Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Fabius Minarchus's avatar

Regarding the need for Right aligned AI, there will be opposition whether we bother or not. Spammers and scammers are furiously working on gaming the AIs just as they gamed the search engines. The tools needed to make self driven trucks drive off the roads and other such nefarious tricks will be available on the dark web soon enough. There is money to be made.

Expand full comment
Fabius Minarchus's avatar

Regarding AI, I am semi-skeptical. Yes, AI can do some really cool things, especially repeating definable tasks. And AI is definitely looking out for tax cheats already.

I'm skeptical of AI replacing programmers because tightly specifying what you want the program to do is HARD. I got into the game when waterfall coding was just about to be replaced with Agile. Requirements specification documents are incredibly hard to both read and write. As compilers got faster and software tools in general got better, it made sense to just code up something to a looser spec, and then get feedback from the customer. The product and the source code basically were the spec, with the documentation lagging behind.

Unless AI becomes telepathic, telling the AI what one wants coded becomes the issue. We are back to writing waterfall requirements documents except they have to be understandable to the AI.

Yes, AI can whip up easily specified parts of a program, or short programs which are easily specified. But then somebody has to glue it together. This reminds me of the introduction of

Microsoft Visual C++ with Microsoft Foundation Classes. There were all these nifty wizards which could add features to your user interface. You could put together a primitive art program in a few hours without understanding what "you" built. But the moment you wanted to do something outside of Microsoft's box, you were screwed. And the resulting code was fragile as all get out.

Expand full comment
127 more comments...

No posts