It's great to see this post I wrote years ago still being useful for people.
I agree with many here that the situation is arguably worse in many ways. However, along similar lines, I've been pleased to see a move away from cargo culting microservices (another topic I addressed in a separate post on that site).
To all those helping companies and teams improve performance, keep it up! There is hope!
Great! We (technologists) should be using machine learning approaches to practical real world problems, particularly those problems whose solutions allow humans to be more productive. That's what I mean by augmenting human intelligence/capabilities.
I gave a lecture at the University of Toronto last year with a similar point to what the speaker was getting at. Namely, we should be focusing on augmenting human intelligence, not chasing some sort of future robot overlords. See https://adamdrake.com/novel-results-considered-harmful.html
This was the approach Douglas Englebart took in the lead up to the Mother of All Demos (MOAD) and it's unfortunate people have forgotten that bit of history.
There is so much that can be done to improve the lives of people if we simply focus on how to optimize a variety of things that have to happen every day. This doesn't mean we should forsake longer-term goals like fully autonomous vehicles or other things, but it does mean that some of those who are most capable of making a very real and significant impact in the lives of thousands of people are forsaking that opportunity.
There is also often the argument that such near-term thinking will lead us to a local optimum in terms of technology advancement, but I don't see that there has been significant evidence to support that claim. After all, Englebart's demo of version control and collaborative editing (among other things) was over 50 years ago and that didn't seem to stall technological progress.
It's great to see this post I wrote years ago still being useful for people.
I agree with many here that the situation is arguably worse in many ways. However, along similar lines, I've been pleased to see a move away from cargo culting microservices (another topic I addressed in a separate post on that site).
To all those helping companies and teams improve performance, keep it up! There is hope!