Pro tip look for an industry that works for big capable customers that can defend themselves. Helps to create a structure of accountability inside a company that you can connect to as someone trying to have a positive career. Doesn't mean everything will be perfect, but it is easier than pushing against the stream in a company that "serves"[1] a disaggregated (and thus mostly defenseless) customer base.
Anti-lock brakes, if I remember correctly, had essentially no safety effect in the real world. Stability control, on the other hand, dropped single car accidents by something like a third. Perhaps you were thinking of that?
Regardless of that, the threat environment has changed pretty dramatically in the last two decades. I gave up my 2006 VW sedan for a new SUV this year because the IIHS numbers had started to look bad for lighter vehicles.
Back in 2006 the previous gen VW Passat was basically as safe as anything you could buy (according to their dataset). Now you need something a lot bigger to be upper tier.
The new vehicle is a plug-in so in the first 4 months of driving I've more than doubled my fuel efficiency. So there's that, anyway.
It generates bugs in pretty similar ways. It’s based on human-written code, after all.
Edge cases will usually be the ones to get through. Most developers don’t correctly write tests that exercise the limits of each input (or indeed have time to both unit test every function that way, and integration test to be sure the bigger stories are correctly working). Nothing about ai assist changes any of this.
(If anybody starts doing significant fully unsupervised “ai” coding they would likely pay the price in extreme instability so I’m assuming here that humans still basically read/skim PRs the same as they always have)
And the internet has been taken over by bad actors (Meta, Xitter, TikTok etc) with the result that the public is swamped by lies and thus democracy and post Cold War peace is being replaced by global war and dictatorship. So refrigerators look pretty good right now...
I don't think technology is really making things worse. The free flow of information comes with pros and cons. It is hard to imagine that unidirectional communication is net better in the final analysis.
That was written when the effect of big tech's attack on the information landscape hadn't been digested yet. Now it's much more clear. The current future is correspondingly much more grim.
I went to public schools in middle class neighborhoods in California from the late sixties to the early eighties. My teachers were largely excellent. I think that was due to cultural and economic factors - teaching was considered a profession for idealistic folks to go into at the time and the spread between rich and poor was less dramatic in the 50s and 60s (when my teachers were deciding their professions). So the culture made it attractive and economics made it possible. Another critical thing we seem to have lost.
What I take from this is that you dont like reading about history much, with clear exception of overly optimistic religious texts. The religious vocation frequently got you into pretty abusive situation and the #1 expectation was "obeisance". That was what you was supposed to do, primary. Not exactly what person you are responding to is writing about.
Moreover, women never needed to start out as teachers to "be ready for childcare". The childcare expectations were much lower at the time, but amount of chores at home massively higher.
Capitalism + ever more powerful cannabinoid drugs => problems. Many states (including the one I live in) are struggling to limit advertising, in particular.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man_(The_Twilight_Zon...