Post #37562 by AdrianC on the US Policy board

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Good piece, thanks for posting.

For readers mystified by the reference, COBOL is a very old programming language that was once pervasive in the business world but in which hardly anyone under 60 knows how to program — yet is still widely used in government. (During Covid, the state of New Jersey put out a frantic call for people who knew COBOL to implement expanded unemployment benefits.)

But this observation raises another concern. What if the Musk people — Muskovites? — try to muck with systems they don’t understand, believing that they’re super smart and can master everything with the help of a little AI? It’s not hard to imagine the whole federal payments system — including, by the way, servicing of federal debt — crashing.

I'm too young for COBOL. Started on Pascal and Fortran, would not say I'm competent with either. But I've come across a lot of young software engineers who if asked "what do you program?" will say "what have you got?".

I expect the Muskovites have the usual software engineer's arrogance multiplied by a thousand. Good description of their "methods" at Twitter in the Isaacson biography of Musk.

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