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My worry is code complexity explosion. Once we start using AI to add features to infrastructure (OS's, compilers, data serialization, etc) it will quickly run a

My worry is code complexity explosion. Once we start using AI to add features to infrastructure (OS's, compilers, data serialization, etc) it will quickly run away from our ability to understand it. It has already run away, it will now be fucking _flying_.

Verdex 4y ago
I expect that before my career is over that I will be given more than one project to fix that the AI stopped being able to deliver features for. I imagine it's going to be one of those laugh so you don't cry affairs.
- turtleyacht 4y ago
  I like it. We're generating "COBOL" debt for our future brethren as we solve present problems with the most modern tools we had.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  Maybe laugh because you're going to get paid for a really long time. (And then, yeah, cry because of what you're going to have to do to earn the money...)
layer8 4y ago
The code might start to resemble biological systems, which are a mess of complexity.
- ModernMech 4y ago
  In the future, programs will develop genetic disorders, and will need to be diagnosed by programmers with the equivalent of medical degrees.
  - 6177c40f 4y ago
    Unfortunately, doctors might be replaced by diagnostic AIs. It'll be AIs all the way down by then.
    - grugagag 4y ago
      Someone will need to maintain these diagnostic AIs, doctors will take to programming too in some way or another. Unless we devolve into a giant sass where we’ll all become like cells to in larger organism. I have no doubt some will adapt but I wonder whether the humanity in people will survive. AI will certainly be able to make a very good imitation of it though
  - vineyardmike 4y ago
    Considering bugs used to literally be bugs, that’s not far off.
    - layer8 4y ago
      We don't know that was the case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bug_(engineering)#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bug_(engineering)#History
bcrl 4y ago
My worry is that AIs reduce the cost for bad actors to engage in harmful behaviour. The companies building these AIs need to take ethics into account. Making it easier to create fake images, video and audio of real people causes harm and should be considered unethical. We need to strike a balance between the freedom to create new things and the externalization of the cost of the harm these tools inflict upon society. Law makers don't seem to have a clue about the consequences of what's happening, so my expectations are pretty low at this point. Overall, I no longer believe that many new technologies are a net good for society.
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  There’s a theory I’ve seen in occasional security related things where you publicly publish your private keys when you’re done with them. That way later on you gain some plausible deniability related to any communications and data found later. When Facebook was new there were stories about people failing interviews because some employer say a picture of them at a bar on Facebook (as if most people don’t go to bars when they’re young). Obviously that doesn’t really happen anymore, but I consider a lot of AI content generation to be the “releasing private keys” for your digital footprint. Was I at that bar or was it stable diffusion?
- autoexec 4y ago
  > Making it easier to create fake images, video and audio of real people causes harm and should be considered unethical. Is photoshop unethical? What should we do to balance the harm it causes to society? Should it be outlawed? What about MS paint, or even word processors? Were harms caused to society by the printing press? Was it all a terrible idea? AI could create tools that end up doing more harm than good. AI could design literal malware. It's unclear if they'd do a better job of it than we do ourselves, and either way it seems likely that it'll take a human to use the code AI produces (or at the very least to direct the AI to use it against other humans) The technology is rarely the problem. It's almost always the people who choose to use that technology for evil. However involved AI becomes in what gets created, until AI becomes actually intelligent and the singularity begins it's people, not technology, we need to worry about. I'm skeptical that faked video and audio will be the end of us. We've had doctored images and impersonators for ages. We've had hoaxes and liars. We'll get smarter and learn to put less trust in random things we find on the internet, just like we're gradually learning not to believe everything we see on TV or that nigerian prices aren't going to make us rich beyond our wildest dreams.
UncleMeat 4y ago
Yep. Every line of code in your codebase increases the cost of things like refactors and bug investigations. If developers can write code 10x as fast but only refactor or understand it 2x as fast... well then we have an interesting problem.
tomxor 4y ago
100%, Programming is all about trying to keep control, trying to prevent it from becoming chaos, trying to ensure you still understand the program you wrote at the end of the day. With out doing any of this it's easy, easy not to care... sometimes I do this with throw away code and suddenly it feels like I can fly, I can write thousands of lines so fast, progress is lightning fast, and then it all turns to shit really quickly and the friction of chaos grinds it to a halt - at which point I only validate my normal slow mode of plodding through things carefully and minimally.
bdw5204 4y ago
I think AI can replace the "copy everything from Stack Overflow" type of developer but I doubt it is capable of replacing the competent developer. The currently popular form of AI is likely to hit a local maximum just like machine translation has where it is reasonably close most of the time on easy or intermediate problems but sometimes breaks in bizarre ways and doesn't work at all for the hard problems. Since speeding up the work of incompetent developers by a factor of 100 is a good way to end up with an unmaintainable disaster that will break in bizarre ways that are very hard to fix, I think we probably are going to see complexity balloon way beyond human comprehension in every codebase foolish enough to use it. Just like those incompetent developers create more work for competent developers, AI will create more work for human developers.
- BoorishBears 4y ago
  Have you actually tried using an LM for programming? ChatGPT catches me off guard sometimes even when working on "boring" problems. For example, I was consuming structs from a UNIX domain socket in Java and had some tedious translation from C-types to ByteBuffer calls. It's brain dead easy thing to do, the structs were defined as packed so not alignment issues, ByteBuffers handle endianness, there's a little bit of trickiness with unsigned types but nothing terrible... but with 6 types and writing tests for all 6 definitions, I wondered if ChatGPT could do it and save me a couple of minutes. What impressed me wasn't that it managed to generate the near identical code to my example definition,it was the fact it recognized one of the fields as padding and pre-emptively discarded its value. The padding wasn't in any way shape or form covered by typing, yet the fact the comment in the C definition mentioned padding caused ChatGPT to generate code that skipped over the padding instead of trying to needlessly capture its value and commented that was doing so. And when I had it generate unit tests, it managed to maintained context on the padding and added a helpful comment pointing it out. - It's small corner cases like that which really make me see LMs as being the natural productivity multiplier for programmers. There's a ton of nuance in some problems that by the very nature of an LM, you'd never imagine it'd be able to capture. Yet when you press on it, it actually does better on those than it does on "copy everything from Stack Overflow" problems.
amelius 4y ago
I think we might get AI that can help in understanding systems. We could run Copilot in reverse and generate documentation. (Some people are already trying this with generation of commit messages)

Verdex 4y ago

I expect that before my career is over that I will be given more than one project to fix that the AI stopped being able to deliver features for. I imagine it's going to be one of those laugh so you don't cry affairs.

turtleyacht 4y ago
I like it. We're generating "COBOL" debt for our future brethren as we solve present problems with the most modern tools we had.
AnimalMuppet 4y ago
Maybe laugh because you're going to get paid for a really long time. (And then, yeah, cry because of what you're going to have to do to earn the money...)

layer8 4y ago

The code might start to resemble biological systems, which are a mess of complexity.

ModernMech 4y ago
In the future, programs will develop genetic disorders, and will need to be diagnosed by programmers with the equivalent of medical degrees.
- 6177c40f 4y ago
  Unfortunately, doctors might be replaced by diagnostic AIs. It'll be AIs all the way down by then.
  - grugagag 4y ago
    Someone will need to maintain these diagnostic AIs, doctors will take to programming too in some way or another. Unless we devolve into a giant sass where we’ll all become like cells to in larger organism. I have no doubt some will adapt but I wonder whether the humanity in people will survive. AI will certainly be able to make a very good imitation of it though
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  Considering bugs used to literally be bugs, that’s not far off.
  - layer8 4y ago
    We don't know that was the case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bug_(engineering)#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bug_(engineering)#History

bcrl 4y ago

My worry is that AIs reduce the cost for bad actors to engage in harmful behaviour. The companies building these AIs need to take ethics into account. Making it easier to create fake images, video and audio of real people causes harm and should be considered unethical. We need to strike a balance between the freedom to create new things and the externalization of the cost of the harm these tools inflict upon society. Law makers don't seem to have a clue about the consequences of what's happening, so my expectations are pretty low at this point. Overall, I no longer believe that many new technologies are a net good for society.

vineyardmike 4y ago
There’s a theory I’ve seen in occasional security related things where you publicly publish your private keys when you’re done with them. That way later on you gain some plausible deniability related to any communications and data found later. When Facebook was new there were stories about people failing interviews because some employer say a picture of them at a bar on Facebook (as if most people don’t go to bars when they’re young). Obviously that doesn’t really happen anymore, but I consider a lot of AI content generation to be the “releasing private keys” for your digital footprint. Was I at that bar or was it stable diffusion?
autoexec 4y ago
> Making it easier to create fake images, video and audio of real people causes harm and should be considered unethical. Is photoshop unethical? What should we do to balance the harm it causes to society? Should it be outlawed? What about MS paint, or even word processors? Were harms caused to society by the printing press? Was it all a terrible idea? AI could create tools that end up doing more harm than good. AI could design literal malware. It's unclear if they'd do a better job of it than we do ourselves, and either way it seems likely that it'll take a human to use the code AI produces (or at the very least to direct the AI to use it against other humans) The technology is rarely the problem. It's almost always the people who choose to use that technology for evil. However involved AI becomes in what gets created, until AI becomes actually intelligent and the singularity begins it's people, not technology, we need to worry about. I'm skeptical that faked video and audio will be the end of us. We've had doctored images and impersonators for ages. We've had hoaxes and liars. We'll get smarter and learn to put less trust in random things we find on the internet, just like we're gradually learning not to believe everything we see on TV or that nigerian prices aren't going to make us rich beyond our wildest dreams.

UncleMeat 4y ago

Yep. Every line of code in your codebase increases the cost of things like refactors and bug investigations. If developers can write code 10x as fast but only refactor or understand it 2x as fast... well then we have an interesting problem.

tomxor 4y ago

100%, Programming is all about trying to keep control, trying to prevent it from becoming chaos, trying to ensure you still understand the program you wrote at the end of the day. With out doing any of this it's easy, easy not to care... sometimes I do this with throw away code and suddenly it feels like I can fly, I can write thousands of lines so fast, progress is lightning fast, and then it all turns to shit really quickly and the friction of chaos grinds it to a halt - at which point I only validate my normal slow mode of plodding through things carefully and minimally.

bdw5204 4y ago

I think AI can replace the "copy everything from Stack Overflow" type of developer but I doubt it is capable of replacing the competent developer. The currently popular form of AI is likely to hit a local maximum just like machine translation has where it is reasonably close most of the time on easy or intermediate problems but sometimes breaks in bizarre ways and doesn't work at all for the hard problems. Since speeding up the work of incompetent developers by a factor of 100 is a good way to end up with an unmaintainable disaster that will break in bizarre ways that are very hard to fix, I think we probably are going to see complexity balloon way beyond human comprehension in every codebase foolish enough to use it. Just like those incompetent developers create more work for competent developers, AI will create more work for human developers.

BoorishBears 4y ago
Have you actually tried using an LM for programming? ChatGPT catches me off guard sometimes even when working on "boring" problems. For example, I was consuming structs from a UNIX domain socket in Java and had some tedious translation from C-types to ByteBuffer calls. It's brain dead easy thing to do, the structs were defined as packed so not alignment issues, ByteBuffers handle endianness, there's a little bit of trickiness with unsigned types but nothing terrible... but with 6 types and writing tests for all 6 definitions, I wondered if ChatGPT could do it and save me a couple of minutes. What impressed me wasn't that it managed to generate the near identical code to my example definition,it was the fact it recognized one of the fields as padding and pre-emptively discarded its value. The padding wasn't in any way shape or form covered by typing, yet the fact the comment in the C definition mentioned padding caused ChatGPT to generate code that skipped over the padding instead of trying to needlessly capture its value and commented that was doing so. And when I had it generate unit tests, it managed to maintained context on the padding and added a helpful comment pointing it out. - It's small corner cases like that which really make me see LMs as being the natural productivity multiplier for programmers. There's a ton of nuance in some problems that by the very nature of an LM, you'd never imagine it'd be able to capture. Yet when you press on it, it actually does better on those than it does on "copy everything from Stack Overflow" problems.

amelius 4y ago

I think we might get AI that can help in understanding systems. We could run Copilot in reverse and generate documentation. (Some people are already trying this with generation of commit messages)