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geophile | on: The Dark Night of Mathematics
> "They are forbidden from creating original works to express themselves. However, they are still permitted to comment on writing, interpret it, share their taste. They are still valued for their appraisal, presentation, understanding and appreciation of creative writing. They just can’t write creatively anymore. They can go on as an enthusiastic spectator.

> ... It revealed that the process of prompting novel proofs will be as auraless as ordering doordash. Watch as magic and mystery evaporate. Watch as the sun sets on our heroic age. Is there not something evil in the act of blocking all future generations of mathematicians from the experience of discovery? Forget about accuracy or even attribution. Something fundamental to the experience of mathematics is being taken."

These passages resonated with me, as someone who has been enchanted by writing software for almost 60 years. It crystalizes something that has been nagging at me for many years: I like writing software. Reviewing, testing, spec-ing, designing, etc. are all important, but they are all incidental to the actual creation of software. They are all necessary for me to do if I'm going to write software, but they are peripheral. I didn't latch on to computer programming because I got into flow state reviewing code, or spec-ing it.

And this is happening in one profession after another. For example, fighter pilots. I suspect that a fighter pilot feels about flying jet fighters the same way that I feel about programming. And he or she will soon be exactly as useless: Doing things related to flying, from the sidelines, but not doing the thing him or herself.

AI is stealing all the fun parts.

xg15 | parent | next
My suspicion is still that this has to do with losing insight in the little specific details of the matter and general understanding.

An area where I realized that was feature engineering: Early ML systems had handcrafted features that were fed into the model. There were relatively arbitrary and the number of features you could reasonably generate that way was tiny, compared to modern systems - but it gave you some understanding what input the model got exactly and you could use it to clear up some failure modes, or be certain that the model learned something that could not possibly make sense.

Then the idea was to automate feature generation. What's not to like? Except that in practice, the automated features simply seem to become part of the blackbox and are not available anymore for understanding.

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psunavy03 | parent
As someone who has been both a software professional and a jet aviator, the same process is going to occur in both. Humans will still be in the loop, but the span of control and effectiveness of each individual human will explode. There's a reason the current plan is to augment manned aircraft with "loyal wingman" drones and smaller ones. Even in the Russo-Ukrainian War, manned aircraft are still A Thing. They've even hauled old prop trainers out of storage to put a guy in the back with an assault rifle to shoot down Shahed drones, because they're too slow for fighters.

Software is going to go through the same adaptation and exaptation process as military aviation.