100%. Not a new phenomenon at all, just the latest bogeyman for the inevitabilists to point to in their predestination arguments.
My aim is only to point it out - people are quite comfortable rejecting predestination arguments coming from eg. physics or religion, but are still awed by “AI is inevitable”.
It's inevitable not because of any inherent quality of the tech, but because investors are demanding it be so and creating the incentives for 'inevitability'.
I also think EV vehicles are an 'inevitability' but I am much less offended by the EV future, as they still have to outcompete IC's, there are transitional options (hybrids), there are public transport alternatives, and at least local regulations appear to be keeping pace with the technical change.
AI inevitabilty so far seems to be only inevitable because I can't actually opt out of it when it gets pushed on me.
To use John Adams' separation of republics into the categories of "the many, the few, and the one," the few in our current day are unusually conflict-adverse both among each other and with respect to the people.
When faced with the current crisis, they look at the options for investment and they see some that will involve a lot of conflict with the many (changing the industrial employment arrangement, rearranging state entitlements), and they see see some that avoid conflict or change. Our few as they are got that way by outsourcing anything physical and material as much as possible and making everything "into computer." So they promote a self serving spiritual belief that because overinvesting in computers got them to their elevated positions, that even more computer is what the world needs more than anything else.
This approach also mollifies the many in a way that would be easily recognizable in any century to any classically educated person. Our few do not really know what the many are there for, but they figure that they might as well extract from the many through e.g. sports gambling apps and LLM girlfriends.
You see, this sounds really cool. So what kinds of problems fit COBOL? And why did "we" conclude from this that general purpose languages were the solution, rather than building many different languages for specific problems? Did "we" even conclude that, or is that just my impression, 50 years later?
From what I remember of the times, it was the PC that killed COBOL.
COBOL was considered a "serious" language, for "serious" business problems running on "serious" hardware that lived in a server room.
PC's were not "serious", and lived on people's desks, running Lotus123 and other such trivial tools.
Then VB/Delphi/etc came along, and a generation of developers writing "little" applications directly for the desktop (of which I was one, and it was fun). You could consider these as specialist DSL's for user interactive applications. But that was not the general view.
Writing an application in VB was several orders of magnitude cheaper than writing the equivalent in COBOL, and if you squinted hard enough from a non-technical point of view they did the same job. Non-COBOL developers started writing server applications that lived on a PC in the server room for a fraction of the cost of a COBOL application living on a mainframe.
And that was that.
Except, of course, for the large institutions (banks being the obvious example) who had invested millions in developing their core applications in COBOL running on mainframes. The cost of rewriting this for no reason (because the original still works) is prohibitive. Y2K gave them a shock, but also added to the sunk cost. They still run COBOL on mainframes, and still train up new developers in COBOL.
> Writing an application in VB was several orders of magnitude cheaper
Order of magnitude is big deal, can you be more specific, did you mean 2 or 3 orders of magnitude? Or what exactly did you mean.
By this logic if writing an app in VB costs 20$ then COBOL equivalent cost 2000$ or 20 000$ ?
Ok, 20$ seems a bit too cheap, let's see, if developing VB app cost 400$. So COBOL equivalent would have cost either 40 000$ or 400 000$ ? Is that what you mean?
> So COBOL equivalent would have cost either 40 000$ or 400 000$ ? Is that what you mean?
If he didn't mean that, I will say, yes, that is correct. You could do things in VB in a day that teams of people in COBOL would take months to do. Many things in VB are basically impossible to do in COBOL.
For some perspective, the reason why many Medicare reforms in the U.S. are not able to be implemented is because the government is unable to actually modify the software. The code that figures out how to bill Medicare is 50 years old, has 8 million lines of code and 1.5 million lines of assembly [1].
Another high profile failure was when CA couldn't furlough state employees because they couldn't figure out how to update the software (a feature, not a bug, for many).
I worked on the Y2K project for a large infrastructure company in the UK.
I was getting paid £50/hour to write VB code and maintain an Access database for the change control system that the COBOL devs used. They were getting paid around £500/hour, because most of them had been hauled out of retirement, to actually change the COBOL code. There were ~1000 people in the building I was in, around half of them devs, around half of those the COBOL guys. The project lasted ~2 years. So, back of envelope maths: 500x250x40x(52-4)x2=£480,000,000. That was just to pay the COBOL devs to amend the codebase for just the billing system.
So yeah, at least 3 or 4 orders of magnitude, I'd say.
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