We're safe from Skynet

As we all know, in the Terminator mythology, Kyle Reese goes back in time to try to stop or destroy the AI that will eventually become Skynet. And it never works, because you can never stop the progress of technology and you somehow leave a trail that future robots can find.

But what if… you could pervert technology, such that AI could never… ever… be developed. Say you were to poison engineering practices and create unusable tools at key moments in history, that would effectively cause a technological regression -- and prevent any future generation from being able to develop anything other than basic applications with software.

I think… I think… we’re already there. Let’s consider the technological regression of software right now:

* Development environments; the concept of a “press the green play button and debug” is quickly fading, and will become a Tool of the Ancients that no one will believe ever existed; instead, we’re seeing world-class tools like Visual Studio be replaced with wooooooowiiee-I-can-hack-a-text-editor-in-javasrcript-guuuuyzzzz garbage like Atom, Visual Studio Code, etc.
* Instant Messenger/Chat; this is basically dead. AIM circa 2002 was probably the best we’ve had to date; it was an open protocol, and tools like Pidgin or Trillian could be used. Everyone has since closed protocols, and we’re stuck with bloated garbage clients like Slack, Teams, etc. that use the CPU fan to indicate new messages are incoming.
* Web forums; enough said.

All told, we have been moving backwards in features and functions while requiring much more hardware. That’s not how it’s supposed to work.

About the only explanation I can come up with is that time travelers from the dystopian future used some Inception-like device to implant ideas into folks like Brendan Eich, Dennis Ritchie, and Linus Torvalds.

The advancement of the UNIX/Linux mindset of “nothing is intuitive, CLI or GTFO” -- combined with the “modern” development practices -- means that writing code as a job is becoming less and less accessible to people who would otherwise be great software developers, because they simply don’t want to memorize obscure commands and quirks for the shitpile of tools required today.

Also, consider what where the great minds in computer science are going; Anders Hejlsberg is dedicating his brainpower to making TypeScript… which simply makes JavaScript suck less. Imagine what he could be doing if not for Javascript.

And now, I'm going to go back to figuring out how to use the 3 different copies of OneNote I have to keep in sync; Office 2016 is, thus far, the least usable since 2003.

This is some interesting food for thought.

>instead, we’re seeing world-class tools like Visual Studio be replaced with wooooooowiiee-I-can-hack-a-text-editor-in-javasrcript-guuuuyzzzz garbage like Atom, Visual Studio Code, etc.
my sides

It's true, though.

>that use the CPU fan to indicate new messages are incoming.
i love this writing style

checked

I think it's the other way around. These days every fucking smart person goes into programming. That might have gone into mathematics or engineering or whatever. Because it's so easy to get into as a kid. We don't really need that many programmers and the vast majority aren't doing anything that essential to technological progress.

Somewhat related, I also blame Wallstreet. They suck up all of the best graduates to do pointless shit in finance. Literally the smartest minds of our generation were wasted on optimizing high speed trading schemes and other garbage.
At one point nearly a majority of the graduating class of MIT went into Wallstreet. Their recruiters were very aggressive about pursuing the smartest people they could find in any STEM field and offering them absurd $$$$. The tech industry as we know it is partially so bad because they got the rejects of this.

In case you didn't know, a SHIT TON of the financial world is powered by - can you guess? Not C#. Not Java. Not C++. Not C. Not Erlang. Even assembler would be acceptable. But COBOL? Fucking COBOL? It's ridiculous.

brainlet spotted

>t. Skynet

I'm not sure that stopping technological progress with a sort of 'poison engineering' would be effective. It would only delay that progress.
To really stop a particular practice or methodology, I would more focus on the mindset of the people who 'would' develop said methodology.
Kinda like the Christian Dark Ages, that prevented certain practices that were deemed as bad.
Using that train of thought, if a robot was to be created that would destroy humanity, you would have to change the minds of people so that such a creation would never come to be, but not by technological difficulty, but you would have to create a society were such a creation wouldn't even be an idea or thought, to have been created.

Maybe it involved heteronormativity, and people then introduced SJWs.

Old legacy code for boring stuff like accounting is in cobol. Nothing new or interesting is. They do use some languages that are unheard of in the outside world like K.

And cobol isn't that bad. Ok well actually it is. But imagine the mess modern coders are leaving to future generations. In 2722, hospitals and businesses will be running windows XP virtual machines. And they will be running million LOC programs in our current meme languages. And loaded with all sorts of libraries and dependencies that have long since been forgotten. And they will of course be exposed to the open internet for some reason.

I'll take programming Cobol any day.

Everything managed needs to be written in C#; everything unmanaged, in Rust.

Holy fuck, the time travelers went back in time and sabotaged skynet, not by stopping it from being deployed, but by fucking up the entirety of computer science to the point where we will never have the resources to run it?
This shit explains so fucking much, all these koders, node.js, the push against compiled languages, high latency cloud compute systems.
Op ur a fucking genius

>that use the CPU fan to indicate new messages are incoming.
My sides are fucking gone

are these both the same person

Yes

>Instant Messenger/Chat;
How is this relevant, connectedness is still at an all time high.
You are looking in the wrong areas. Even in terminator skynet came from the military industrial complex. The NSA has hands of deployment to half the computing devices in the world. They have so much data they are forced to invest in AI to even begin to manage it.

You're missing the point. Connectedness, maybe, but owned by massive companies with proprietary closed standards, completely centralized to the one company, and only properly consumable by a massive resource hog of a program. The one I consider least bad, Discord, *still* literally embeds the entirety of Google Chrome into a *chat client*. It's about the perversion of proper technology development.

>You're missing the point.
No, you are you, fucking mong. Why would you think that some AI would grow out of a consumer chat network?

I'm not saying that an AI would grow out of a computer chat network. I'm saying that an AI could only be developed in an age where technology is developed intelligently with properly usable tools, and we're seeing a large-scale technological regression with the entire technological environment more or less sucking.

>Shitty UX trends in consumer tech equals a "large-scale technological regression"
Fuck Sup Forums is full of such braindead retards with no experience in technology fields.

consumers have never and will never drive technological innovation. It is always specialist groups or individuals