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The end of classical Computer Science is coming

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Re: The end of classical Computer Science is coming

#42
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just take a look at the generated code and explanations. A surprising amount of it is subtly but fundamentally wrong because gpt is just a regurgitation engine. The issues may look superficial, but when you start looking at why they happen, you realize the truth. The ml tools are usually great at writing boilerplate that's the same every time. The instant you do anything else, they fall over. They're statistical auto…

Sounds good, but... do we have models in our heads? Or are our minds simply huge and complicated neural networks?

Well, we absolutely have models in our heads. That's how we can understand what programs do.

It's possible our minds are also huge and complicated neutral networks, though I suspect that description is incomplete at best.

But the point is that current tools are trained on text generation. Something that would change programming would have to train on the meaning of programs. It's a rather different task, as it's no longer statistical. Doing it properly requires metacognition as well, to avoid falling into the trivial inconsistencies in most programming languages. And connecting that with real-world tasks that it hasn't seen before would require an understanding of the real world.

I'd call something with all of those capabilities AGI. I honestly don't think any system short of that will ever be more than an autocomplete, because it can only ever fit things together based on some statistics.

Re: The end of classical Computer Science is coming

#43
post #7

Writing a program is still the most efficient way to explain a lot of things, even to another human - I've been in plenty of meetings where hours of explaination and examples only added confusion, whereas 20 minutes of pseudocode or 5 minutes of real code made it very clear what we were talking about. If you just want to do the same thing you currenty do but faster, AI will handle that. But modelling a business proce…

This is a great point. Look at how many IETF standards contain pseudocode.

Also, in mathematics, many proofs contain a decision procedure or a parametric algorithm for constructing a counterexample.

Re: The end of classical Computer Science is coming

#44

I agree with the gist, and I actually just started doing a course on AI today as a result of not wanting to get left behind 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.…

Excited for squishy logic to calculate the balance of my PayPal account and enforce GDPR compliance

Re: The end of classical Computer Science is coming

#45
I think the more realistic model of the future of programming given programs like Copilot is what’s happened in the SQL and compiler domain.

SQL and Compilers changed the goal of many programmers from writing custom extractors or serving as computer translators, to writing useful intents for extraction and actions. You still need to know WHY you’re extracting or adding your code in both cases, often need to understand the substructure enough to dive in and debug when results are unexpected or “not optimal enough”, and ultimately much of the cut content caused by the gained efficiency was ultimately boilerplate that, once eliminated, allowed programmers to take on more ambitious project scope than they did previously, because they weren’t spending their time rewriting a new data storage system or translating actions into machine language for the umpteenth time.

I feel we’ll see a similar progression - these code generators, very optimistically assuming a world where they work deterministically “good enough” to trust with even core business logic, will be treated as black box valid action generators, but in a world where action generation is free, but under-specification or incorrect specification is wrong, we still have something curiously resembling programming - the art of programming becomes one of maintainably chaining assemblages of black boxes into cohesive, maintainable superstructures.

I suspect we’ll say the same thing about code which was of simple and safe enough structure that we could trust it to black box generators that we currently say about SQL,

> Thank god I don’t have to redo all that work every time I start a new project

And, as with SQL, the project requirement boundaries will move to match your increased output capacity.

Much like the old saying “What Andy Giveth, Bill Taketh away”, it is perhaps modernized, “What Copilot giveth, Your PM Taketh Away”

Re: The end of classical Computer Science is coming

#46
I think humans being marginalized by their own inventions, might be a longer term consequence. Short term, we're still dealing with a growing demand for things where people with skills are more effective than any AI. And ironically, there's a lot of demand right now for people that can do some productive but low level stuff with AI.

Ten years ago, you needed a team with phd propeller heads to do anything with AI. These days, what you need is a lot of data engineers capable of moving data around via scripts efficiently and people that can use the off the shelf stuff coming out of a handful of AI companies. It's like database technology. You don't have to have a deep understanding of them in order to use them. I can get productive with this stuff pretty quickly. And I need a working knowledge of what's out there in order to lead others to do this stuff.

The consequences of a general AI, or even something close enough to that, coming online would be that, pretty soon after, we'd put that to use to do things currently done by really smart humans. Including programming things. The analogy is maybe that as an executive of a large tech company, you don't necessarily have to be a hard core techie yourself. You can delegate that stuff to "human resources". Adding AI resources to the mix is going to naturally happen. But it will be a while before that's cheap and good enough to replace everybody. For the foreseeable future, we'll have a growing number of AI resources but it will be relatively expensive to use them and we'll use them sparingly until that changes.

Re: The end of classical Computer Science is coming

#47
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what language? Do you speak two languages fluently, so you can compare translations?

I’ve used it a lot from German and Russian. I lived in Germany for a few years. Auto translation was absolutely essential for navigating official things like government websites, banking, flat renting, etc. Now, all of my in-laws are exclusive Russian speakers. When my partner isn’t around to translate, we use Google Translate’s conversation feature. It works great. My partner overhears a lot of our conversation. She…

Google translate:

===

One day in the spring, at the hour of an unprecedentedly hot sunset, two citizens appeared in Moscow, at the Patriarch's Ponds. The first of them, dressed in a summer gray pair, was short, well-fed, bald, carried his decent hat with a pie in his hand, and on his well-shaven face were glasses of supernatural size in black horn-rimmed. The second, a broad-shouldered, reddish, swirling young man in a checkered cap twisted at the back of his head, was in a cowboy shirt, chewed white trousers and black slippers.

===

Human:

===

At the sunset hour of one warm spring day two men were to be seen at Patriarch's Ponds. The first of them--aged about forty, dressed in a greyish summer suit--was short, dark-haired, well-fed and bald. He carried his decorous pork-pie hat by the brim and his neatly shaven face was embellished by black hornrimmed spectacles of preternatural dimensions. The other, a broad-shouldered young man with curly reddish hair and a check cap pushed back to the nape of his neck, was wearing a tartan shirt, chewed white trousers and black sneakers.

===

"шляпу пирожком" has been auto-translated to "hat with a pie" - ridiculous and inaccurate AI translation. It is only one of many, many examples.

The example above was from a random book. I knew AI is going to fail.

Re: The end of classical Computer Science is coming

#49
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve used it a lot from German and Russian. I lived in Germany for a few years. Auto translation was absolutely essential for navigating official things like government websites, banking, flat renting, etc. Now, all of my in-laws are exclusive Russian speakers. When my partner isn’t around to translate, we use Google Translate’s conversation feature. It works great. My partner overhears a lot of our conversation. She…

Google translate: === One day in the spring, at the hour of an unprecedentedly hot sunset, two citizens appeared in Moscow, at the Patriarch's Ponds. The first of them, dressed in a summer gray pair, was short, well-fed, bald, carried his decent hat with a pie in his hand, and on his well-shaven face were glasses of supernatural size in black horn-rimmed. The second, a broad-shouldered, reddish, swirling young man in…

Machine translation isn’t for translating literature at the moment. Maybe that’s why you’re feeling it falls short. For conversational vernacular or straightforward instruction, it’s great. I can’t remember the last time I used pork-pie hat in a conversation, for instance.

Perhaps you could qualify your initial statement that we can’t translate literature in a way that isn’t ugly. That would be true. But machine translation is a huge asset every day to people in need of understanding important things in a foreign language. Quite a miracle really.

Re: The end of classical Computer Science is coming

#50
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hey, we’re getting very close! I can get my phone to turn off a light after asking it three or four times.

one career later
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