More than 5 years ago, in Barbour County, West Virginia, Alderson Broaddus University was completely shut down due to a reported terrorist threat.
Eight thousand kilometers away, in Europe, I find myself right at the center of the aforementioned events where an application I authored is being put to the test—an application that could potentially prevent (or at least minimize) the number of casualties, and which at that exact moment is not working.
I will tell you a story about the illusion of knowledge, expertise, and experience, and about the price paid when that illusion shatters.
After that, I will ask you how many similar stories, with varying degrees of fortunate outcomes, will be told in the future when a probabilistic machine predicting the next token writes, verifies, tests, and deploys code to production while our hands slowly loosen their grip on the steering wheel.