Nope. I built and programmed a single-board Kim-1 in high school and went on to an Apple II then Commodore 64.
The thing is 80's hobby programmers also read a ton of science fiction which, unironically, was very pro-tech but also explored the social impact of tech.
Case-in-point: My favorite AI novel of that era was "The Adolescence of P1" which starts with an engineer innocently prompting P1 to dig a foundation for a moonbase as efficiently as possible. He expected it to start deploying robot construction equipment and take a week or two. Instead, P1 redirects a massive cargo of moon rocks in orbit and blows a crater in a few minutes from space.
From there, P1 propagates itself and gains control of everything from the global "Internet" to power grids to all nuclear bases and satellites. Not good.
We THOUGHT numerous cautionary tales like this would inspire rigorous "alignment" guardrails and controls once we needed them but, no. ... It turns out even when AI experts and CEOs themselves are saying there's a "10% chance of total human annihilation" by AI, our government and the tech oligarchs are kind of, sort of, thinking about, maybe, instituting controls.
Fiction is not real, but I would add a "yet" into the sentence.
But that's not the point. Science Fiction (speaking generally) takes a specific hypothesis, and then imagines a society that derives from that.
For example "The Space Merchants" (Pohl & Kornbluth, 1952) imagined a world run by advertising. Or "Profession" (Azimov, 1957) explores education. I offer these as the tip of a large iceberg.
Science Fiction is seldom about science. It's mostly about people and society interacting with that science. It doesn't seek to predict science advances, but rather predict how those advances will affect the society we live in.
Sure Terminator isn't real. (And frankly not something I'm terribly worried about.) But the impact of AI on society is real, and that impact will manifest in ways we have predicted (eg the movie Her) and in ways we've not yet explored.
What happens when there are no engineers left? Nobody knows how to use a slide-rule anymore because we have machines to do that work. What happens when building a bridge becomes "Claude please design a bridge", which it does then perfectly well? Why should coders, or accountants, or engineers even exist in a world where AI exists?
That's the kind of question Science Fiction sets out to answer.
The thing is 80's hobby programmers also read a ton of science fiction which, unironically, was very pro-tech but also explored the social impact of tech.
Case-in-point: My favorite AI novel of that era was "The Adolescence of P1" which starts with an engineer innocently prompting P1 to dig a foundation for a moonbase as efficiently as possible. He expected it to start deploying robot construction equipment and take a week or two. Instead, P1 redirects a massive cargo of moon rocks in orbit and blows a crater in a few minutes from space.
From there, P1 propagates itself and gains control of everything from the global "Internet" to power grids to all nuclear bases and satellites. Not good.
We THOUGHT numerous cautionary tales like this would inspire rigorous "alignment" guardrails and controls once we needed them but, no. ... It turns out even when AI experts and CEOs themselves are saying there's a "10% chance of total human annihilation" by AI, our government and the tech oligarchs are kind of, sort of, thinking about, maybe, instituting controls.
Please, go back and read more science fiction.