The supposed rise of the machines

New tools often claim to make people "obsolete." Be it creating software without programmers, or providing often atrocious customer support through "intelligent agents." AI is often hailed as People 2.0. But all of this just an illusion.

It's often overlooked that automation always helped with the boring stuff so that people could focus on creativity. That's why we have frameworks, libraries, and SaaS.

As programmers, we're problem solvers. But we should be willing to move on to a new higher problem when the old ones become easy to solve. When programs were written in assembly, the creation of software itself was an achievement. Today, when entire ML models can be expressed in a few lines of code, our objective cannot be "just creating models." We should solve bigger problems in which a model is just a small piece of the solution.

That's how automation can give rise to more creativity by reducing focus on the mundane.