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"Self-driving cars" and Fusion power also come to mind. With the advent of photography, it was widely believed that drawing and painting would vanish as art forms. Radio would obsolete newspapers, becoming obsolete themselves with television, and so on. Don't believe the hype.
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My car has driven me back and forth with no issues for 6 months now. But yes it's been a long time coming.
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And yet.. my car was surrounded by 5 self-driving cars with no people in them on the way to work on Thursday.
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And your ability to go your own way is only temporary and due to inertia. Today, for a while, you can still buy a vehicle that requires a driver and doesn't look and perform exactly like every other waymo.

But that's only because self driving cars are still new and incomplete. It's still the transition period.

I already can't buy the car I want with a manual transmission. There are still a few cars that I could get with one, but the number is both already small and getting smaller every year. And none of those few are the one I want, even though it was available previously.

I already can't buy any (new) car that doesn't have a permanent internet connection with data collection and remote control by people that don't own the car even though I pay full cash without even financing, let alone the particular one I want. (I can, for now, at least break the on board internet connection after I buy the car without disabling the whole car, but that is just a trivial software change away, in software I don't get to see or edit.)

It's hardly unreasonable to suggest that in some time you won't be able to avoid having a car that drives itself, and even be legally compelled to let the car drive itself because you can't afford the insurance or legal risk or straight up fines.

And forget customizing or personalizing. That's right out.

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Waymos require a highly mapped environment to function safely in. Not to take away from what Waymo has accomplished, but it's a far more bounded problem that what the "self driving" promise has been.
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And they still rely on human operators for some maneuvers, as we learned this week.
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Just like in "I, Robot?"
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Um.. Claude Code has been out less than a YEAR.. and the lift in capability in the last year has been dramatic.

It does seem probable based on progress that in 1-2 more model generations there will be little need to hand code in almost any domain. Personally I already don't hand code AT ALL, but there are certainly domains/languages that are under performing right now.

Right now with the changes this week (Opus 4.6 and "teams mode") it already is another step function up in capability.

Teams mode is probably only good for greenfield or "green module" development but I'm watching a team of 5 AI's collaborating and building out an application module by module. This is net new capability for the tool THIS WEEK (Yes I am aware of earlier examples).

I don't understand how people can look at this and then be dismissive of future progress, but human psychology is a rich and non-logical landscape.

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Because then you won't be important, the model will be important. And then everyone will have to use their model, that's their dream. Why isn't that your nightmare too? Why will you be special if it can just code whatever it needs to code? Then anthropic can just employ all the programmers that will ever be needed, to just review new skills and modules of code. It was predicted early on there would be a need for about six big computers worldwide. Well now we'll just need six AI shepherds. And then literally everyone else will forget how anything works because it will be a solved problem. People already treat computers like magic, it will literally become a dark art. And I guess it's fine, what can we do, right? Go with the flow I guess. "If I don't , someone else will. Maybe I can be one of those six real people at Anthropic".
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