Agentic Society and Its Future

A blunt reference, but I immediately thought about Kaczynski ¹ when the idea randomly jumped into my mind.

There is no doubt that coding agents lower the gate-keeping bar for making useful programs. They are powerful tools that tremendously boost the productivity for those who know what they are doing. Language models understand a legacy codebase better than the most experienced employee; and No, I don’t advocate for a human-purism that only handwritten code are acceptable. This post is not even concerned about the “AI takes my job” narrative.

In fancy words, the coding agent is a tool of the future that is retrofitted into conventions of the past. Today, we are asking agents to “do a human’s job,” like writing programs in a high-level language, whose semantics still resemble ours, because those languages are made for humans.

We distinguish between two kinds of technology, which we will call small-scale technology and organization-dependent technology. Small-scale technology is technology that can be used by small-scale communities without outside assistance. Organization-dependent technology is technology that depends on large-scale social organization

TWO KINDS OF TECHNOLOGY

Which kind of technology is Programming, then? Or, more generally, the interface and skills needed to operate the machinery that belongs to the second kind?

The science of computing started long before the engineering of computing; that’s why German uses Informatiker.

The text received some polishing from ai-powered proofreader. Ha Ha Ha.