It’s not a fantasy, we were there at some point and we deliberately moved from it.
When Unix was the norm, everyday employees knew how to navigate a shell. In highschool I had a friend working at the bank. You know what she did all day? Ran SQL queries to make reports. No degree. She wasn’t a programmer. She was a financial analyst.
Now we have people constructing database systems in an excel workbook on a share drive somewhere, but even that’s fading. Now we have people creating systems in Discord and spending 20 hours a week moving data from point A to point B. Tasks that someone 20 years ago could trivially automate. They don’t know how anymore.
We have lawyers paying 20 paralegals to maintain and consolidate a document shared between 10 parties with 50 revisions floating around. We’ve had version control for decades. They refuse to learn. They would rather spend the enormous amounts of man hours doing what is essentially manual labor.
It’s clear that computers are a huge part of our lives. You can learn to use them or you can burn hours - but you can’t opt out.
I mean, Jesus Christ kids these days don’t know what a directory is. We had a short window of computer literate everyday people and then poof! Gone! But the need for computers is still here. And we can’t quite talk to them and tell them what to do yet.
When Unix was the norm, everyday employees knew how to navigate a shell. In highschool I had a friend working at the bank. You know what she did all day? Ran SQL queries to make reports. No degree. She wasn’t a programmer. She was a financial analyst.
Now we have people constructing database systems in an excel workbook on a share drive somewhere, but even that’s fading. Now we have people creating systems in Discord and spending 20 hours a week moving data from point A to point B. Tasks that someone 20 years ago could trivially automate. They don’t know how anymore.
We have lawyers paying 20 paralegals to maintain and consolidate a document shared between 10 parties with 50 revisions floating around. We’ve had version control for decades. They refuse to learn. They would rather spend the enormous amounts of man hours doing what is essentially manual labor.
It’s clear that computers are a huge part of our lives. You can learn to use them or you can burn hours - but you can’t opt out.
I mean, Jesus Christ kids these days don’t know what a directory is. We had a short window of computer literate everyday people and then poof! Gone! But the need for computers is still here. And we can’t quite talk to them and tell them what to do yet.