> I thought that too up until this GenAI moment, and now I wonder if needing to be an archaeologist will be so valuable if one can get your needs met by a quickly GenAI-written script/program.
I never have actually read those books (though I read some summaries about them, interesting concepts). My understanding is the "programmer-archeologists" basically had an archive of massive quantities of very high-quality software that did pretty much anything you'd want software to do. So it made more sense to find the software you need and glue it together than write from scratch.
And given GenAI doesn't write high quality software (at least not yet, and hopefully never), I don't think that "GenAI-written script/program" would be a good replacement (though an AI archeologist might make more sense, with such an archive).
The world in question is ours but later, with direct lineage from Unix systems indicated. So I see these archaeologists as a glorified priesthood of shell scripters, grep still having bugs, and the glue being programs themselves. Not too different than many roles today.
Beyond that, it is an odd hope on your part for GenAI to never be able to write high quality software.
Zooming out, my bigger point was that this was a sci-fi book written by the person who coined the term and concept ‘Singularity’ and the series includes a malevolent murderous sentient AI virus (IIRC) and it included some reference to how programming was accomplished and yet still, given all that, there was no anticipation of even our nascent current GenAI coding capabilities.
I never have actually read those books (though I read some summaries about them, interesting concepts). My understanding is the "programmer-archeologists" basically had an archive of massive quantities of very high-quality software that did pretty much anything you'd want software to do. So it made more sense to find the software you need and glue it together than write from scratch.
And given GenAI doesn't write high quality software (at least not yet, and hopefully never), I don't think that "GenAI-written script/program" would be a good replacement (though an AI archeologist might make more sense, with such an archive).