How History Can Inform a Dynamic Understanding of Technological Revolutions Mirroring this Moment In Software Engineering

About this episode

You're tired of hearing that you need to pick up AI, so today I'm not going to add to that pile. Instead, we'll look back at two moments in history that look a lot like this one: the arrival of Fortran in the 1950s, and the spread of autopilot in commercial aviation. Both show how new abstractions change the shape of our work without being purely good or purely bad. You've heard plenty of engineering leaders tell you to use more AI and more agents, often in a way that seems out of touch with your day-to-day work. I'm not going to add to that today. Instead, I want to share some history. If it feels like our industry is in a completely unique moment, it helps to look at earlier times that had a similar shape. In this episode, I look at the early skepticism around Fortran and the effects of autopilot on pilot skill. Then I explain why a dualistic "good or bad" view of AI leaves out most of what is actually happening. • Fortran and the Skeptics: In the 1950s, Fortran became widely known as the first high-level language, generating machine code so programmers didn't have to write it by hand. Skeptics doubted it. John von Neumann reportedly questioned why a serious scientific machi