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Comment by withinboredom | Hacker News Reader

Yet, we still have programmers writing assembly code and hand-optimizing it. I believe that for most software engineers, this will be the future. However, experts and hobbyists will still experiment with different ways of doing things, just like people experiment with different ways of creating chairs.

An AI can only do what it is taught to do. Sure, it can offer unique insights from time to time, but I doubt it will get to the point where it can craft entirely new paradigms and ways of building software.

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You might be underestimating the potential of an automated evolutionary programming system at discovering novel and surprising ways to do computation—ways that no human would ever invent. Humans may have a better distribution of entropy generation (i.e. life experience as an embodied human being), but compared to the rate at which a computer can iterate, I don't think that advantage will be maintained.

(Humans will still have to set the goals and objectives, unless we unleash an ASI and render even that moot.)

AI, even in its current form can provide some interesting results. I wouldn’t underestimate an AI, but I think you might be underestimating the ingenuity of a bored human.

Humans aren't bored any more [0]. In the past the US the US had 250 million people who were bored. Today it has far more than than scrolling through instagram and tiktok, responding to reddit and hacker news, and generally not having time to be bored

Maybe we'll start to evolve as a species to avoid that, but AI will be used to ensure we don't, optimising far faster than we can evolve to keep our attention

[0] https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/social-media-profound-boredo...

I’m bored all the time and I’m a human. Last I checked anyway.

I agree, it's definitely still possible to get bored.

If I stop making progress on my personal projects, sinking my free time into games or online interaction is very unsatisfying.

Perhaps, but evolutionary results are difficult to test. They tend to fail in bizarre, unpredictable ways in production. That may be good enough for some use cases but I think it will never be very applicable to mission critical or safety critical domains.

Of course, code written by human programmers on the lower end of the skill spectrum sometimes has similar problems...

It doesn't seem like a completely different thing to generate specifications and formally verified programs for those specifications (though I'm not familiar with how those are done today).

I mean, I don’t even like programming with Spring because what all of those annotations are doing is horribly opaque. Let alone mountains of AI generated code doing God knows what.

I mean Ken Thompson put a back door into the C compiler no one ever found. Can you imagine what an AI could be capable of?

ASI?

Artificial Super-Intelligence

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