Whenever a new technology emerges, along with it always emerge naysayers who claim that the new technology could never work --- while it's working right in front of their noses. I'm sure there were people after Kitty Hawk who insisted that heavier than air flight would never amount to much economically. Krugman famously insisted in the 90s that the internet would never amount to anything. These takes are comical in hindsight.
The linked article is another one of these takes. AI can obviously reason. o3 is obviously superhuman along a number of dimensions. AI is obviously useful for software development. This guy spend 20 years of his life working on formal methods. Of course he's going to poo-poo the AI revolution. That doesn't make him right.
> Whenever a new technology emerges, along with it always emerge naysayers who claim that the new technology could never work
There's some survivorship bias going on here – you only consider technologies which succeeded, and find examples of people scrutinising them beforehand. However, we know that not every nascent technology blossoms; some are really effective, but can't find adopters; some are ahead of their time; some are cost-prohibitive; and some are outright scams.
It's not a given that every promising new technology is a penicillin – some might be Theranos.
Author here. Putting a lot of words in my mouth there. In particular, I don't talk about whether AI is useful for software development - I talk about whether AI is useful as reliable software. I don't discuss how AI's abilities relate to human abilities. I don't discuss whether what AI currently does counts as "reasoning".
The linked article is another one of these takes. AI can obviously reason. o3 is obviously superhuman along a number of dimensions. AI is obviously useful for software development. This guy spend 20 years of his life working on formal methods. Of course he's going to poo-poo the AI revolution. That doesn't make him right.