This has started to feel a bit like the beginning of railroads and then the steampunk fiction of "let's just build railroads to everywhere". We don't need it and there's no use for it.

As with painting, after a while there's nothing really new to paint, we genuinely need 0 new software. We need to fix our broken physical world, our social lives, our kids and what's left of our democracies.

This software crap is done, leave it to the nerds.

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fasterik an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Agreed that software isn't going to fix our institutions. But we need 0 new software? AlphaFold won its creators a Nobel prize in chemistry and solved a research problem that feeds into every area of biology, medical research, and drug discovery. We still have an untold number of unsolved problems related to human health, food production, energy production, infrastructure, transportation, education... The list is practically infinite.

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barrenko 33 minutes ago | parent [-]

Agree for stuff like alphafold, for the likes of education, imho, it's been solved for at least a couple of centuries.

Textbook and blackboard > ipad.

	▲	fasterik 27 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		For childhood education sure, we don't really need high tech solutions there. But what about training the next generation of mathematicians, physicists, and engineers? Even decades ago, computer algebra systems and numerical solvers started to become indispensable, at least in many subfields. Now we're moving into the territory of automated proofs of mathematical conjectures. The state of the art is going to keep improving, and education is going to have to adapt to keep pace.

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morbicer 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Beautifully put. Software is ok. It's not going to fix our broken world. If AI could at least find cure for some illnesses that would be great. Or decrease social injustice and help with global warming. But it's likely going to do the exact opposite.