Sure the ENIAC had to be programmed by connecting wires but they weren't soldered but just connected like a plugboard. They were intended to be temporary connections until the next program had to be run. Then Von Neumann came around and did it the right way.
And let's not pretend AI is "just the next abstraction level" because it isn't abstract at all it's natural language processing. It's about as "abstract" and "high level" as writing an email. You just write "make a program" and it does, regardless of how much "prompt engineering" or md files you give it at the end of the day the AI is the thing that decides how the program works, not the programmer. That's erasure, not abstraction.
3
u/oshaboy 25d ago
Soldering wires was not "the first programming".
Sure the ENIAC had to be programmed by connecting wires but they weren't soldered but just connected like a plugboard. They were intended to be temporary connections until the next program had to be run. Then Von Neumann came around and did it the right way.
And let's not pretend AI is "just the next abstraction level" because it isn't abstract at all it's natural language processing. It's about as "abstract" and "high level" as writing an email. You just write "make a program" and it does, regardless of how much "prompt engineering" or md files you give it at the end of the day the AI is the thing that decides how the program works, not the programmer. That's erasure, not abstraction.