Subject: Re: My Way
Yes, a lot of this going around. I'm still more than a little skeptical. Mostly because most of the folks writing it are in the software business.

It's pretty clear that AI has made enormous strides in "solving" software coding. Which is really going to change the game for people who are in the software industry. But that doesn't mean that it's going to change much else.

Not all problems, and not all that many jobs, are "software-shaped." Software is obviously inherently, natively digital. It's also one of the areas of human endeavor where you have a massive amount of information on how to do it already on-line, like GitHub. It's an activity that has historically almost entirely been done on computers. And it's also an activity - much like chess or go - where an AI can "know for itself" whether what it's trying to do is working or not. You can get an AI to play a billion games of chess against itself, and it can see which things work or not because it knows whether it lost or won the game. You can't do that with something like "debone this chicken," because AI doesn't get the automatic feedback of whether the chicken was deboned correctly or not.

I find that people tend to use heuristics in assessing AI capabilities that are grounded in how human capabilities are grouped. We have an intuitive sense that if a human is smart enough to do X and Y, they can probably do Z. If I have a human legal intern that's capable of reading through a thousand pages of discovery and giving me a summary of the important points, and the intern is a fairly capable writer, that intern can probably draft a short brief in support of a legal point while knowing that it's wrong to manufacture non-existent cases. Because we know that human skills tend to "clump" in certain ways. But AI doesn't do that. My computer has been able to do division to a bunch of decimal places in a fraction of a second since as long as I've had a personal computer - while still not being able to do a million things that a human who can do long division is able to do.

Back to the original point. AI is getting very good at software coding. But almost everything you would ever need to know about how to code software well is accessible in digital form. Does that mean AI is going to get very good at writing a good pop song? Probably not - because a massive amount of what you need to know about how to write a good pop song isn't very accessible in digital form. You don't have massive datasets of people who have written good pop songs explaining how to write a good pop songs. You'll have some interviews and some books, and of course lots of examples of the finished product - but most music-making activity has historically been off-line in a way that software writing has not.