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The future of web development is AI. Get on or get left behind. (alex.party)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
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[–] 15 points 2 years ago* (6 children)

I do wonder about inventions that actually changed the world or the way people do things, and if there is a noticeable pattern that distinguishes them from inventions that came and went and got lost to history, or that did get adopted but do not have mass adoption. Hindsight is 20/20, but we live in the present and have to make our guesses about what will succeed and what will fail, and it would be nice to have better guesses.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Quality work will always need human craftsmanship

    I'd wager that most revolutionary technologies are either those that expand human knowledge and understanding, and (to a lesser extent) those that increase replicability (like assembly lines)

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    It's tricky, because there's no hard definition for what it means to "change the world", either. To me, it brings to mind technologies like the Internet, the telephone, aviation, or the steam engine. In those cases, it seems like the common thread is to enable us to do something that simply wasn't possible before, and is also reliably useful.

    To me, AI fails on both those points. It doesn't really enable us to do anything new. We already had chat bots, we already had Photoshop, we already had search algorithms and auto complete. It can do some of those things a lot more quickly than older technologies, but until they solve the hallucination problems it doesn't seem reliable enough to be consistently useful.

    These things make it come off more as a potential incremental improvement that is still too early in it's infancy, than as something truly revolutionary.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago

    Well it’ll change the world by consuming a shit ton of electricity and using even more precious water to fill the data centres. So changing the world is correct in that regard.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    It needs to be more trustworthy. If I have to double check everything, I still have to figure out how to do whatever it's doing, then figure out how it's doing the thing, then verify if it did it right. By then, I could have just done it in step 1.5 probably.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago*

    I do wonder about inventions that actually changed the world or the way people do things, and if there is a noticeable pattern that distinguishes them from inventions that came and went and got lost to history,

    Cool thought experiment.

    Comparing the first iPhone with the release of BlockChain is a pretty solid way to consider the differences.

    We all knew that modern phones were going to be huge. We didn't need tech bros to tell us to trust them about it. The usefulness was obvious.

    After I got my first iPhone, I learned a new thing I could do with it - by word-of-mouth - pretty much every week for the first year.

    Even so, Google supposedly under-estimated the demand for the first Android phones by almost a factor of 10x.

    BlockChain works fine, but it's not changing my daily routine every week.

    AI is somewhere in between. I do frequently learn something new and cool that AI can do for me, from a peer. It's not as impactful as my first pocket computer phone, but it's still useful.

    Even with the iPhone release, I was told "learn iPhone programming or I won't have a job." I actually did not learn iPhone programming, and I do still have a job. But I did need to learn some things about making code run on phones.

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