3 ms·

smartphone industry is just ~15 years old. We have personal PC since like ~40 years only. LLM as ChatGPT 3.5 is not even 1 year old since release. It took still

by pzo 3y ago

smartphone industry is just ~15 years old. We have personal PC since like ~40 years only. LLM as ChatGPT 3.5 is not even 1 year old since release. It took still a while before fridge got invented and got into mainstream. 200 years is a huge amount of time. The whole industrial revolution started around 200 years ago. 3d printing is still new by this standard. People overestimate impact of some technology in very short term and underestimate in medium or long term

amalcon 3y ago
> 200 years is a huge amount of time. Indeed, but this is somewhat the point? E.g. China was an empire (before it was a multiparty republic, before it was a Communist republic, before its government became whatever you want to call it today) 100 years ago. For a technical example: 200 years ago, steam locomotives were the fancy new transportation tech. There's a case to be made that the successor to the successor to that tech has been on its way out for a few decades in favor of the electric locomotive. It's pretty hard to predict what will happen in 200 years, which means we should be skeptical of both the prediction that AIs will take over by then and the prediction that they won't.
- pzo 3y ago
  successor to steam locomotives are not just only electric locomotive but cars, planes, rockets. In few decades we might use more often rockets such as SpaceX for moving cargo or travel. Sure maybe in 200 years we won't get AGI but current technologies that we call AI will be massively improved and I would bet by that time software development as we currently know it will be a solved problem
  - mythhabit 3y ago
    The majority of "difficulty" in software development is not writing the code. It's specification. And while that may or may not be solved by LLM or other AI tech, we're so far off that it's not even a thing right now. Not long ago, all machine tools was made by hand. When we got vastly improved CNC machines, but we still need the expertise to create the files the CNC machine needs. I'm betting that SW development will be the same. We still need engineers to understand the context the software operates in, and with that knowledge the engineer can prompt an AI to generate the first draft of the code in many small chunks that needs to be assembled.

by pzo 3y ago

amalcon 3y ago

> 200 years is a huge amount of time. Indeed, but this is somewhat the point? E.g. China was an empire (before it was a multiparty republic, before it was a Communist republic, before its government became whatever you want to call it today) 100 years ago. For a technical example: 200 years ago, steam locomotives were the fancy new transportation tech. There's a case to be made that the successor to the successor to that tech has been on its way out for a few decades in favor of the electric locomotive. It's pretty hard to predict what will happen in 200 years, which means we should be skeptical of both the prediction that AIs will take over by then and the prediction that they won't.

pzo 3y ago
successor to steam locomotives are not just only electric locomotive but cars, planes, rockets. In few decades we might use more often rockets such as SpaceX for moving cargo or travel. Sure maybe in 200 years we won't get AGI but current technologies that we call AI will be massively improved and I would bet by that time software development as we currently know it will be a solved problem
- mythhabit 3y ago
  The majority of "difficulty" in software development is not writing the code. It's specification. And while that may or may not be solved by LLM or other AI tech, we're so far off that it's not even a thing right now. Not long ago, all machine tools was made by hand. When we got vastly improved CNC machines, but we still need the expertise to create the files the CNC machine needs. I'm betting that SW development will be the same. We still need engineers to understand the context the software operates in, and with that knowledge the engineer can prompt an AI to generate the first draft of the code in many small chunks that needs to be assembled.