A different view on AI
This week, I came across three articles addressing AI in different ways without getting carried away by the recent hype. I share them all in this post. The emphasis in the quotes is mine.
Original post: AI is useless, but it is our best bet for the future
Salvatore Sanfilippo shares his view on AI. Specifically:
However, except for rare, groundbreaking examples like AlphaFold — Google’s AI that significantly advanced our understanding of protein folding — AI has yet to genuinely push forward human knowledge in a fundamental way.
It is an interesting point of view that deviates from the continuous news that artificial intelligence will replace us all within a few years.
Salvatore also wonders if it’s worth it but concludes that, most likely, the game is worth the candle:
Yet, if artificial intelligence remains stuck at its current level of development indefinitely (even if with small incremental improvements, enough to fire many translators, programmers, drivers, actors, …), perhaps it might have been better not to have it at all. […] investing in AI is like making a bet. I advocate for further investment and continued progress — not necessarily because of what AI can currently do, but because of what it might become in the future.
Taking distance usually helps to see things more clearly, and this post is controversial enough.
Original post: AI’s effects on programming jobs
Laurie Voss writes the second article that struck me and discusses another hot topic: will AI replace developers?
The important thing to note is that this is not some unprecedented change. We’ve been adding levels of abstraction to programming since it was invented.
Artificial intelligence is just a new abstraction that will make programming more high-level, as it already did when we moved from machine languages to high-level languages. By lowering the barriers to entry, Laurie predicts that there will be many more developers, just as in the past.
I still don’t know how biased I am, given that I have been developing software for 10 years, but I agree with this vision. The proper middle ground is usually also the most realistic.
Original post: Trapping misbehaving bots in an AI Labyrinth
The last article concerns Cloudflare’s announcement of AI Labyrinth.
When we detect unauthorized crawling, rather than blocking the request, we will link to a series of AI-generated pages that are convincing enough to entice a crawler to traverse them. But while real looking, this content is not actually the content of the site we are protecting, so the crawler wastes time and resources.
Given the long-standing problem of AI companies scraping data for model training without regard for content copyright, Cloudflare has decided to use artificial intelligence practically against itself. Quite peculiar and ingenious.