How History Can Inform a Dynamic Understanding of Technological Revolutions Mirroring this Moment In Software Engineering
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How History Can Inform a Dynamic Understanding of Technological Revolutions Mirroring this Moment In Software Engineering

B2Upper-intermediateSeptember 30, 202617 min

You're tired of hearing that you need to pick up AI, so today I'm not going to add to that pile. Instead, we'll look back at two moments in history that look a lot like this one: the arrival of Fortran in the 1950s, and the spread of autopilot in commercial aviation. Both show how new abstractions change the shape of our work without being purely good or purely bad. You've heard plenty of engineering leaders tell you to use more AI and more agents, often in a way that seems out of touch with your day-to-day...

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bit of history, a little bit of history that might be helpful. If you have found

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This might be some useful background on scenarios that kind of looked a little bit like what

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The last thing you need is another engineering leader, another engineering manager, you know, someone who seems out of touch with your day-to-day work telling you that you need to pick up AI, that you need to use agents more. And so I'm going to avoid doing that today and instead I want to talk about a little

0:20

bit of history, a little bit of history that might be helpful. If you have found yourself in a place where you think that we're in a fundamentally unique scenario. This might be some useful background on scenarios that kind of looked a little bit like what we're going through in the industry today.

0:42

And hopefully this can provide some kind of useful thought for you if you're struggling with what it means to adopt AI today. There are a couple of stories that I think are relevant. One is, if we rewind back to the 1950s, the development of Fortran.

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