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But everyone can use language to clarify things, not just lawyers. A proper AI system would fill in the missing info with the optimal defaults, and ask for clar

by return0 10y ago

But everyone can use language to clarify things, not just lawyers. A proper AI system would fill in the missing info with the optimal defaults, and ask for clarification for the rest. Every new edge case added makes the system smarter

marvin 10y ago
This is exactly what a skilled developer does. In principle you could probably design a system that does it automatically. Sounds like strong AI territory though.
mattkrause 10y ago
Of course! I'm not saying that only people with 180s on the LSAT will be able to program. Instead, I'm arguing that writing an air-tight specification of your goals can be tricky, time-consuming and requires a certain mind-set, even if we assume perfect natural language understanding and ignore all the implementation details by saying that wizards...err...deep neural networks solve those issues. As support for this argument, writing contracts is still tricky, despite everyone involved having perfect language understanding and the sort of generalized intelligence that computers lack. Therefore, if there ever is an English-to-bytecode compiler, I expect that the "programs" written for it will look much more like a contract with lots of awkward but precise language and much less like "Yo Siri, build me a chatbot." You can call the person who spends all day drafting these things and interacting with the code-generating software something other than a programmer if you want, but if the shoe fits.... I'm also not convinced that optimal defaults exist for many things. You could certainly recommend a data structure based on the way it is accessed (if it's always being queried for the min, throw it in a heap, but use an array or hash table for random access), but how do you gradient-descent your way to a fun original video game without also assuming a decent model of human psychology? At some point, you have to specify that "when the player does X, Y happens", which is programming.

by return0 10y ago

marvin 10y ago

This is exactly what a skilled developer does. In principle you could probably design a system that does it automatically. Sounds like strong AI territory though.

mattkrause 10y ago

Of course! I'm not saying that only people with 180s on the LSAT will be able to program. Instead, I'm arguing that writing an air-tight specification of your goals can be tricky, time-consuming and requires a certain mind-set, even if we assume perfect natural language understanding and ignore all the implementation details by saying that wizards...err...deep neural networks solve those issues. As support for this argument, writing contracts is still tricky, despite everyone involved having perfect language understanding and the sort of generalized intelligence that computers lack. Therefore, if there ever is an English-to-bytecode compiler, I expect that the "programs" written for it will look much more like a contract with lots of awkward but precise language and much less like "Yo Siri, build me a chatbot." You can call the person who spends all day drafting these things and interacting with the code-generating software something other than a programmer if you want, but if the shoe fits.... I'm also not convinced that optimal defaults exist for many things. You could certainly recommend a data structure based on the way it is accessed (if it's always being queried for the min, throw it in a heap, but use an array or hash table for random access), but how do you gradient-descent your way to a fun original video game without also assuming a decent model of human psychology? At some point, you have to specify that "when the player does X, Y happens", which is programming.