Sunday, December 1, 2024

Located in Taketa, rural Japan, is a one-man workshop that builds acoustic guitars the traditional way. Building a single guitar takes about four months. A lot of the actual work involved is sand and polish, sand and polish, sand and polish. And then, one more time, sand and polish, and again … sand and polish. It is craftmanship and a labour of love. After four months of sweat and dedication, the end result is a beautifully crafted acoustic guitar, begging to be played by a skilled musician.

This year we saw the rise of AI code generation. Maybe it should not have been a surprise, but it was. AI already writes movie scripts, short stories, writes music, makes paintings in the style of the old masters, and now it generates code. While robots were thought to automate and alleviate us from the mundane, boring (and sometimes dangerous) tasks, AI is performing creative tasks.

In the age of AI, anyone can code. You just tell the computer what to do in natural language, and the AI writes the code for you. Programming always was about telling the computer what to do.

However, “anyone can code” is painting by numbers. There is no artistry there. There is no craftmanship. It is copy-paste code taken to its extreme.

“Bilbo Baggins! Do not take me for some conjurer of cheap tricks”, yelled Gandalf, the grey wizard.

Where does it lead us? In one way, it opens up endless possibilities. In another, it seems extremely dangerous to the species, the fall of civilization. It is Star Trek utopia versus The Terminator dystopia.

Even if we will not be destroyed by autonomous killer drones, think of the social impact that AI will have on our lives. What is the point of pouring hours into handwriting a blog post, when the AI can generate one in a few seconds? What good is a piano player, when the AI plays just as good?

What is the value of artistry and craftmanship in a world that is abundant with AI?

Steve Jobs called the computer “a bicycle for your mind”. What if I could leverage AI to build the things I’ve always wanted to, but couldn’t, due to time constraints?

Presumably AI changes programming from hand-coding everything, to becoming the manager of code, where you are the overseer rather than the implementor. It’s like performing merges on other peoples codes, rather than writing your own. Being the art director, rather than personally doing the handwork.

Well, I tried it, but in my experience it’s much the same as using StackOverflow. You can get some good ideas there, but it’s rarely the code I want to write, and not at the level of quality that I’m striving for. That said, it is impressive what AI can do.

It’s concerning that AI will likely get better at what it’s doing, and basically make all our jobs void. Some say that will not happen, and AI has already reached its peak. If it keeps getting its training data from mediocre code examples on the internets, then the AI coder will be mediocre at best.

Perhaps more alarming is when people start accepting this as “good enough”. It has already been shown that the number of bugs in software increased dramatically when using AI. So now we are using AI for solving the bugs created by AI. It’s a mad world.

In many ways the AI coder we are seeing today is a direct descendant of the hive-mind that is the internet. It is a useful assistant, and it should be viewed as such. The assistant is not going to take our jobs, at least not for now. But society is undeniably being changed forever (yet again!) by computer technology.

I actually considered having this December post be generated by AI. Perhaps it wouldn’t have made any difference to you, dear reader. But it would have made all the difference to me.