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On AI and Software engineering in industry

In any complex industrial undertaking, the chain of responsibility and authority is decomposed into a hierarchy. But this hierarchy of people has evolved to mirror the hierarchy of complexity in the problem space. Any complex problem is better solved by dividing into smaller parts and combining the results. And these are then broken into further smaller parts. Quickly, the breakdown of complex problems gets represented as a tree, and the mapping of the people responsible for each node in the tree becomes the organisation hierarchy. What does this have to do with AI? AI is yet another tool for automation of parts of this tree to make them more efficient and increase profit. In the early days of NASA there was a group of people, mostly women, whose role was called “computers”. In a matter of a few years, entire departments were replaced with machines. Some of them who understood the “what” and “why” behind the computations (as opposed to the “how”) kept their jobs and became operators of...