... when we find that it also affects us - sat on our fat backsides in our air conditioned gold plated ballrooms.

> I yet have to see someone actually argue that you don’t need to understand SQL and ORM will suffice

Well that's because decades of bitter experience has told us all that object graphs rarely map cleanly to sets of relationships.

However, I do think that must have been the original idea as tools such as Hibernate tried so hard to obscure the underlying SQL and database. As a result all Hibernate objects have their own particular identity requirements which only made sense to a developer that knows what's going on under the hood.

I would still like some kind of proof.

Like an early article having headline "ORM will replace SQL knowledge".

I am professional dev for 15 years and hobbyist for 20 years and I might have missed something. But only thing I do remember was "anti ORM" people nagging how "one should really know SQL" - where I never heard anyone saying "don't learn SQL" maybe only NoSQL hype... but no one else.

If it is conscious then perhaps it will human like. If the consciousness is human like perhaps it will have a conscience. If it has a conscience then may be it can be trusted.

But then again, perhaps that conscience will convince it that the universe is better off without us.

May be search is not the golden goose, perhaps more the carrot that brings the user into range of the shitty stick of ads and data leeching.

I'm a bit afraid that although AI is being presented as part of the carrot, it may actually be a shittier stick.

Because they don't know

(that they are an ad company (and they don't know what the implication is)).

What exactly is the example?

Sorry, I'm in the UK so I haven't read the article that the author has decided to block my access to.

That block is the example.

The author has said, he blocked it because of UK regulations.

If UK is making authors be defensive and block their own stuff, or have legal charges, it is little backwards to blame the authors for the blocking.

Yes, well, the author seems to be blocking access to make a point about being forced to block access. Which is a bit, you know. Really? OK, I don't need to read your stuff, I can read literally hundreds of thousands of other pages on the internet without their authors throwing a tantrum.

> Note: This PDF only works in Chromium-based browsers.

I thought that PDF was some sort of open standard.

I don't know how I feel about this. I started programming in 1979.

I went for a job in AI in the late 1980s and realised from the bonkers spin of the company founders that it really wasn't the 5 to 10 years away as I was being told. I went looking something that was going to deliver a result.

I came back to it maybe 6 years ago when while on the bench at a consultancy. I got into trying to do various Kaggle challenges. Then the boss got the bug and wanted to predict the answers to weird spurious money-making questions. I tried but even when there was good data, I didn't know how to do better anyone else. When there wasn't good data it just produced complete shit.

Since then the world has changed. Everything I touch has AI built in. And it's really good. When you don't know your way around something or you've got stuck it really gets you moving again. Yeah, if it regurgitates a stupid negative example from the documentation as if it is "the way to do it", you just ignore it because you have already read that.

Now, every week I'm subjected to lectures by people who don't know how to code about how productive AI is going to make me. Working in the financial sector every Californian pipe dream seems to be an imperative, but all must verified by an adult. My IDE tries to insert all sorts of crap into my production code as I type, and then I'm supposed to be allow it to generate my unit tests.

I know it will get better, but will it be another 5 to 10 years?

Are we 80% of the way there yet?

> Since then the world has changed. Everything I touch has AI built in. And it's really good.

Clearly you don’t use Amazon’s Alexa.

Right now as I eat my lunch, I'm listening to The Rest is Classified.

Productivity is a moveable feast and tricky to compare with the past. The productivity business talk about is the ratio of cost to profit.

As tech become available to help reduce your costs and drive up your profit, the same tech also reduces your competitor's costs and perhaps lets more competitors into the market. This drives down your product prices and reduces your profit.

So you invest but see no increase in productivity, but if you don't do it - you're toast.