There definitely is: the rent-seeking behavior is out of control. As a kid I could fiddle with config.sys (or rather autoexec.bat) while nowadays wrestling a file path out of my phone is a battle and the system files of my phone are kept from me.
I think the magic happens at different levels of abstraction as time goes by, and it's easy to get stuck.
Us kids could fiddle with autoexec and config to get DOOM going, today's kids can fiddle with a yaml and have a MMORPG that handles 10 000 users from all over the world going.
It's not the same but I can easily imagine it feeling at least equally magical for a kid today.
In many ways, things like RPi and Arduino have actually massively expanded the realm of totally hackable computing beyond what was even possible for early personal computer users.
I figure auto mechanics contended with this 25 years ago. Now it's hard to find someone to replace your water pump, if your vehicle even has one. Like auto mechanics, though, these machines still exist and there's still a big market for those skills. It might just require more legwork to find that work.
Old farts like us think the desktop is the default kind of computer, but it isn't. Most computers are phones, followed by tablets and laptops with touchscreens, and desktops are the weirdest ones.
I am much younger than the poster you are replying to, but I feel much the same.
When people first contact ML, they fool themselves into believing it is intelligent... rather than a massive plagiarism and copyright IP theft machine.
Fun is important, but people thinking zero workmanship generated content is sustainable are still in the self-delusion stage marketers promote.
https://medium.com/ideas-into-action/ikigai-the-perfect-care...
I am not going to cite how many fads I've seen cycle in popularity, but many have seen the current active cons before. A firm that takes a dollar to make a dime in revenue is by definition unsustainable. =3
"The Ice King"
If I'm dockerizing an app, I want the most simple, basic, standard thing - not somebody's hand-rolled "optimized" version that I can't understand.
In general, it takes around 10 months for people to realize something about probabilistic markdown definitions, and maintenance cycles.
You may miss learning from skilled people someday. =3
Your last point is probably correct though, because AI will also allow systems to become orders of magnitude more complex still. So like the early days of the internet, these are still the fun days of AI, when the tool is overpowered compared to its uses.