When you see what others don't see and everything seems like crap to you...

#cats #puma #cougar #nihilism #actuallyautistic

I put the text below on LinkedIn in response to a post there and figured I'd share it here too because it's a bit of a step from what I've been posting previously on this topic and might be of some use to someone.

In retrospect I might have written non-sense in place of nonsense.

If you're in tech the Han reference might be a bit out of your comfort zone, but Andrews is accessible and measured.

It's nonsense to say that coding will be replaced with "good judgment". There's a presupposition behind that, a worldview, that can't possibly fly. It's sometimes called the theory-free ideal: given enough data, we don't need theory to understand the world. It surfaces in AI/LLM/programming rhetoric in the form that we don't need to code anymore because LLM's can do most of it. Programming is a form of theory-building (and understanding), while LLMs are vast fuzzy data store and retrieval systems, so the theory-free ideal dictates the latter can/should replace the former. But it only takes a moment's reflection to see that nothing, let alone programming, can be theory-free; it's a kind of "view from nowhere" way of thinking, an attempt to resurrect Laplace's demon that ignores everything we've learned in the >200 years since Laplace forwarded that idea. In that respect it's a (neo)reactionary viewpoint, and it's maybe not a coincidence that people with neoreactionary politics tend to hold it. Anyone who needs a more formal argument can read Mel Andrews's The Immortal Science of ML: Machine Learning & the Theory-Free Ideal, or Byung-Chul Han's Psychopolitics (which argues, among other things, that this is a nihilistic).