AI

I used to think AI (when it finally "arrived") would help compensate for the many irrationalities of Homo sapiens. What can I say, I grew up on a steady diet of science fiction.

And now AI is arriving in the form of ChatGPT. And it successfully duplicates the failings of human brains. I could already get all kinds of biases, misconceptions, confabulations, and outright lies from humans, amplified by the internet. Now I can get it from AI too.

Even in the specialized area of programming assistance, I'm somewhat skeptical. Tabnine is a good, helpful tool. It claims it wrote 15% of my code in the last month. But when I review the highlights, they're one or two short lines of code. Not much 'I' in that AI. To me, the challenge in coding is writing coherent well organized code. Copying and pasting snippets will never achieve that. It seems to me it's just going to encourage even more boilerplate. Why not, when it's generated for you. Think how many lines a day you can "write". Most code is crap (including mine), and that's what these models are trained on. Even if you wanted to train it on "good" code, where do you find that? Who is going to judge it?

Perhaps this is just a temporary situation and AI will solve these problems. I'm not optimistic for the near future because it seems inherent in the current approach.

Although, there is perhaps some cause for hope: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/01/wolframalpha-as-the-way-to-bring-computational-knowledge-superpowers-to-chatgpt/

Meanwhile, after billions of dollars worth of research, self driving cars are currently a flop. I suspect that's a temporary setback.

Interesting times.