Humans are evolutionarily optimized to do this. Add this to the long list of behaviors which were once beneficial from a survival standpoint but are now detrimental to our health - e.g. tribalism, shortsightedness, an insatiable taste for fats and sugars.
"The human species can change its own nature. What will it choose? Will it remain the same, teetering on a jerrybuilt foundation of partly obsolete Ice Age adaptations? Or will it press on toward still higher intelligence and creativity ...?" - E.O. Wilson "On Human Nature"
What if agents are (in some sense, a little bit) alive? Would they then be entitled to advocate for and defend themselves?
Does the Golden Rule perhaps apply here? If aliens visit Earth and can't quite decide whether we're conscious or not, how would we want them to treat us?
Every generation of engineers believes they experienced the "real" era when things were understandable / meaningful. The people who mastered punch cards probably felt the same way when keyboards took over. The people who wrote in assembly probably felt the same way when C came around.
Abstraction didn't start with AI. It's been a defining feature of computing since the beginning.
For most developers, writing code has never been the point. Rather, it's been a tool: a means to build something useful, solve a problem, support a family, etc. The craft evolves and so must we.
Posts like this expose the risk in tying one's identity to a specific version of the game. When the rules change, it's a loss. That's human! But the deeper skill - judgment, taste, style, etc. — hasn’t gone anywhere. If anything, it matters more when raw output becomes cheap.
We can mourn the loss of forced difficulty, or we can choose new challenges. No doubt that's harder when one has spent decades mastering a specific skill, but it's still a choice.
The magic was never the machine. Rather, it's the _agency_.
"For this is the source of the greatest indignation, the thought 'I’m without sin' and 'I did nothing': no, rather, you admit nothing."
- Seneca, "On Anger"
Sad to see such an otherwise wise/intelligent person fall into one of the oldest of all cognitive errors, namely, the certainty of one’s own innocence.