I put the text below on LinkedIn in response to a post there and figured I'd share it here too because it's a bit of a step from what I've been posting previously on this topic and might be of some use to someone.

In retrospect I might have written non-sense in place of nonsense.

If you're in tech the Han reference might be a bit out of your comfort zone, but Andrews is accessible and measured.

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It's nonsense to say that coding will be replaced with "good judgment". There's a presupposition behind that, a worldview, that can't possibly fly. It's sometimes called the theory-free ideal: given enough data, we don't need theory to understand the world. It surfaces in AI/LLM/programming rhetoric in the form that we don't need to code anymore because LLM's can do most of it. Programming is a form of theory-building (and understanding), while LLMs are vast fuzzy data store and retrieval systems, so the theory-free ideal dictates the latter can/should replace the former. But it only takes a moment's reflection to see that nothing, let alone programming, can be theory-free; it's a kind of "view from nowhere" way of thinking, an attempt to resurrect Laplace's demon that ignores everything we've learned in the >200 years since Laplace forwarded that idea. In that respect it's a (neo)reactionary viewpoint, and it's maybe not a coincidence that people with neoreactionary politics tend to hold it. Anyone who needs a more formal argument can read Mel Andrews's The Immortal Science of ML: Machine Learning & the Theory-Free Ideal, or Byung-Chul Han's Psychopolitics (which argues, among other things, that this is a nihilistic).

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #coding #dev #tech #SoftwareDevelopment #programming #nihilism #LinkedIn

Regarding the last couple boosts: among other downsides, LLMs encourage people to take long-term risks for perceived, but not always actual, short-term gains. They bet the long-term value of their education on a chance at short-term grade inflation, or they bet the long-term security and maintainability of their software codebase on a chance at short-term productivity gains. My read is that more and more data is suggesting that these are bad bets for most people.

In that respect they're very much like gambling. The messianic fantasies some ChatGPT users have been experiencing fits this picture as well.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #tech #dev #ChatGPT #GPT #Gemini #GamblingAddiction #nihilism