RickRussell_CA

You may be thinking of the first episode of the US version of Max Headroom?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekg45ub8bsk

“The only people that inactive are pensioners, the sick, or the unemployed. I mean, come on. Who really cares?”

Fast food restaurants don’t really have kitchens any more, though. Just “stations” where frozen components are toasted or broiled, then shifted right into a wrapper.

Read the story. That’s essentially what happens, as the economy contracts and only the fittest and quickest can survive doing labor, everybody else gets moved into basic income slums.

It’s not a long read, and Brain’s foresight around what happens to displaced workers is proving to be incredibly accurate.

The biggest risk I see is Idiocracy. Like, the movie.

Business workers become afraid to do or propose anything without AI signoff. Retail & service workers are told to do what the AI says, the way the AI says to do it, or get fired.

Technology innovator Marshall Brain (RIP) wrote a book in the early 2000s about an AI called “Manna” designed to replace fast food managers:

https://web.archive.org/web/20201204080050/https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

The AI just talks in your ear all day: “Empty one bag of fries into the fryer. You have 6.5 minutes, switch to the sandwich station. Make one Big Burger: grab one patty from the 1/4 pound bin and place it on the griddle… … The fries are ready, turn around and lift them into the drain hopper…”

All day, every day, exactly 8 hours plus mandatory breaks, employees on autopilot listening on ear buds.

I am shocked. Shocked, I say!

Well not that shocked.

Hey, one week of anticipation to distract from the yawning chasm of darkness is better than nothing.

I have no statistics, but my sense is that most orgs still depend on Active Directory, Sharepoint, and other services that are Windows-based and often hosted on the company’s cloud structure. And Azure itself is fundamentally a Windows service.

Vertical integration. Windows underpins Office, and even cloud services.

Xbox though, they’ve already pretty much written its epitaph.

Misinterpreting contextually appropriate diction is not pedantry.

sometimes you have to make a point and you just have no other way of doing so

Well, that’s just an excuse for bad leadership.

It was never a question of being technically right or wrong. Linus’ realization was that his inflammatory language was viewed as permission by other people in the Linux community to be verbally abusive to their peers. People who had been valuable contributors to Linux projects explained to Linus how they had been berated by colleagues, and when challenged those colleagues cited Linus’ own language.

What Linus wants is working code, and you don’t get working code by giving tacit permission to your most aggressive & abrasive community members to attack others.