Claims of consciousness are untestable, since it is an undefined concept.
We think of ourselves as conscious because it is our lived experience— but we are always wrong to some degree. My mother has dementia and cannot be made aware of her situation, except momentarily.
We think of other humans as conscious not as the outcome of any test, but rather because we each share with other humans a common origin which suggests common mechanisms of experience.
Treating other humans as equivalent to ourselves is a heuristic for maintaining social order— not an epistemological achievement.
Altman’s moral flaw stems partly from an identity failure: he does not see himself as human. He sees himself as The Chosen One. He is transhuman. He can sympathize with humans but never empathize.
43 years in software development: I have not seen the SDLC that this guy claims is predominant.
What has ALWAYS happened is that teams of people come together and muddle through. We use concepts from the classic “SDLC” to discuss our processes, but we never followed it. We did have milestones, yes, which is simply incremental development.
When “Agile” appeared, the world was already pretty agile. It introduced a new vocabulary and some new values. But it didn’t fundamentally change the process— which is exactly why it was so widely “adopted.” A truly different paradigm would have been ignored.
DevOps represented a real phase shift in some respects, and agentic development does take that further.
But it’s always been people muddling through, and you ALWAYS have learning and design and testing. I don’t care how you spin it— you cannot evade it.
Here is an article from 26 years ago that relates:
No one in the whole world is boring, because “boring” is not trait, it’s a relationship. For any given person there is some set of people who are interested in him, and many others who are not.
Do you want to be loved? Then offer love and be lovable. Do you want to be valued? Then value things and be a valuable.
Another article claiming productivity without providing evidence of the quality of the work. How do we know these meeting summaries are accurate? And why are meeting summaries so great, anyway? I never had them before.
Well… I sometimes ask my wife to help me clean everything up. Somehow with her there, it eases the pain of erasing my haptic pan-spatial memory system.
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