A.I. can now write its own computer code – that’s good news for humans

Not yet, but give it a couple years.

You will join the taxi drivers, and so will I.

You might argue, "well then generating the code is still a win" and it might be, but its a micro-optimization. If the AI can do the easy part but not the hard part, its akin to shaving seconds from an operation that takes hours. Its focusing on the wrong thing. If the AI could instead do the hard part, you would save a lot lot more effort and therefore money. Once that's done, by all means, automate the easy part too, but until then, the priorities are off.

You might still say that this is worth it, saving those seconds still means you don't have to pay for them, even if the majority of the cost is still there. This is possibly true and all well and good. I don't really care, because I'll still have a job doing the hard part. The issue is that when these AI's are mentioned, the "hard part" is always glossed over, the AI is sold as this thing that will automate all development, where it really should be sold as a thing that shaves a little off the total cost of development, but that the hard and therefore expensive parts are still there.

Sure, there are some development tasks that are fairly trivial and some companies that do mainly these might go out of business, but you still have the stories of oracle selling a website to the government agency for $100 million, because it has to interact with a slew of legacy systems, deal with ambiguous tax codes/regulations/requirements. There's a lot of tech out there that has these complexities and that's not going to be automated by these AI's for now, until they tackle "the hard part".

A note on "all the details": if you truly have all the details (refined unambiguous requirements, detailed architecture with all the use cases and edge cases outlined and documented, technology tradeoffs investigated and documented etc etc) then great, it would be quick, easy and cheap to implement then. Unfortunately, what is more common, is that a non-developer will say this and "all the details" really isn't all the details at all and just the tip of the iceberg.

https://www.kafka-online.info/before-the-law.html

Were they?

Twitter: "an absolutely minimal MySpace clone. Let users write posts to feed using SMS."

Google: "Like AltaVista, but without all the bullshit - just the search box. For weighting, have it use this funny algorithm we figured out the other day."

I'm not denying both were innovative - I just think the innovation, the "extrapolation", didn't happen at the technical/tactical level we're discussing here. All the pieces were already there, and used for similar things. The innovation was in figuring out that this particular shape of service is something people might want to use, and that it could make money.

Well, my curiosity quickly led to the discovery that penises and swastikas have a large overlap with furries, by the way of the Rule34 site. Which finally made me realize that furries are probably the catch-all category on Rule34: making another ‘rule 34’ pic? well just slap furries on it, and you got that audience covered at almost no additional cost. The same way as incest titles are everywhere in porn, since it costs nothing to phrase every single title that way regardless of actual content.

There is such a huge code case, because writing the code was easy to do.

And maintenance is 90% of the work.

http://nautilus.cs.miyazaki-u.ac.jp/~skata/MagicHaskeller.ht...

And whle we're at it, if you want to auto-write Prolog, use my own Louise:

https://github.com/stassa/louise

For example, free-form document search used to be considered AI problem, because people assumed the program needs to understand the documents and the query, the way a librarian or an archivist did. It turns out that some fuzzy matching and a silly graph algorithm can get you 90% there - so search is now called "non-AI". But it's not the people's understanding of AI that changed. It's that the AI part of search is the unsolved remaining 10% (that would also make it not suck).

Same story with machine translation. It was considered AI, now it's 90% solved with clever algorithms and a big corpus. Definitely not AI - but again, only because the AI part is the remaining 10% that would make machine translation not suck. Note how business and legal language is still translated by humans - that's because the 90% that was solved is good enough only for casual use, where people are willing to tolerate mistakes and to meet the machine halfway.

Point is, I'd argue people still have the same vague definition of AI as they always had - a program that is smart in general sense, that can navigate its environment and figure stuff out on its own. A program that, if you squint hard enough, could be considered a person[0]. Problems that transitioned from "AI-complete" to "doesn't need AI after all" are ones for which we found good enough solutions that didn't need the AI.

--

[0] - At least to sensibilities trained on science fiction, which very much broadens what you'd consider a sapient life form, a person.

I am also looking for reasons not to be worried!

The real problem facing our elites will be how to both control their immiserated and angry population, and the AIs now running most of the economy.

I propose cyborgization for such people and will advise the rich people I know to invest in brain computer interfaces and related tech.

We are going to have to think long and hard about the social contract we live under.

How do we deal with never before seen unemployment rates? Is liberalism able to cope with that? How do we stop something much worse from exploiting the coming automation crisis?

It depends on what you mean "early days". If it's about Codex itself, then that's probably right, it's a new-ish system. However, the task of creating a computer program by another computer program, variously known as "automatic programming", "program synthesis", "program induction", "inductive programming" and so on is not new, rather it goes back to the 1970s and probably earlier still. Very briefly, these terms describe a constellation of approaches that automatically create a program according to a specification.

Placing Codex in the context of this earler work, it is an example of program synthesis system that composes programs from incomplete specifications, variously given as natural language specifications or what we can call "code snippets" (i.e. you start writing code and the system completes it; I don't know the propper term for this kind of specification). As such, it is one in a long line of systems that predate it and it is not even the most impressive of those systems (37% accuracy is nothing to write home about).

The reason that you misidentify it as something new, by your "early days" turn of phrase, is a peculiar tendency of deep learning researchers to ommit any references to relevant prior work, for reasons that are difficult to discern. Sometimes the reason seems to be honest-to-god lack of familiarity with other approaches than deep learning (even other neural networks approaches). Sometimes it seems to be more of an attempt to claim well-trodden territory as brand new and trumpet a small step forward (or not even that much forward) as the breaking of new ground. Sometimes there seems to be an attempt to avoid unwanted comparisons to different approaches with different trade-offs, that could make the deep learning system look more lackluster than desired.

In any case, there you have it. Codex is not any kind of breakthrough or innovation. What is new is the sudden interest in program synthesis. Perhaps this is a positive thing and program synthesis approaches will finally begin to be adopted in the industry. But knowing how these things work, and how what gets hyped and what doesn't is altogether without any rationality, I'd guess probably not.

How do I try it? Any instructions on setting it up

Theres not necessarily an advantage to rewriting older code with newer versions of the same because it works.

You're kind of implying that you dont write bad code. But from your reasoning all your code is bad because a newer way will replace your code.

So many opinions about code are wrong and I think you take something too seriously when it doesn't really matter. If someone uses var rather than let, that doesn't make them an idiot, it just means they're using an older construct. The difference is so unimportant that it rarely makes a difference to code understandability or readability.

Most developers go through your phase of thinking other people are idiots because they don't know something you do. But in the grand scheme of things, it makes no serious difference to code quality. That pedantic person just wastes everybody's time in a code review and spins their wheels when they could be learning to write more understandable code.