Progress will grind to a halt just like self driving cars did because the real world is just too chaotic and 'random' to be captured by a formula/equation/algorithm.

My prediction is: AGI is theoretically possible, but would require impractical amounts of computing power - kinda like how intergalactic travel will never happen.

And regrading comparison with self driving car they are still improving just the bar for them is much higher. If autopilot works 99.9% if time then 1 out of 1000 drivers will die - so technology has to be even better. for LLM is enough if it’s 90% good to be broadly useful.

Even with self driving truck if one truck driver is leading another truck behind controlled by AI, and just for safety you have somewhere C&C center with one person monitoring 4 such ai trucks and in case unexpected event remotely take over control then one truck driver position is redundant.

I'm sure there's still room for innovation, but I think a lot of it going forward will be driven by rapid improvement in AI capabilities.

In 2008, tech wasn't everywhere. iphones were brand new and very few people had them.. There was no "mobile browser" market share (though we did have SMS gateways). 77% of the global population hadn't even been on the internet yet.

AI looks like it's going to be at the forefront of the next big wave of fundamental changes to society, and it's really hard to predict where that will lead us. But I suspect it's going to become apparent that this relatively brief period of tech-elite empowerment was a historical anomaly, because the AI underlings are going to be willing to do a lot more work with none of the coddling, and they're going to improve very quickly.

Or typescript! I was writing actionscript 3 in 2008 which is essentially the same spec

Yes, gmail might have had some SPA-like behaviour in 2004-2006 but it was nothing like what we have today. Pretty sure I got access in 2005 because I knew someone who worked at google, and it was mostly doing full refreshes between actions at the time, like pretty much the entire rest of the web

You seem to be trying to redefine SPA to mean something else and much vaguer - the use of some specific frameworks, or not being "hacky" whatever that means - but your history here is just off.

Also, jquery was written in 2005 and launched in 2006, and became popular very fast. It was definitely pretty well known by 2008 and of course jquery itself was nothing new, most companies had very similar sets of utility libraries for JS that they used. Jquery just happened to be open source and have a monomaniacal focus on terseness at almost any cost.

Reality is the web has changed relatively little since 2008. It got some more APIs that weren't new, they were used in native desktop/mobile apps for many years beforehand, and that's about it.

SPAs certainly were a thing back then, it was just called AJAX. (Not to mention the desktop apps that were, architecturally, almost the same thing.) jQuery was a response to the popularity of putting interactivity in the browser, not a precursor.

The questions remain the same, not just from 2008, but going back a long ways… Where does the code live? How is it transformed to execute, where does it execute and how it is moved there? Where does the data live, how is it transformed and moved to where it needs to be displayed, and how are changes moved back? When some of the answers shift, due to changing network capabilities, processing capabilities of nodes, or scaling needs, it’s doesn’t really change the overall picture.

Take any mature-ish technology that you use today and compare the version 1/3 through its life to the version you use now. Look at Chrome 20 compare to Chrome 111, or React 14 compared to React 18, or an iPhone 4 compared to an iPhone 14, or a car from 1950 compared to a car today...

The difference is always quite significant. Superficially they're still the same thing, but if you look at the detail everything is just better. AI will be the same.

I'm not. I'm saying it's true for every technology. Everything gets better with time.

As for self driving cars, compare a DARPA challenge car from 2013 to a Waymo car today. It's massively better.

We still had a Moto X from 2013 that my wife would power on every now and then to test an app that they were developing (iOS household), and besides the camera it still looks like a perfectly usable modern smartphone. When using it, it doesn't feel like a phone from the prehistory.

i dont think, if you took someone from 15 yrs ago, and transplanted them here today, that they'd find it all that different technologically. Sure, machines are faster, slightly different, and such, but the fundamentals haven't changed. A software engineer could just as well write an app today as they had 15 yrs ago.

You'd have to go back 30 yrs, for computers (and the landscape of computing) to have been different enough, that you can't transplant a software engineer.

What exactly revolutionary happened in the last 30 years? javascript? (two weeks project)

amazon, google, facebook, netflix, iphone, instagram, tiktok -- execution is great but seems inevitable that somebody will create it. Ok, for non-IT people iphone was a game changer (the first personal computer that your grandmother can actually use).

The ability of generative AI to produce BS indistinguishable from human BS is very impressive but it remains to be seen whether it is a net positive for an average developer (the time wasted correcting it, waiting for its output can be spent understanding the problem better--the typing the code itself is a small part of a programmer who knows what they are doing).

Hahahah. Yes. Who could have foreseen the trailblazing advances in the tech industry such as "television, but over the internet", "booking rooms, but via a website" or "posting messages on a forum"

Don't forget the stuff powering it: "RPC, but over HTTP", "scripting languages, but compiled", or "Key-value stores"

If only I had dared to dream.

The premise of all this seems to be that learning how to program computers is difficult or complex. It is not.

Also, AI will not replace human reasoning in 10-15 years. If it does, it means AGI, and we all have much bigger problems than layoffs.

True. But I guess the big question is what kind of skills you're going to need after that.

Agreed, what John said was a bit of a platitude. I understand the spirit of what he said but he could have phrased it better.