If only European bureaucrats mortgaged their entire economy on 500 AI scam companies that never produce any profit and sold off their entire manufacturing base to their main adversary. This is how real superpowers roll.
The issue with x-ray lithography has always been... the cost. Just the cost of making a mask for one of these systems makes it unusable in industry. Would be interested to hear what they did to get costs down.
I don't think they'll enjoy a price increase, but I also don't have confidence that the average Trump voter will blame him for it. Most of them are already distrustful of government and this will just validate that. Of course Obamacare failed, Trump was right all along, it failed because too many illegals, etc.
Why shouldn't a law firm be owned by non-lawyers? That limitation seems ridiculous.
Hospitals are owned by non-doctors. Engineering firms are owned by non-engineers. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes the ones that fail are owned by the practitioners and the ones that succeed are led by former outsiders.
Toymaking companies are owned by adults, gynecology practices can be owned by men, wheelchair companies can be owned by those who can walk, record labels can be owned by non-vocalists, etc. Most sports teams...
Why should lawyers get special treatment?
If someone is a good operator, that's orthogonal.
Most ICs are not good at leadership, logistics, product, long term vision, etc. or at least not everything that a well-rounded CEO or owner might be. While hiring leadership from within the ranks works, it's not a necessary condition for success.
Attorneys have a special status before the law. In particular, an attorney is legally required to act in the client's legitimate interests. If there is another person in the organization above the attorney and that person is also an attorney, the same requirement extends to them. But if that person is a random MBA or shareholder, they have no such obligation, which creates a conflict of interest.
Other true professions have similar but lesser requirements. Some leadership positions in a hospital require an MD. Not because the MD makes you a better leader, but because the position involves making medical decisions. In an engineering company, some decisions must be made by a civil engineer. And so on.
The requirements for attorneys are stricter, because the law is a special case before the law. While other fields exist within the system, the law is the system itself.
It’s because there are financial and other accountability requirements unique to law firms (dealing with trust money etc) that are tied directly to the legal professional obligations of the person in charge of the firm.
Because lawyers occupy a quasi-public role in our legal system. They aren’t entirely separate from the system itself. The legal system depends on the enforcement of ethics and responsibility in a way that might be incompatible with a purely profit motive.
This point is arguable of course. On one hand legal services are expensive and often inaccessible for many. On the other hand more aggressive competition and consolidation has absolutely ruined society in a couple situations, medicine being the obvious example.
Bits About Money says similar things about banks: "A recurring theme of this column is that banks are privately funded public infrastructure." [1]. So laws around them are quite strict and different from regular companies.
This is a whole thing with pharmacies not owned by pharmacists, veterinarian clinics not owned by vets, dental clinics not owned by dentists and yes, people have noticed the perversion of incentives.
A lot of time it doesn't work, but more importantly, when it doesn't work the people who pay really can't tell. Law and medicine are very complex and ultimately are near total trust industries. When I go to the hospital I relinquish complete control to a bunch of people I don't know. Often literally - I could be under general anesthesia and couldn't fix the problem myself even if I wanted.
If the healthcare outcomes are worse in pursuit of a small increase in profit, I, the consumer, wouldn't know. There's so many corners to cut and I think a lot of them you could cut with only a small loss in quality. Probably nobody would notice.
If you have the means/opportunity to go back to school and do another profession that you have interest in, I recommend it. That is precisely what I did with my SWE earnings. Take it slow though, I breezed through a harder degree plan my first time around college and proceeded to do much worse at the start when I went back. I had to be realistic and take a lighter course load.
I believe that code from one of these things will eventually cause a disaster affecting the capital owners. Then all of a sudden you will need a PE license, ABET degree, 5 years working experience, etc. to call yourself a software engineer. It would not even be historically unique. Charlatans are the reason that lawyers, medical doctors, and civil engineers have to go through lots of education, exams, and vocational training to get into their profession. AI will probably force software engineering as a profession into that category as well.
On the other hand, if your job was writing code at certain companies whose profits were based on shoving ads in front of people then I would agree that no one will care if it is written by a machine or not. The days of those jobs making >$200k a year are numbered.
I wish but I dont think we could be any futher away from professionalizing like engineering/law/accounting/medicine. There was a deliberate effort to flood the field and lower salaries and developers were so full of hubris and thought there was infinite demand for their labor and went along with it and still are. Maybe some are learning given the job market the last few years.
Despite software being in everything and harm to the public due to bad software has materialized every developer seems vehemently against professionalizing. Do you want a surgeon that went to surgeon bootcamp because "you dont need all those years in medical school to learn how to remove an appendix"? Do you even want an accountant who went to accountant bootcamp to do your taxes?
Obviously there is no way to really predict when this would happen, but I don't think it will be up to developers to decide whether it happens or not. In Texas for example, the legislature forced engineering to be professionalized (or regulated) in an emergency session after a school in a well off area exploded in a gas explosion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_London_School_explosion#In...).
I also do not think this is limited to software engineering. Medical doctors and accountants have faced the squeeze in recent years too. There are tons of (bad) DO med schools opening up across the country that will be flooding the field before long, nurse practitioners and physicians assistants get to do more and more work that only doctors got to do, and more and more accounting is being offshored. The question is when things get so bad that even the powerful decide to actually do something about it.
I don't think that you can really make that comparison. "Conventional" computers had more proven practical usage (especially by nation states) in the 40s/50s than quantum computing does today.
From my understanding, Israel pretty much did exactly this; however, I remember listening to a British military expert on Deutsche Welle explaining that when a nation reverse engineers the F-35, it locks them out of a lot of intelligence sharing from the US that keeps the F-35 military hardware functioning versus their opponents (Russia, Iran, China, etc). Keep in mind that as a nation develops new military capabilities, its opponents will react to this and switch up their own hardware/tactics so these updates are incredibly important to keep the fighter jet effective over time. Not as much of a problem for Israel since they have well established and funded intelligence agencies and a local military industry that can do this themselves. Their main opponents are also not as militarily capable as Europe's (Russia) so that probably plays a role as well.
I don't think it's a matter of reverse engineering. What I read indicated Israel paid the vendor for access to the source code, which makes a little more sense.
(the reason given was kind of interesting, involving a prediction that within a decade the stealth technology of fifth-gen fighters might very well be compromised by improved sensor and signal processing technology, and Israel wanted to stay on the pointy end of that)
Chip design/semiconductors/etc. have been a dead end in the US for 30+ years, but EE is a broad field and other specialties like RF/power systems/anything defense related are still in high demand. An EE with a PE will have an infinitely easier time getting a job working at a utility or engineering firm than any software developer these days to be honest.
