> I am immensely impressed with the progress companies like Google or IBM made in playing go, chess, and Jeopardy, but I keep asking myself, why don’t they invest all this effort in programming technology? I can’t help but see parallels with Ancient Greece. The Ancient Greeks made tremendous breakthroughs in philosophy and mathematics–just think about Plato, Socrates, Euclid, or Pythagoras–but they had no technology to speak of. Hero of Alexandria invented a steam engine, but it was never put to work. It was only used as a parlor trick. There are many explanations of this phenomenon, but one that strikes close to home is that the Greeks didn’t need technology because they had access to cheap labor through slavery. I’m not implying that programmers are treated like slaves–far from it–but they seem to be considered cheep labor. In fact it’s so cheap to produce software that most of it is given away for free, or for the price of users’ attention in ad-supported software. A lot of software is just bait that’s supposed to entice the user to buy something more valuable, like beer. https://bartoszmilewski.com/2020/02/24/math-is-your-insurance-policy/