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There are currently no signs that what you think will happen will happen. Soft AI is the only place where anything is moving on that front and the movement is i

There are currently no signs that what you think will happen will happen. Soft AI is the only place where anything is moving on that front and the movement is infinitesimally small. Here's an analogy for you: It took more than 1000 years (from Babylon to Archaic Greece) for us to go from writing with only consonants to using vowels for the first time.

ewzimm 10y ago
Years don't make progress on their own, people working during those years push progress forward. The estimated population of ancient Babylon at its height was 200,000. Let's imagine that 1% of them were working on developing writing for at leat 2 hours every week and that those who came after them were able to maintain that level of work for 1000 years until ancient Greece, over 200 million hours of work. That's less time than the official Gangnam Style video has been watched on YouTube. In 50 years, 99%+ of all the work ever done by civilization will be done after 2016.
- nickbauman 10y ago
  As long as we're criticizing the analogies in the discussion (rather than the actual arguments) I'd say the hours spent do not have a consistent quality vis-a-vis solving hard problems. Because there are more absolute hours available does not mean that there are more hours available for solving hard AI problems. There are very likely less. And there has been virtually NO progress on the hard AI front.
  - xeromal 10y ago
    Analogies are always a rabbit hole. Haha.
  - ewzimm 10y ago
    Hard, human-level AI would help this a lot, but it isn't necessary. All that's required for traditional programming to become obsolete is for computers to be much better at understanding ambiguity and have a robust model for the flow of programs. With today's neural networks and technology, I have no doubt it would be possible to design something that would create good code based on all the samples on github. Not easy by any means or someone would have done it, but it doesn't require any breakthroughs of computer science, just lots of data and good design. The tools referenced in the articles are working primitive versions of this.
    - foota 10y ago
      There's an important distinction though between being able to write a compiling (or even functional) program and being able to write a program that serves a particular purpose.
      - ewzimm 10y ago
        I'm talking about human-guided programming without using traditional programming language, creating a design document to lay out what it does and how data flows and allowing the computer to sort out the details based on a stored data set.
        pessimizer 10y ago
        Why do you assume that this design document would be simpler to create than the traditional computer program? Because otherwise, this is exactly what happens now.
        ewzimm 10y ago
        Design is always going to be a part of creating something. What this article is arguing is that manual typing of text by humans using traditional programming languages will not be the primary means of implementing those designs in the future. We don't yet know how to make computers into good designers, but we know that we can create tools that translate designs into executable code that can be less error-prone and more reliable than people typing letters into a text editor.
        pessimizer 10y ago
        My question is how is drawing rather than writing simplifying anything i.e. what is the gain from moving from traditional programming to some sort of theoretical picture programming? Is it that you can draw lines between things rather than just assuming that the line from one symbol points to the next symbol on the line? Does that simplify things, or make them more complicated? > we know that we can create tools that translate designs into executable code that can be less error-prone and more reliable than people typing letters into a text editor. I disagree. Maybe you know, but I haven't seen any indication of the sort.
  - ewzimm 10y ago
    Hard, human-level AI would help this a lot, but it isn't necessary. All that's required for traditional programming to become obsolete is for computers to be much better at understanding ambiguity and have a robust model for the flow of programs. With today's neural networks and technology, I have no doubt it would be possible to design something that would create good code based on all the samples on github. Not easy by any means or someone would have done it, but it doesn't require any breakthroughs of computer science, just lots of data and good design. The tools referenced in the articles are working primitive versions of this.
paavokoya 10y ago
>It took more than 1000 years (from Babylon to Archaic Greece) for us to go from writing with only consonants to using vowels for the first time Yeah and it took "us" 60 years from discovering flight to landing a rocket on the moon. Took "us" 60 years from the first computer to globally-live video streaming in your pocket. Time is a pointless metric when it comes to technology. You don't know what someone is cooking up down in some basement somewhere that will be released tomorrow and shatter your concept of reality.
- mooreds 10y ago
  I wonder if 'leisure-person years' is a better metric of progress (where 'leisure' is defined as the number of hours you can spend neither raising/searching for food nor sleeping). Be really hard to identify, though.
davorb 10y ago
> for us to go from writing with only consonants to using vowels for the first time Speaking as someone who has studied cuneiform and Akkadian, I would say that this claim isn't true. Here's a vowel that predates the period that you mentioned[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_(cuneiform) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_(cuneiform)
sapphireblue 10y ago
There are signs, if you know were to look for them: http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.07211 http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.07211 https://arxiv.org/abs/1410.4615 https://arxiv.org/abs/1410.4615 http://arxiv.org/abs/1605.06640 http://arxiv.org/abs/1605.06640 https://arxiv.org/abs/1410.5401 https://arxiv.org/abs/1410.5401
thaumasiotes 10y ago
> Here's an analogy for you: It took more than 1000 years (from Babylon to Archaic Greece) for us to go from writing with only consonants to using vowels for the first time. Where did you get this idea? Babylonian writing fully indicated the vowels. It always has. You're thinking of Egyptian / Hebrew / Arabic writing. Even where a semitic language was written in cuneiform, vowels were always indicated, because the cuneiform system didn't offer you the option to leave them out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkadian_language#Vowels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkadian_language#Vowels (Old Persian was written in repurposed cuneiform, and therefore could have omitted the vowels, but didn't.)

ewzimm 10y ago

Years don't make progress on their own, people working during those years push progress forward. The estimated population of ancient Babylon at its height was 200,000. Let's imagine that 1% of them were working on developing writing for at leat 2 hours every week and that those who came after them were able to maintain that level of work for 1000 years until ancient Greece, over 200 million hours of work. That's less time than the official Gangnam Style video has been watched on YouTube. In 50 years, 99%+ of all the work ever done by civilization will be done after 2016.

nickbauman 10y ago
As long as we're criticizing the analogies in the discussion (rather than the actual arguments) I'd say the hours spent do not have a consistent quality vis-a-vis solving hard problems. Because there are more absolute hours available does not mean that there are more hours available for solving hard AI problems. There are very likely less. And there has been virtually NO progress on the hard AI front.
- xeromal 10y ago
  Analogies are always a rabbit hole. Haha.
- ewzimm 10y ago
  Hard, human-level AI would help this a lot, but it isn't necessary. All that's required for traditional programming to become obsolete is for computers to be much better at understanding ambiguity and have a robust model for the flow of programs. With today's neural networks and technology, I have no doubt it would be possible to design something that would create good code based on all the samples on github. Not easy by any means or someone would have done it, but it doesn't require any breakthroughs of computer science, just lots of data and good design. The tools referenced in the articles are working primitive versions of this.
  - foota 10y ago
    There's an important distinction though between being able to write a compiling (or even functional) program and being able to write a program that serves a particular purpose.
    - ewzimm 10y ago
      I'm talking about human-guided programming without using traditional programming language, creating a design document to lay out what it does and how data flows and allowing the computer to sort out the details based on a stored data set.
      - pessimizer 10y ago
        Why do you assume that this design document would be simpler to create than the traditional computer program? Because otherwise, this is exactly what happens now.
        ewzimm 10y ago
        Design is always going to be a part of creating something. What this article is arguing is that manual typing of text by humans using traditional programming languages will not be the primary means of implementing those designs in the future. We don't yet know how to make computers into good designers, but we know that we can create tools that translate designs into executable code that can be less error-prone and more reliable than people typing letters into a text editor.
        pessimizer 10y ago
        My question is how is drawing rather than writing simplifying anything i.e. what is the gain from moving from traditional programming to some sort of theoretical picture programming? Is it that you can draw lines between things rather than just assuming that the line from one symbol points to the next symbol on the line? Does that simplify things, or make them more complicated? > we know that we can create tools that translate designs into executable code that can be less error-prone and more reliable than people typing letters into a text editor. I disagree. Maybe you know, but I haven't seen any indication of the sort.
- ewzimm 10y ago
  Hard, human-level AI would help this a lot, but it isn't necessary. All that's required for traditional programming to become obsolete is for computers to be much better at understanding ambiguity and have a robust model for the flow of programs. With today's neural networks and technology, I have no doubt it would be possible to design something that would create good code based on all the samples on github. Not easy by any means or someone would have done it, but it doesn't require any breakthroughs of computer science, just lots of data and good design. The tools referenced in the articles are working primitive versions of this.

paavokoya 10y ago

>It took more than 1000 years (from Babylon to Archaic Greece) for us to go from writing with only consonants to using vowels for the first time Yeah and it took "us" 60 years from discovering flight to landing a rocket on the moon. Took "us" 60 years from the first computer to globally-live video streaming in your pocket. Time is a pointless metric when it comes to technology. You don't know what someone is cooking up down in some basement somewhere that will be released tomorrow and shatter your concept of reality.

mooreds 10y ago
I wonder if 'leisure-person years' is a better metric of progress (where 'leisure' is defined as the number of hours you can spend neither raising/searching for food nor sleeping). Be really hard to identify, though.

davorb 10y ago

> for us to go from writing with only consonants to using vowels for the first time Speaking as someone who has studied cuneiform and Akkadian, I would say that this claim isn't true. Here's a vowel that predates the period that you mentioned[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_(cuneiform) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_(cuneiform)

sapphireblue 10y ago

There are signs, if you know were to look for them: http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.07211 http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.07211 https://arxiv.org/abs/1410.4615 https://arxiv.org/abs/1410.4615 http://arxiv.org/abs/1605.06640 http://arxiv.org/abs/1605.06640 https://arxiv.org/abs/1410.5401 https://arxiv.org/abs/1410.5401

thaumasiotes 10y ago

> Here's an analogy for you: It took more than 1000 years (from Babylon to Archaic Greece) for us to go from writing with only consonants to using vowels for the first time. Where did you get this idea? Babylonian writing fully indicated the vowels. It always has. You're thinking of Egyptian / Hebrew / Arabic writing. Even where a semitic language was written in cuneiform, vowels were always indicated, because the cuneiform system didn't offer you the option to leave them out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkadian_language#Vowels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkadian_language#Vowels (Old Persian was written in repurposed cuneiform, and therefore could have omitted the vowels, but didn't.)