Seeing all these predictions of the AI future, I'm reminded of when every object in the world was going to be tracked on a blockchain. How's that working out?
@tomw On the other hand, Bill Gates insisted for years that commercial use of the Internet would not go that far. Personally, I think AI will make us humans a bit more redundant again. What has advantages and disadvantages.
@tomw I asked ChatGPT to write me a SAS program and it produced beautiful, good code, formatted, commented. This is not often remarked on, but the world will really change if non-programmers can tell a computer what they want it to do and it can do it. A little way off but not at all unreachable. Blockchain, uh, no, not really settin' the woods on fire.
@swarmpicker Non-programmers will not know if the code is any good or not. Even if it does the right thing most of the time it might do a very wrong thing the rest of the time.
@tomw It could be sandboxed, limited to a particular language and environment, etc. This stuff is only a few months old -- the ability to program without coding could be huge. It's already mind-boggling, give it some time. This is not what the pundits are talking about but it will redefine the user-computer relationship. (Unless commercial interests shut it down.)
@swarmpicker It's all fun and games until it creates a subtle bug that puts incorrect data into your database over a period of months, to take one example. Not everything is obviously correct or incorrect. Not every bug, especially ones that touch permanent state like data, is easily recoverable.
@tomw If somebody in a cubicle can say "Give me the mean and standard deviation of income by region," rather than dealing with the IDE and the quirks of the language, and get an answer... the effect will be tremendous. And why not get a preset vixualization while you're at it?
@swarmpicker But to go back, I don't think this example is as grand as your claim "non-programmers can tell a computer what to do". Perhaps if you are highly specific and there is no chance of any action having effects beyond the strict limits of your program, as in changes to a database, HTTP requests, text that will be published, allowing access that should not have been allowed, making any kind of real world decision... a very long list
@tomw I did see a guy here who had ChatGPT write an iPhone app to find him tickets or something. It set up the API and wrote the code to scrape ticket sites, or whatever it was. Granted it took him a few tries to get it right, but this technology is very new. In a few more years people will be able to conjure up apps and algorithms as they need them, with the required user skill level dropping constantly. (Currently you have to know what an API is, to use one.)
@tomw It reminds me of all the times I've heard over the last fifty years that programmers are about to become obsolete, because users will be able to make their own applications with the help of computers.
Maybe someday that will come true, but I'm not planning a career change yet.
@oldmankris Yeah, I have enough problems getting people to use the Wordpress editor to edit their own website, instead of coming back to me with edits.
At the time if you said "that will not happen, it is neither possible nor useful", you got the exact same tone of replies as you currently get if you criticise ChatGPT. Oh no no no, blah blah, new technology, so exciting, early days, possibilities, developing so fast...
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