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Software development requires certain qualities from a programmer which AI can't attain before becoming human: personality and consistency. Personality is shape

by sedatk 3y ago

Software development requires certain qualities from a programmer which AI can't attain before becoming human: personality and consistency. Personality is shaped by lifelong experiences mostly irrelevant to programming itself. Personality dictates the experience you want for the users. To be able to do that, you need to know the users, you need to understand how a human thinks, functions, and understands things. Consistency is an artistic element shaped culturally. Again, you need to be exposed to cultural elements for a long time, and more importantly, develop an understanding of them. I think it's very hard to train AI on these two fronts, and that's why we'll be needing programmers for a long time. AI will keep doing the mundane tasks for us though, thankfully!

dontupvoteme 3y ago
Have you met most programmers or used much software? Consistency - This is what GPUs were made for, putting a bunch of 'effort' almost instantly into investigating any regression that any real SW dev would ignore because, life's way too damn busy.
- sedatk 3y ago
  GPUs can create consistent output, AIs can't.
staunton 3y ago
I don't know what you mean by consistency. What you call "personality" seems to roughly mean "predicting what humans like". That's what stuff like RLHF is for. It's also not some sort of ascension where the computer program suddenly "becomes human". It's a spectrum on which we can expect steady improvements (and still never need to call computer programs "human").
- sedatk 3y ago
  I meant a certain aspect of aesthetics by "consistency". When you explain your requirements to AI, you'll say "create a dialog box with two buttons" right? I mean that's how you'd communicate with a programmer, so, I should at least be capable of that. However, AI cannot guarantee you a consistent style for such a prompt because it has no understanding of the culture, something the programmer, the prompter, and the users share altogether, but not the AI. AI might have access to the vast amount of design training data, but it can't understand the reasoning behind the variety of those designs, and it can't come up with a similar design every time. It has no cultural affinity, therefore no ability to stick to cultural norms. So, in order to fill that gap, you need to become more specific with your prompt. And the more specific you get, the more your language becomes closer to a programming language, therefore contradicting the purpose of the AI in the first place. I'm sure we'll see improvements, but I find it very unlikely to have the same level of understanding without having the same level of cognition and experience as a human, hence my phrasing.

by sedatk 3y ago

dontupvoteme 3y ago

Have you met most programmers or used much software? Consistency - This is what GPUs were made for, putting a bunch of 'effort' almost instantly into investigating any regression that any real SW dev would ignore because, life's way too damn busy.

sedatk 3y ago
GPUs can create consistent output, AIs can't.

staunton 3y ago

I don't know what you mean by consistency. What you call "personality" seems to roughly mean "predicting what humans like". That's what stuff like RLHF is for. It's also not some sort of ascension where the computer program suddenly "becomes human". It's a spectrum on which we can expect steady improvements (and still never need to call computer programs "human").

sedatk 3y ago
I meant a certain aspect of aesthetics by "consistency". When you explain your requirements to AI, you'll say "create a dialog box with two buttons" right? I mean that's how you'd communicate with a programmer, so, I should at least be capable of that. However, AI cannot guarantee you a consistent style for such a prompt because it has no understanding of the culture, something the programmer, the prompter, and the users share altogether, but not the AI. AI might have access to the vast amount of design training data, but it can't understand the reasoning behind the variety of those designs, and it can't come up with a similar design every time. It has no cultural affinity, therefore no ability to stick to cultural norms. So, in order to fill that gap, you need to become more specific with your prompt. And the more specific you get, the more your language becomes closer to a programming language, therefore contradicting the purpose of the AI in the first place. I'm sure we'll see improvements, but I find it very unlikely to have the same level of understanding without having the same level of cognition and experience as a human, hence my phrasing.