…every day we wake up and collectively make a world together; but which one of us, left to our own devices, would ever decide they wanted to make a world like this one?”

— David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

the assumption that any culture has a monopoly on moral truth or on clear moral thinking strikes me as somewhere between naïve and ludicrous.

— Michael-John Turp, Who’s to Say?

1952, the Univac was at work processing the 1950 census with a complex program developed by about eight programmers. Other machines were doing chemical dynamics, neutron diffusion calculations, missile performance calculations, etc. Assemblers, relocating linkers and loaders, floating-point interpretive systems, etc. were in routine use. By 1955 people were building 50 to 100 man-year business programs. By 1956 General Electric had in operation a payroll system in its Louisville appliance plant with more than 80,000 words of program. By 1957, the SAGE ANFSQ/7 air defense computer had been running two years, and a 75,000 instruction communications-based, fail-safe-duplexed real-time system was in operation in 30 sites.

— Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month

Our current technology is not close to the information processing power of a single human brain. Skynet is not going to wake up. AIs are not going to solve world hunger. LLMs are not going to take all our jobs away. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t useful.

— Robert C. Martin, We, Programmers

I cannot help but care how you think, because—as I cannot help but see the universe—each time a human being turns away from the truth, the unfolding story of humankind becomes a little darker.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, How to Actually Change Your Mind