I foresee technogenic catastrophe

And this is why:

In Perl, C, C++, PHP, and pretty much every programming language worthy of the name, declaring an empty 2d array is generally something like:

int my_2d_array[colums][rows];

In numpty fuckwit Python it's:

my_2d_array = np.empty( shape = (10,10), dtype='int')

Every programming language has something like this in it. In C++, for example, it is impossible to pass multi-dimensional arrays to subroutines. And so forth.



When I was young, and stupid, I worshipped people who created computers and wrote programming languages.

They were as gods to me. I'd read books like "The soul of a new machine" and fanboy out... and then one day, I realised that the people who write programming languages and design computers aren't gods, they ain't even ordinary slobs who put their trousers on one leg at a time  - they're fucking idiots who happen to be in possession of a better short term memory and more ability to concentrate than everyone else, but that's about it. And worst of all, they think they're fucking geniuses!

The writer Michael Chricton calls it "thintelligence" - a very specific, very narrow form of intelligence devoted entirely to technology and its capabilities, but completely lacking in any understanding of how said technology might actually work in the real world. He used it to describe the mentality that lead to the fictional technogenic catastrophe of Jurassic Park, but we see it all the time, in everyday life and in the realm of policy (whose bright idea was it to store all the country's nuclear waste in the same rusty tub of water?) - but the most maddening sign of it in everyday life is surely the proliferation of gadgets with unbearably awful dogshit user interfaces.

If you're a civilian frustrated by technology, you might as well know that it's unbearably awful dogshit all the way down - the computer industry treats programmers and end-users with the absolute, fucking, haughty contempt of the unintelligent nerd who thinks he is smart because he can memorize Pi to twenty places, do his 12 times table and program in ten crappy, awful, shitty languages like fucking Python.


And these shitboxes built by morons aren't just ruining our everyday lives. If they were, that would just be tough shit - but they're not. They're flying aircraft straight into the ground. They're driving cars into stalled traffic at full speed. And soon, they'll be programmed to kill people simply because they're in the way of some yuppies' Merc.

This, of course, is the problem with the idea of letting experts decide everything. They're assholes too.