#futurewarning

🚀 Elon Musk recently dropped a 💣 with a tweet that shook the 🌐! In it, he warned about the ⚠️ of overreliance on AI & automation 🤖, hinting at a future straight out of the dystopian 🎞️ "Idiocracy" 🥤📺🤦‍♂️. He also mentioned E.M. Forster's 1909 story "The Machine Stops" 🛑, painting a dark picture of society's downfall 🌆🔥.

Elon Musk’s recent tweet 🐦 highlights a potential concern that is mirrored in the 2006 movie “Idiocracy” 📽️. The film presents a dystopian future where the general population becomes increasingly unintelligent over time 🧠⏳, ultimately leading to the collapse of society. Musk’s tweet suggests that a similar scenario could arise if we become too reliant on AI and automation 🤖, eventually forgetting how these machines work 🔧.

One way that AI could contribute to the decline of society, as portrayed in “Idiocracy”, is by fostering a culture of complacency and overreliance on technology 📱💻. As AI systems become more advanced, people may rely on them for decision-making, problem-solving, and general knowledge 🧩. Over time, this could lead to a gradual erosion of critical thinking skills 💭 and a diminishing ability to solve problems independently. As individuals lose their ability to think critically and innovate, the overall intellectual capacity of society could decrease 📉.

Moreover, as AI and automation take over more tasks 📈, there may be a decline in the need for human labor 💼, leading to fewer opportunities for individuals to engage in meaningful work 🛠️. This could result in a loss of a sense of purpose and a growing disconnection from the world around them 🌍. Without the necessity to learn, adapt, and overcome challenges, people may become intellectually stagnant and less capable of addressing complex issues that require human ingenuity 🧠.

Musk also referenced “The Machine Stops” 🛑, a 1909 science fiction short story by E. M. Forster that depicts a world where humanity has become entirely dependent on a global machine for all aspects of their lives 🌐🤖. In this story, people live in isolated cells and interact only through technology 📲, while the machine takes care of their every need. This dependence on technology ultimately leads to the decline of human culture, intellect, and innovation 📚.

“The Machine Stops” illustrates how an overreliance on technology can lead to the erosion of society. The story serves as a cautionary tale ⚠️, warning against the dangers of placing too much trust in machines and losing touch with our humanity ❤️. Similarly, Musk’s tweets suggest that relying too heavily on AI and automation could create a world where humans gradually lose their capacity for independent thought, creativity, and innovation 🎨🎭.

If you use lxml etree to parse XML, you may have come across the following:

>>> sample_xml = """<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><article><h1>Heading</h1><p>Content</p></article>""" >>> root = etree.XML(sample_xml) >>> title = root.find('.//h1') >>> if title: ... print title.text ... __main__:1: FutureWarning: The behavior of this method will change in future versions. Use specific 'len(elem)' or 'elem is not None' test instead.

Basically, when you use the test if el where el is the result of an etree.find, you get an object of type lxml.etree._Element. Now this object has an interesting behavior. If an element el has no children, then bool(el) (i.e. converting el to a true/false value) results in False. I can only guess this is to make it easier for recursive functions where you do something with the children of an element.

In any case, it means you must use the check el is not None instead of if el in your code. The other test suggested — if len(el) — returns 0 if the element has no children so actually behaves identically to if el!

Note that this works in other contexts too, so unfortunately this otherwise straightforward piece of code:

title = root.find('.//h1') or root.find('.//h2')

will almost never give you the result you actually want (particularly since h1 and h2 tags don't generally have children).

Instead probably the cleanest way to rewrite this is:

title = root.find('.//h1') if root.find('.//h1') is not None else root.find('.//h2')

Far less elegant, and requires calling the method twice.

All this, because at some early point in the development of ElementTree it was decided that an el would be resolved to False if it had no children. The alternative, which this FutureWarning anticipates, is one where el evaluates to true even if it has no children, and where code using if el to mean if len(el).

Note that since September 2007 documentation has warned of the change:

The boolean interpretation will most likely change in future versions, so that all elements evaluate to true, also if they have no children.

After 7 years and a few version changes (it's at 3.x now) I really have to wonder if this will, indeed ever change considering that even the latest code still emulates the old behavior.