"Common sense is not so common" predates LLMs or AIs by decades or may be centuries

Humans regularly design entire Uber, google, youtube, twitter, whatsapp etc in 45 mins in system design interviews. So AI designing some toy version is meh.

Given we have agents that give 10x productivity gains do we also need to meet in person to get much more gains?

What this seems to be suggesting is that productivity gains due to agents are meaningless because 99% effort goes in non coding tasks which will get sped up by meeting in person

Have we really made "progress" ? Even in 2000 I doubt people were allowed to walk into a bank and look at everyone's account details.

Well we have because that vulnerability in websites is formally recognized in OWASP and has been fairly well eradicated since then.

...How long did it take a transfer to settle in the 2000s

Well…

cash was and is still instant.

When doing large enough transactions that makes cash cumbersome, the slowness is a feature not a bug. We would want multiple reviews and time before it settled.

The value of $100 bill was much higher in 2000 and in 1969 when it became the highest denomination in circulation, so you could transact much higher value with a “wad of cash” than today.

Before 1969 we had bills up to $10,000 for a reason, they served like a credit note/T-Bill from the government, they were no longer needed after banking became robust enough for Cheques/P-Notes etc to replace them.

Paper Cash or Gold/silver coins before them are well understood solved problems, with thousands of years of experiments on size, security ,seigniorage and so on.

Wires have been fast, during banking hours, for a long time. Expensive, though.