The great AI overthrow of the old-school way of writing software into the new way of managing fleets of agents just brings back so many memories of the Issac Asimov novella “Profession” – the key point of the story is that education is instantaneous via direct-to-brain knowledge transfer, but the education is limited to just one technology and so when the technology changes, those who were educated with the older technology become obsolete because nobody had learned how to learn something new.

The story just seems so relevant to the way people are using LLMs: nobody is learning, or even caring about, the underlying fundamentals. So where are the new advances in technology going to come from… who will be able to invent the new thing? And then, having done so, will anyone use that new thing given that the new thing won’t be part of the training corpus of the LLMs… Or are we just doomed to build SaaS web apps with crappy auth and boring dashboards for the rest of time – I certainly hope not!

Cover image of "Profession" by Issac Asimov