Okay, but that point only concerns production of software, a relatively new “production output”. The statement (“there is no automatist revival in industry …”) would apply just the same to any factory, and ridicules the idea that there can be a mechanical procedure for producing any good. In reality, of course, this seems to be the norm: someone figures out what combination of motions converts the input to the output, refuting the notion that e.g. “There is no mechanical procedure for preparing a bottle of Coca-cola …”
In any case, my dispute with Callahan’s remark is not merely about its pessimism regarding mechanizing this or that (which I called View 1), but rather, the implication that such mechanization would be fundamentally impossible (View 2), and that this impossibility can be discerned from philosophical considerations.
And regarding software, the big difficulty in getting rid of human programmers seems to come from how their role is, ultimately, to find a representation for a function (in a standard language) that converts a specified input into a specified output. Those specifications come from … other humans, who often conceal properties of the desired I/O behavior, or fail to articulate them.
Okay, but that point only concerns production of software, a relatively new “production output”. The statement (“there is no automatist revival in industry …”) would apply just the same to any factory, and ridicules the idea that there can be a mechanical procedure for producing any good. In reality, of course, this seems to be the norm: someone figures out what combination of motions converts the input to the output, refuting the notion that e.g. “There is no mechanical procedure for preparing a bottle of Coca-cola …”
In any case, my dispute with Callahan’s remark is not merely about its pessimism regarding mechanizing this or that (which I called View 1), but rather, the implication that such mechanization would be fundamentally impossible (View 2), and that this impossibility can be discerned from philosophical considerations.
And regarding software, the big difficulty in getting rid of human programmers seems to come from how their role is, ultimately, to find a representation for a function (in a standard language) that converts a specified input into a specified output. Those specifications come from … other humans, who often conceal properties of the desired I/O behavior, or fail to articulate them.