l-man-bda, the ultimate scarce resource

[Francois-Rene Rideau <address@hidden>]

On Sun, Mar 30, 2003 at 11:50:15AM -0500, Peter J. Wasilko, Esq. wrote:
>     In the next 100 years the dominant issue will not be how to make programs more efficient, but rather how to make the programmer (and the End User programmer in particular) more efficient.

Exactly. This means that
(1) we must teach machines to automate that which can be automated
(2) as automation progresses, we must focus our minds on that
 which cannot be automated (yet) -- and structure them accordingly
(3) as we understand these mind structures, we can automate them in turn,
 in an exponential progress loop.

Problems:
(1) cost of implementation; cost of resources necessary
(2) slowness to adapt; increasing cost to acquire furthering marginal skills
(3) increasing complexity; intrinsic difficulty to understand

Solutions?
(1) using machines to automate development itself; open code sharing
(2) improving human learning and teaching techniques; freedom and competition
(3) using machines to help understand ourselves; ultimately, autonomous systems

To me,
(1) is about computational reflection; enabling computer systems to "see"
 and "understand" enough about themselves so as to automate things like
 consistency checking wrt arbitrary invariants, context-sensitive interfaces,
 incremental development of domain specific ontologies, etc.
(2) is about using psychology and social sciences in teaching, learning,
 and social organization for better use of knowledge in society
 (which supposes that psychology and social sciences get rid of
 the superstition in which they are currently drowning, and
 really become sciences)
(3) is about intelligence augmentation and bootstrapping an AI
 But (1) and (2) must be advanced enough before we can do much about it.


> Peter J. Wasilko, [...]
> Executive Director, The Institute for End User Computing, Inc.
> [...] http://www.ieuc.org [...]
>
> [It's] time to abandon brittle architectures with poorly factored
> interfaces, gratuitous complexity, and kludged designs dominated
> by sacrifices on the altar of backwards compatibility.

[ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ]
[  TUNES project for a Free Reflective Computing System  | http://tunes.org  ]
As long as software is not free, we'll have hardware compatibility,
hence bad, expensive, hardware that has decades-long obsolete design