This came up on the Lunch Money livestream yesterday. The entire episode is worth a listen but here's the relevant sections:

Krugman: "I've been writing some about downsides of technological change and I realized afterwards that if I really wanted a really stellar example of a productive important innovation that had terrible effects on society would be the cotton gin."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJxQbfbpf7M&t=25m38s

Richardson: "I always have a hard time articulating this, but the number of large plantations in which enslavers owned in air quotes, you know, more than 25 or more than 50 other human beings was a very very small proportion of the American South, less than 1%. The majority of people who again owned their black neighbors had one or two enslaved people on their farms. They weren't necessarily called plantations. And they would be working alongside those black Americans. And the cotton gin could have made small farms viable and could have ended human enslavement. And instead what they gave us was, you know, the the Trail of Tears in the 1830s that cleans indigenous Americans out of the southwestern land. You get an extraordinary land rush into the American South in the 1830s and the 1840s. And you get the establishment of these gigantic essentially factory farms. And that's a place where, you know, the majority of southerners, obviously the indigenous southerners and the black southerners, wanted no part of this system, but it actually didn't serve the white farmers either. It served a really small, less than 1% group of American enslavers in the American South. And you look at that and you think that wasn't the technologies fault. That was the fault of the people who um who set up the political system that enabled it to work that way."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJxQbfbpf7M&t=28m18s

Yes, absolutely in a good way

Your question implies a belief that things are 'good' or 'bad', but the reality of the world is a lot more nuanced than that. Pretty much everything that doesn't lead directly to human suffering can be seen as both good and bad.

If you take them at their word, the people working on the current browsers, compilers and databases are all using it

Google self reports 70% ai usage in code, bun was fully ai rewritten to be rust

How long did it take from the first DBMS to get to Postgres? The first OS to get to Linux? The first compiler to get to LLVM? For Postgres and Linux and LLVM to become mature enough to hold the revered reputation they have now?

The jury's still out on AI, but coding agents have only really worked for about 6 months now. It's not exactly a fair statement to make. Obviously good things take time and thought. And understanding the full implications of technological advancement also takes time and thought.

AI isn't re-creating the world, it's augmenting it.

The death of Stack Overflow being a visible indiction: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1926661#g...