of the magic of being an agent in this world taken away when you are following a set of instructions to a T?
Unable to make decisions for yourself without consulting your "virtual assistant" about something as trivial as if you can use y milk in place of x milk seems like a sad reality to me
Educators, generals, dieticians,
psychologists, and parents program. Armies,
students, and some societies are programmed.I've been mulling on it for a while now.
it's not untapped. it's just slightly more effective if I don't tell you I'm trying to program you.
in any case, in terms of "ultimate principles" all meaningful information is in the end an expression of some form of control;
more precisely, we can only observe (as a 3rd "objective" party) the results of meaningful exchanges between interacting entities by noticing (measuring) changing behaviors whenever "meaning" gets transferred from one to another entity; i.e. I'm pointing out that (similarly to electricity/magnetism) we can never observe "meaning" directly, but can measure its effects on beings interacting with the "fields of meaning" ahahhaha.