B.Enedict Evans, Technology Analyst whose newsletter is a must read for those who follow the industry, he made an interesting point this week. He said that she had been talking to generalist journalists who “were still under the impression that ChatGPT was a trivial parlor trick and that everything was about as interesting as a new iPhone app.” On the other hand, she continued, “most people in technology walk slowly, holding the top of their head with both hands to prevent it from flying off. But within that, I think we can see a variety of attitudes.”
We certainly can, on a spectrum that ranges from the opinion that this “generative AI” is going to be the biggest bonanza since the invention of the wheel, to fears that it portends an existential risk to humanity, and numerous opinions in between. Looking for a respite from the fire hose of mixed comments, I suddenly remembered an interview that Steve Jobs, the closest thing to a visionary the tech industry has ever had, gave in 1990, and I pulled it out. in Youtube.
In it he talks about a memory he had of reading an article in american scientist When I was 12 years old. It was a report of how someone had measured the efficiency of locomotion of various species on planet Earth: “How many kilocalories did they expend to get from point A to point B? And the condor won: it made it to the top of the list.” ready, it surpassed everything else; and humans took up about a third of the list, which wasn’t a great display for the ‘crown of creation’.
“But then someone there had the imagination to test the efficiency of a human riding a bicycle. A human riding a bicycle flew the condor to the top of the list. And it made a huge impression on me: that humans are tool builders and that we can design tools that amplify these inherent abilities that we have to spectacular magnitudes.
“So for me,” he concluded, “a computer has always been a bicycle of the mind, something that takes us far beyond our inherent capabilities. And I think we’re only in the very early stages of this tool, very early stages, and we’ve come a very short distance, and it’s still in its formation, but we’ve already seen huge changes, [but] That’s nothing compared to what’s to come in the next 100 years.”
Well, that was in 1990 and here we are, three decades later, with a powerful bike. How powerful it is becomes clear when one inspects how the technology (not just ChatGPT) tackles particular tasks that humans find difficult.
Writing computer programs, for example.
Last week Steve Yegge, a renowned software engineer who, like all super geeks, uses the ultra-programmable text editor Emacs, conducted an instructive experiment. He typescript the following message in ChatGPT: “Write an interactive Emacs Lisp function that appears in a new buffer, prints the first paragraph of A tale of two cities, and changes all words with ‘i’ to red. It just prints the code without explanation.”
ChatGPT did its thing and spit out the code. Yegge copied and pasted it into his Emacs session and posted a screenshot of the result. “In one fell swoop”, he writes, “ChatGPT has produced fully functional code from a sloppy English description! With voice input hooked up, I could have written this program asking my computer to do it. And not only does it work correctly, the code you wrote is actually pretty decent Emacs Lisp code. It’s not complicated, sure. But it’s a good code.”
Ponder the importance of this for a moment, as tech investors like Paul Kedrosky are already doing. He resembles tools like ChatGPT to “a missile aimed, albeit unintentionally, directly at the software production itself. Sure, chat AIs can work seamlessly in producing undergraduate essays or creating marketing materials and blog posts (as if we needed more of either), but such technologies are great to the point of magic. obscura to produce, debug, and speed up software production quickly. and almost at no cost.”
Since our networked world is ultimately powered by software, suddenly having tools that can write it, and that could be available to anyone, not just geeks, marks an important moment. Programmers have always been like magicians: they can make an inanimate object do something useful. I once wrote that sometimes you must feel like Napoleon, who was able to command legions, with a stroke of the pen, to do his bidding. After all, computers, like troops, obey orders. But to become masters of their virtual universe, the programmers had to possess arcane knowledge and learn specialized languages to converse with their electronic servants. For most people, that was a pretty high threshold to cross. ChatGPT and his ilk just downloaded it.
what i’ve been reading
write in
A masterful reflective essay in writing by Helen Lewis on her Substack blog.
meeting of minds
An insightful analysis of the meeting between Xi Jinping and Putin by Nathan Gardels in November magazine.
long stories
The monster reveals itself is a cunning essay on the conspiracy theory charm in it hedgehog review by PhilChristman.
