I’ll give you a real concrete example. I had to build an app on the Mac, which needed to be signed. I did not want to learn Apple signing procedures in order to do this. It turns out I did not have to, because I got the robot to learn it. So then I was able to finish doing what it was I intended to do without having to spend an afternoon or a day misunderstanding the Apple signing procedures.

Could I have learned these and become a more virtuous person by knowing apples signing rules? Maybe. What’s much more likely is that I might’ve just stopped doing this rather than deal with that particular difficulty. Instead, I was able to work on other problems that arose in the building of this application.

What I am suggesting to you is that I don’t have to fucking feel bad for being daunted anymore. And neither does anyone else. Folks that want to do that on their own time are free to, but I’m never going back.

There’s a lot of projects for people where this is gonna start to be the operative situation. Folks who might have gotten stuck on an early stumbling block are now just moving ahead and are learning about different and frankly more interesting problems to solve. I’m still beating my head on things, but they are not. “did I get this format just right?”

This shift is an analogous to how we took having to do computer arithmetic out of the hands of programmers in the 80s. There used to be a substantial part of programming that was just a computer arithmetic. Now, almost nobody does that. Nobody in this thread could build a full adder if their life depended on it or produce an accurate sin function. It used to be that that would’ve stopped you cold and trying to answer an engineering problem on a computer. Now it doesn’t. We do not run around telling people that they’re not engineers or that they’re not learning because we have made this affordance.