Analogue Evolution, Digital Revolution: Tipping Points in Technology • Dylan Beattie • YOW! 2023

This presentation was recorded at YOW! Australia 2023. #GOTOcon #YOW
yowcon.com
Dylan Beattie - Consultant, Software Developer & Creator of the Rockstar Programming Language @DylanBeattie
RESOURCES
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github.com/dylanbeattie
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dylanbeattie.net
codewithrockstar.com
ABSTRACT
Technological progress is non-linear. Sometimes, innovation is a smooth curve; hundreds of small, incremental improvements over many years - until something comes along that changes the game; something that fundamentally challenges our assumptions around what technology can achieve. Within the last few decades, technology has profoundly and irreversibly changed the shape of human society; how we work, how we relax, how we communicate and collaborate. And, in almost every case, the key has been digitalisation: the ability to take transform part of our reality into a stream of bits.
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to see the tipping points, to identify the moments when a particular technology or idea achieved critical mass, when something went from being an interesting prototype to a viable product - but for people who were there at the time, it often wasn’t nearly so obvious. In an industry that’s perpetually excited about the “next big thing”, how do developers and technologists decide what to focus on? Should we be thinking about augmented reality? Will machine learning replace developers? Is AI a fun toy, a useful tool - or an existential threat to humanity?
Join Dylan Beattie for an entertaining look at the innovations that really did change the world (and a few that didn’t!), and how understanding our history can help us make sense of the next digital revolution - whatever that turns out to be. [...]
TIMECODES
00:00 Intro
03:55 Tipping points
05:20 Film vs digital cameras
12:52 Music industry
16:34 GenAI
20:14 Books
24:39 Stack Overflow
26:03 Will AI replace software engineers?
31:00 Kodak Super 8
32:54 DALL-E
36:39 ChatGPT
42:24 Alice & Bob
44:42 solidproject.org
46:17 Social media
52:43 Conclusion
58:07 Outro
Read the full abstract here:
yowcon.com/sydney-2023/sessio...
RECOMMENDED BOOKS
Roger Penrose • The Emperor's New Mind • amzn.to/49sLkAO
Henney, Buschmann & Schmidt • Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture Volume 5 • amzn.to/3GAPzN7
Gamma, Helm, Johnson & Booch • Design Patterns (Gang of Four) • amzn.to/3sPJ8yk
David Farley • Modern Software Engineering • amzn.to/3GI468M
Kevlin Henney • 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know • amzn.to/2Yahf9U
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#AnalogueEvolution #DigitalRevolution #TippingPoints #ChatGPT #LLM #Kodak #mp3 #StackOverflow #SolidProject #Programming #SoftwareEngineering #ComputerScience #DylanBeattie #YOWcon
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kzbin.info...

[@Rx7man]

Yay... A new Dylan Beattie talk! And it's great as usual!

[@user-bk9wt8gk1q]

Having books written by LLM and not have them to be declared that they are written by LLM seems like a huge problem. Interesting and enjoyable talk!

[@kalmarnagyandras]

The bigger problem IMHO is the amount of good reviews it has... :)

[@user-bk9wt8gk1q]

@@kalmarnagyandras Probably also bots? 😅

[@passenger9000]

An amazing talk making great amount of extremely valid points

[@edgeeffect]

I still remember when VR was poised to totally transform the way we do everything.... and, for that matter, at least 2 times when "proper, real AI" was just around the corner and was about to put all the doctors and lawyers outof business. (Well, one time at least)

[@akirachisaka9997]

44:00 I do really like this idea. That machine intelligent systems will become “legal person” long before consensus of if they are a person or if they are sentient is reached. Like, if it can walk like a duck, quack like a duck, and can run a company better than a human could… then yeah. Imagine, “SASHA is the Chief Operational System of Sasha Hedge-funds, and she owns 60% of the corporations stocks”.

[@JeremyAndersonBoise]

Count on Dylan to have a measured take on the inflection point of generative AI. Great stuff.

[@jayishappy]

Strong Rabbit R1 vibe with the proposition at 50ish minutes. Great talk, as always, thanks !

51:15 social network where you can add friends only by touching your phones

[@newklear2k]

Jeez, I haven't seen a drum scanner in nigh on 20 years… ironically, while I was still back in Brisbane.

[@josephjensen2789]

Excellent video. You make a great point at the end about using AI together with humans. But as for DALL-E 3 getting the text wrong, patient persistence has worked well for me, by either telling it several times in the same conversation what it spelled wrong or starting a new conversation completely. This only makes sense if it would take you a long time or impossible to create the image manually. You obviously have more talent than I do with graphic design.

[@Rx7man]

I just rewatched this, and as you're going on about the British Airways chatbot.. Air Canada tried that and the chatbot's (false) advice was in fact found legally binding for Air Canada kzbin.info/www/bejne/lZW4pWpribWEhsk

[@dfs-comedy]

Chat-GPT also gaslit me when I asked: "What is the smallest even number greater than 2 that cannot be expressed as the sum of two primes?" It came back with 4. Then apologized, and said 6. Then 8. etc... And yet when I asked it what the Goldbach Conjecture was, it answered correctly and told me it had been verified up to a very high number (I forget how high exactly, but much higher than 8!)

[@vrjb100]

In order to gain more acceptance of Artificial Intelligence in companies, the management should be replaced by AI first.

[@dfs-comedy]

I think there's another tipping point coming, caused not by technological innovation, but by unrestrained greed: Nowadays, it's hard to buy music. Mostly you rent it. And so physical media is becoming popular again because people like to own stuff. (Though, you don't need physical media; you just need to be able to download music and listen to it without an Internet connection... which the big streaming companies hate.)

[@haxwithaxe]

The potential for AI replacing humans is less of a "all X are replaced" and more of a "we only need half of our X because they can do twice the amount of work". Developers in general will not disappear but we will increasingly do more and more multiples of the amount of work we do now and have fewer and fewer peers.

[@crism8868]

That's a recipe for burnout in my book 😐

[@kaiserruhsam]

20:00 give the teledildonics people some more time

[@seanys]

A thousand dollars for a webcam?!?

[@jakesimonds5051]

Who's building APIs designed to be queried by LLMs/APIs that can take user garbage prompts and figure out what they actually asked for????

[@richardjblackman]

bullish on original thought and authenticity.