The Machine Stops

Will software ever get so complicated and old that it becomes impossible to maintain and nobody knows how it works anymore because the original developers are gone and it was written in a language no young people learn in university and it was made using tools that are no longer supported?

Now, imagine if people’s lives depended on this code. Imagine if society itself depended on this code.

People nowadays say you don’t need to learn math because calculators exist. So the average person doesn’t know much math.

Read the novella The Machine Stop by E.M. Forster if you haven’t already.

The Machine Stops*

Fucking autocorrect

bump

>>1
Check out the size of cc1plus on latest gcc

>>1

Will software ever get so complicated and old that it becomes impossible to maintain

http://ai.neocities.org/maintainer.html

>>5
In awe at the size of this lad. Absolute unit.
>>6
That GIF is interesting. I don't really understand how ASCII art has anything to do with AI though.

>>7
I'm afraid in practice only neural networks work. The symbolic approach to AI has failed.