What if 99% of the World was ILLITERATE???
Back in the day I had the honor to collaborate with StockTwits in building a prototype sentiment stock screener.
The process seemed straightforward; we were able to utilize the Python programming language to partition a universe of 7000 stocks into new classes using the combination of price and sentiment.
When you really broke it down, however, the process was incredibly complex for those uninitiated in the dark arts of data science. Moreover, for anyone who didn't know a programming language, it would have been impossible to replicate the screen in a reasonable time frame.
Then we did a back of the envelope calculation of the amount of time it would take a perfect human data entry agent to complete the analysis. That is, assuming our agent cannot make data entry errors, how long would it take a human to do the same analysis?
We measured this by doing a sample of some of the tasks our script did automatically, then extrapolating out across the whole dataset. This includes looking through each message MANUALLY and recording the sentiment data. To give you an idea of the scale of this, $AAPL had a over 13,000 messages for one week, alone...
In total, we processed around 129,000 messages. For our human agents, they would have to iterate repeatedly through chunks of messages that look like this. Its not meant to be human readable, mind you, so isolating the sentiment tag in each message (if it exists at all) is a non-trivial task. Thus we allocated about 15 seconds to each message for extraction and recording of sentiment (we were averaging a little more than this, when you included downloading the message chunk, finding the sentiment, then finding the next message id to jump to). That means processing the messages alone would have taken over 1.9 million seconds or about 22 days.
But that's just half the battle. Now our agents have to count all the sentiment data and merge it with price data. In the end it would take around 2 months, give or take a few days. It took our script around 4 hours to run in total. In other words it would take a human over 5.1 million seconds to run the scan (and by human we mean one who never slept the whole time, or maybe a team of perfect data entry agents...) versus 14,400 for the computer. That's around 360 times better.
In other words, for this particular task our script can do in 1 day what our human agent can do in a year. Its safe to say that in this context, programming can give one almost superhuman abilities.
There's always a consistent stream of chatter about the coming labor apocalypse stemming from robots replacing humans. Far from it:
Right now we are witnessing the SMALL benefits from having a small minority coding literate individuals.
Bill Gates once said that a single, talented programmer wasn't 10x more productive than a non-programmer. A good programmer could be a million or a billion times more productive than a non-programmer!
Its hard to overstate the benefits to society of what would happen if each human learned to program:
We could unlock tremendous gains in productivity for years to come. The flip-side is this: as coding literacy becomes mainstream, the difference between literates and illiterates will increase, especially in data heavy fields. We can see this in trading already: how many young kids out there really expect to land a Junior Trader job without knowing a bit of coding? None?
There was a time when very few people knew how to read. Widespread literacy enabled leaps in productivity that were unthinkable at the time. It its the belief of @marketstack that we are living through a similar moment right now...
so what would your ecomend as a beginners guide to starting coding if someone were interested but trying to avoid going to school or even online school over it
is there even a way for someone to learning coding solo
Wow! You are spot on. Wide scale transfer of coding skills would change the world similar to human language.
totally agree! i feel like this is a gutenberg moment
For a lot of us in our late 20s, it's too late. I will definitely encourage my daughter to develop these skills when she is born
counterpoint: i just helped someone in their late 30's learn python and they've since built some complicated things including some slack chatbots which get pretty heavy use. i think if you are suitably motivated you can learn coding at any age.
Eh, just like most programmers don’t use assembly, layers of abstraction make increasingly complex tasks simple for humans to operate.
There’s nothing wrong with learning to program, but it’s not some sort of requirement for living in the 21st century.
so far no one has developed a layer of abstraction general enuf to replace programming... i do think that we will see a general purpose, non-coding, visual way of assembling programs in our lifetimes. right now there are domain specific visual programming languages, and whoever creates a general purpose visual way of "coding" is going to be a centi-billionaire for sure
i disagree with you here however, i think that learning the language of the machines is a requirement if you want to maintain some kind of semblance of power in the future... machines will be your overlords if you don't understand how to manipulate, create, and control their minds
I didn't mean to limit abstraction to just programming. The analogy works to all complex systems.
You don't need to know metallurgy and fabrication techniques to drive a car even though those skills are essential in creating the car.
Systems that have a human end user are designed to be used by the human being (with varying degrees of success). The people who create those systems will always be a minority of the population by necessity because those systems have to then provide some sort of function.
If you are concerned that the machines will be the overlords, then you are talking about general AI run amok. And your programming skills won't save you in that scenario as the futuristic AI will be able to alter the code anyways.
umm, exactly, there are tools for driving but who holds more power here, 1) the human which created the machine and knows exactly how it works, 2) the machine, 3) or the humans who use it as a tool and just know how to use it proficiently?
number 3 is clearly on the bottom of the totem pole
when the machine breaks, or malfunctions, group 3 is powerless.
group 1 is clearly on top. they can create the machines and tell them what to do
the machines have far more power than group 3, the "user" class.
not learning to program is putting yourself forever in the less powerful user class
Python is a great and simple language, but we need to simplify it programming even further for it to become mainstream.
Hopefully a good blockchain comes out that will pay people to learn and create tutorials.
i'm thinking of putting out some tutorials on steem in the near future, hoping the same thing myself!!!
any subject matter in particular you would like to see?
If you know how to access dSteem through a chrome extension and javascript that would be ideal. Just basic stuff like getting the text content and seeing who voted for a post and for how much.
Knowing to code for future generations is just as critical as knowing math or the alphabet for previous generations. It is just incredible how educational institutions all over the world do not realize how important it is.
There are great tools for kids to start getting involved in coding learning from early ages like Scratch. We just need education policiy responsables to focus on this subjects when they define the educational programs, as well as they, focus on history, language and math.
than our world would still be ruled by apes
dont worry the machines are coming soon to replace the apes
correct
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Amazing and creative.