From Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time
I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re 15 and 35 is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're 35 is against the natural order of things.”
In 2003 I was 15, just getting started programming, I was mostly writing scripts and editing config files on my Linux PCs. By 2005 I was working as a programmer, writing SQL, VB and C# for insurance salesmen to help them increase the output of their leads business. This is how I got started as a software engineer. It was awesome. In this way I identify with the boomers.
I graduated college in 2012, started working as a software engineer, right when @pmarca declared Software was eating the world. Became a dad in 2014, bought our first house in 2016. By 2022 I had tripled my income, but that kind of decade is rare and precious, and reality set in. ChatGPT was launched that year. Russia invaded Ukraine, interest rates went back up from 0 to something reasonable, like 7%. History was back.
By 2023 I had gone through my first layoff and come to terms with the sinking reality that AI will eat your software job sooner or later. Oh what a coincidence, that's the year I was 35. wtf I'm a Luddite now.
Douglas Adams was right. Being post-35 I now see many of the new technological developments as against the natural order of things. The solution though is to find where they are being misused and then redirect it to support the flourishing of mankind. As guidance for how we should do this, we should go back to Genesis:
Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.From this we can conclude that any application of software that discourages mate finding and family formation should be on the chopping block. Humanoid sex robots? Illegal. The other part of this is the taking dominion over creation part. It's our power and responsibility to bend the world to our will through technology in order to support healthy human flourishing. That means no transhumanism and brain uploading. Make technology that allows humans to be more human, and to glorify our creator.
Genesis 1:28