The evolution of abstraction

Technology, and in general the way we build on the shoulders of the older generations, is an evolution of the ability of abstraction that humans possess. Humans grow up not questioning society, commerce, technology and life in general, but with the ability to compound upon and build further on advancing abstraction to a higher level, which shows that it is indeed a tangible technical method that is effective with real-world implications.

Yet there is a part of me that has a strong belief in the understanding of life in an end to end manner. This will lead to better utilisations, discoveries, optimisations and understanding, but this is at a stark contrast as to how humans at large are.

As we approach the point of maturity in big data and big compute, with artificial intelligence getting ever closer towards general intelligence and a bit more, this is ever more apparent. The benefits of abstraction simply outweigh full scope realisation, because humans are computationally limited, in the same way modern llms have to rely on pretrained data unlike alpha go zero which has a more manageable sample space.

Agents

Agents are the latest wave of abstraction machines, which are to take the place of a human in the loop, consulting something, implementing it, reading documentation, and then troubleshooting using tools.

Humans no longer have to be an intermediary layer between these discrete processes; we have harnesses which can take an overarching idea and put it into motion, letting us travel into a higher order of abstraction and thought. This new paradigm does help the human retain more relevant context to the project as a whole, improving overall direction control, while not having to concern itself with or offload oversight for smaller mechanical implementations. It furthermore helps the human to self iterate the idea and direction through the pipeline that makes the human more akin to a consumer, looking at end goals and implementations, as the best skill these days when it comes to this department is the writing of requirement elicited documents, or better known as a host of markdown documents.

This structure did already exist as clusters of human work forces, architects and product designers worked at a higher level, while implementation was abstracted away to different stratified workers. The main achievement we have maid with this technology is the same as every other technology throughout the past, it's a work multiplier, what once took the effort of multiple people can now be done by one, leading to a mass climb of abstraction upwards so people can resettle again in a completely new stratified environment.

Anybody can be a steve jobs these days

Agents and in general, the advancements in AI have simply made being a visionary more attainable to the masses. Individuals can spend more time observing, thinking and contemplating while abstracting away technical requirements, years of mechanical experience and repetitive enumeration. In a similar way of how the printing press made the dissemination of ideas much easier as you didn't need scribes who had to slave away at a desk and also be learned to be slaving away at a desk as a pre-requisite, the current advancements in machine learning will bring forth the ability to build, to almost everybody, to visualize one's own imagination.