Don't You Mean Extinct?

Jul 10, 2026

Don't you mean extinct?

In 1993, Jurassic Park came out and revolutionized the use of CGI in films[1]. To the public the experience was magic. But for some of the people in the movie industry, it was a rude awakening.

Director Steven Spielberg had hired stop-motion master[2] Phil Tippett[3] to bring the film's full-body dinosaurs to life using his go-motion technique. Spielberg was highly skeptical that computer-generated imagery (CGI) could realistically depict a dinosaur[4]. But Dennis Muren and the digital artists at Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) worked on a proof-of-concept using CGI. They rendered a fully textured, photorealistic T. rex chasing a herd of Gallimimus in full sunlight.

I went down with [visual effects supervisor] Dennis Muren when he presented the T-Rex test to Steven and Steven went, ‘Wow, that’s what we’re going to do,’ and he asked me how I would feel and I said, ‘I feel extinct’[5]. I did seem like everything that I had built up until that time was like, "We are not going to do that anymore"[6]. Phil Tippett

Tippett, who had already selected a crew of thirty and was gearing up for the massive go-motion assignment, was understandably devastated by the turn of events. The Making of Jurassic Park

I have been thinking of this anecdote a lot lately. I see a lot of pessimism[7] around programmers. The anxiety of becoming obsolete is particularly palpable online[8][9].

Evolve

The best way to avoid becoming extinct is to evolve. I liked zkmon's take from Hacker News.

Ride the wave. You rode it when websites/webapps were the wave. I came into software industry before internet, kept changing my horse. You are never too old to learn new tricks. The new wave create new kind of work and workers. Be one of them. Ride the beast, master the tools. It's the same game again. zkmon (Hacke Nnews)

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