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Comment by TonyTrapp | Hacker News Reader

I often wonder how much time it will take for the scenario you described to collapse. Once computer systems become completely closed and programming becomes unavailable to the lowly user, how are new skilled people going to find their way into the system? Will it die when the last developers of the system retire?

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That's the oft-forgotten other half of the premise of the film Idiocracy. Everybody talks about the (inaccurate and unrealistic) premise of natural selection favouring unintelligence, but overlook how the future society is supported by ageing high-tech easy-to-use machinery which is falling apart.

Maybe Idiocracy was right, but not for the reason most people assume...

Eventually, but it could live on for a long time. Reminds me of a story in the Dying Earth series, can't quite remember which one. Cugel visits a city where no one knows how the technology works anymore. Some of it still works, other stuff is breaking down, and the populace thinks that's because the magic is fading away. Or maybe I'm confusing different stories. Anyway, something along this line probably.

Having systems working without maintenance would be a true breakthrough.

Most machines will work for a while without maintenance. See: All the cars on the road that have never had so much as an oil change.

Similar stories have been around for a while, (I think) starting with "The Machine Stops" by E. M. Forster in 1909:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops

"City of Ember" is another version of this type of story:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Ember

I'l pretty sure that there's at least one Star Trek TOS episode like this too.

It’ll be something you’ll need to go to university for. You wouldn’t be able to learn it for free at home.

And that's the part where I think it collapses. In many fields (not just computer science), the best people get interested and tinker with the subject early on. Overall, if the only way to learn how to develop and maintain "the system" is in their 20s at a university (or apprenticeship or whatever), I think the quality will deteriorate over time and the system will become unmaintainable.

> quality will deteriorate over time

Jonathan Blow's talk "Preventing the Collapse of Civilization"[1] makes a good argument that software quality has already suffered significant deterioration. We've just gotten used to software not working. Reboot the computer; refresh the webpage; spend the morning trying to work around the "improvements", regressions, and removed features in the software that forced an update.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko

The 'ole "student license". I remember that one from my days learning SAS. Getting out of the clutches of that awful SAS licensing was how I discovered the world of open source and R and Python.

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