31–40 of 77 posts
When the full car auto-pilot is getting released you said? Oh, I forget about foreign language translation. As a person who speaks multiple languages, we still cannot translate from one language to another so it doesn't look ugly.
Machine translation works pretty well though. At least into English.
Feels like the typical extrapolation: "Look how fast we've done the 80%! It is only a matter of time until we reach 100%". Except that it never works like that, does it? The further we go, the harder it becomes. It's impressive how fast they went from nothing to almost-fully-autonomous cars, but actually-fully-autonomous cars may never happen, who knows? As a developer, I honestly feel more threatened by the energy c…
> Fast forward to today, and I am willing to bet good money that 99% of people who are writing software have almost no clue how a CPU actually works The fact that many people do not know exactly enough what they are doing can be seen in the result. The people whose goal is to write as robust and efficient software as possible still do have to know and control the details. It's like driving a car; you do not have to b…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Machine translation works pretty well though. At least into English.
From what language? Do you speak two languages fluently, so you can compare translations?
However, this bit reads as needlessly hyperbolic to me:
> The engineers of the future will, in a few keystrokes, fire up an instance of a four-quintillion-parameter model that already encodes the full extent of human knowledge (and them some), ready to be given any task required of the machine.
I mean okay, sure, eventually. But people were predicting hand-wavy everything-solutions like this sixty years ago in Star Trek. It's not very imaginative. Not to mention- this four-quintillion-parameter model will be hugely inefficient for simple tasks. I think it'll be a long time before we care that little about efficiency.
But here's a much more near-term scenario I'm imagining:
You need to stand up a new microservice. You have an off-the-shelf "learned microservice" web framework that you reach for. You write a small training set of example request/response JSON, not unlike unit-tests. Maybe the training set includes DB mutations too. You start testing out the service by hand, find corner-cases it doesn't handle correctly, add more training examples until it does everything you need.
Now, in addition to saved effort vs hand-coding (which may or may not be the case, depending on how simple the logic is), you've got what I've started to think of as a "squishy" system component.
Maybe, because AI is fuzzy, this service can handle malformed data. Maybe it won't choke on a missing JSON key, or a weird status code. Maybe it can be taught to detect fishy or malicious requests and reject them. Maybe it can tolerate typos. Maybe it can do reasonable things with unexpected upstream errors (log vs hard-fail vs etc).
This is the really compelling thing for me: so much of what makes software hard is its fragility. Things have to be just so or everything blows up. What if instead, the component pieces of our digital world were a little squishy? Like human beings?
When I was 17 (I’m now 50) I was at a careers fair at my school. I was told “don’t go into computer programming, there won’t be any jobs because the computers will program themselves”
When I was 17 (I’m now 50) I was at a careers fair at my school. I was told “don’t go into computer programming, there won’t be any jobs because the computers will program themselves”
Similar here. It was a computer store sales guy telling preteen me not to bother with the MS-DOS book I had in hand because in a few years people will just verbally instruct their computers in plain language.
At best, you'll reduce the time spent writing code at the cost of greatly increasing the time spent writing tests to give you sufficient confidence that your autogenerated code actually does what it is supposed to.
And if it doesn't, good luck fixing it.
Feels like the typical extrapolation: "Look how fast we've done the 80%! It is only a matter of time until we reach 100%". Except that it never works like that, does it? The further we go, the harder it becomes. It's impressive how fast they went from nothing to almost-fully-autonomous cars, but actually-fully-autonomous cars may never happen, who knows? As a developer, I honestly feel more threatened by the energy c…
I think even 80% is a bit much…