I see two problems here.
1: Our bus is racing downhill off the cliff due to mismanagement.
2: Billionaires motivate self-proclaimed experts with (or without) arts, management or business degree who motivate kids to rush to the controls to "save the world", always on the hype, today AI. They never allow experts to handle the issues.
What expert, you ask?
Those who know the warnings about an anthropomorphic illusion of thinking machines (Turing, Weizenbaum), not understanding informatics (Bush, Licklider, Engelbart, Nelson), worshipping science (Neumann, Szilard) and forgetting that civilization is not given but must be built within each and every member (Asimov, Postman).
And that even conscious actions without the big picture is futile (Aaron Swartz, Edward Snowden).
When in real life you see an accident, you step back, yell for a doctor, call for ambulance, because you know that without relevant knowledge, you can make all worse. With global crises (climate, pollution, ... now AI) every spectator rush to "provide their opinion and help".
One day the hype will be over, Gene Kranz returns: "Let's work the problem people. Let's not make things worse by guessing." I really hope there will still be anything to save.
My 2 cents.
2: Billionaires motivate self-proclaimed experts with (or without) arts, management or business degree who motivate kids to rush to the controls to "save the world", always on the hype, today AI. They never allow experts to handle the issues.
What expert, you ask?
Those who know the warnings about an anthropomorphic illusion of thinking machines (Turing, Weizenbaum), not understanding informatics (Bush, Licklider, Engelbart, Nelson), worshipping science (Neumann, Szilard) and forgetting that civilization is not given but must be built within each and every member (Asimov, Postman).
And that even conscious actions without the big picture is futile (Aaron Swartz, Edward Snowden).
When in real life you see an accident, you step back, yell for a doctor, call for ambulance, because you know that without relevant knowledge, you can make all worse. With global crises (climate, pollution, ... now AI) every spectator rush to "provide their opinion and help".
One day the hype will be over, Gene Kranz returns: "Let's work the problem people. Let's not make things worse by guessing." I really hope there will still be anything to save.
My 2 cents.
Hi Jonathan,
Not having too much free time, I only skimmed over your article, and peeked into the site, nice one! I see a lot of similarity in the background, but I had an issue that you probably don’t hear too often. I think your abstraction is not deep enough. Although a generation younger, I have been building information systems from requirement negotiation to deployment and maintenance in the past 25+ years with a different core vision.
We cooperate with and via information systems that themselves are cooperating networks of various modules. This cooperation means learning and changing the state of the system through their modules and that goes from copying files, deploying existing modules, to changing their configuration or behavior – that is what we call “programming”. Thus, the “programming system” is just another module responsible to interact with the internals of a module, including itself of course. In this context, the ultimate module is the runtime that allows all the other modules work and cooperate in a particular environment: programming language and ecosystem over an abstract runtime or an operating system.
This approach allowed me to create a framework (the runtime and what I think you call a “programming system”) that I needed to implement other target systems (sometimes in hybrid environments). Testing it with your questionnaires:
Self-sustainability, 1: Add items runtime – yes. 2: Programs generate and execute programs – partial (as much I needed it). 3: Persistence – yes. 4: Reprogram low level – partial (metadata yes, runtime: code generation and build yes, “save algorithm as code” no). 5: Change GUI – yes.
Notational diversity, 1 Multiple syntaxes – yes (if you mean multiple programming languages and persistence methods). 2 GUI over text – yes. 3 View as tree – NO! It’s a free graph without such limitations. 4 Freeform – yes.
This was back in 2018, since then I learned that 1: the hard questions come after you have a working system on this level, and 2: a working prototype is an excellent cause to be rejected. This is too heavy for a pet-project, so I abandoned the main research and use bits and pieces in paying jobs (at this moment, creating a hand-coded knowledge base over the European XBRL filings for academic research). However, your research overlaps my playground, so here is another message in the bottle… 🙂