3 ms·

Or, more likely, the march towards better abstraction ends with a natural language interface where problem descriptions can be effortlessly translated into func

• friend_and_foe 3y ago
  Well, that falls under the "better tooling" I referenced. We have to have some set of tools as yet unimagined that are so robust that they don't need constant changes. I have to be able to use a piece of software and be able to explain to my grandkids how to use it when I'm old. A part of the fast changing problem is that we are still developing the technology, but that means once we can breathe and things become more stable and change slower we will look back on a lot of mistakes and pain. There are a lot of people invested in the current unsustainable state of affairs and this can't go on forever, those people are going to lose their shirts.
• WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
  Right now humans are quite shit at translation of natural panguage into code. Other humans are shit at stating their requirements in any language at all. Don’t keep your hopes high.
  • valine 3y ago
    GPT-4 can write html from a messy napkin sketch. These models won’t need formal requirements. “I’m having a problem with A, B and C” will likely be all the model needs from you. Your argument was very common and quite persuasive two years ago. Not so much today.
  • LoganDark 3y ago
    https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/08/25/a-very-comprehensive-and-precise-spec https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/08/25/a-very-comprehensi...
    • valine 3y ago
      This 2016 comic failed to predict GPTs. It turns out the same model that writes your code can also write the specification. I don’t blame the author, it’s nearly impossible to predict future technology. Pretending that GPTs don’t exist on the other hand, now that’s just silly.
      • LoganDark 3y ago
        I think what's more likely to happen is that people will be able to turn a conversation into code instead of just a problem statement. In fact, ChatGPT already does that, although you still need to have some skill in order to properly integrate and test the code that it gives you.
        • valine 3y ago
          Sure, the more information you give the model the better. While our current models generate imperfect code, GPT4 code is much more usable out of the box than GPT3.5 code. If that trend continues we will absolutely get to the point where mistakes are the exception not the rule.
          • LoganDark 3y ago
            I wonder if once (better) multimodal models are a thing, a model might actually be able to close the feedback loop itself. It won't magically generate a working product the first time but it might be able to test it and iterate on it automatically, depending on what you're trying to do. You then just have to make sure it's iterating on the thing you actually want.
            • WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
              This is also the moment you should start to take into account the likelihood that you are unnecessary.
              • 3y ago
• cubefox 3y ago
  Yeah. It seems Hanson hasn't considered the effects of AI. It can plausibly compensate the productivity loss from a shrinking population.
• danaris 3y ago
  It's hard enough for humans to take natural-language descriptions of a problem to be solved (that is well within human capabilities) and turn them into human-workable solutions without a significant process of back and forth to get the requirements clear. Getting a computer, within the next decade or two, to do better, doesn't seem realistic—not because I think it is impossible that we will have a computer fully capable of parsing natural human language into internal representations of the concepts it represents with high fidelity, but simply because humans are bad at communicating. Tell me you've never, ever had a project described to you by someone who was horribly nonspecific—or even outright wrong—in their description of what they need. (If you can truthfully do so, I can easily find you a dozen people who can't—starting with myself.) Human language is woefully inadequate to convey the breadth and depth of human experience, needs, wants, requirements, etc. This is why we invented programming languages in the first place.