Why we got obsessed with building for AI
Back in times people tried to build a tower to reach the sky. When God learned about it - he disrupted people’s plan making everyone speaking their own language. This way people could not understand each other anymore.
This story is known as the story of Tower of Babel. And I have mentioned it earlier in my blog. I have more to say and present a different perspective on this metaphor.
The AI revolution
I’ve seen many bold promises, like “the most popular programing language will be English”. And thousands of likes and comments was happily accepting it. But is that the right tool for this goal?
The AI revolution shows us how easy it is build similar things with a relatively small amount of text. Even more advanced systems and good results are achieved with a few files, that describes approach, provides technical details, functional and non-functional requirements. Basically software developers finally have time to do what different specialists could not do well. Plan and specify what are we building.
Not how it will be sold. Not what features our CEO likes the most. Not trying to sell a bunch of features because of hype or because it was demanded by very specific and small customer.
Technical, precise language. Clear decisions. Project documentation, not a science fiction that has endless amount of attempts to squish it into reality.
With a clear goal of having a plan how to build it. Not how to make everyone believe we are going to build it. And now, when finally right steps are done into the right direction everyone’s crying “we (engineers) won’t be needed anymore!”. That’s not possible to keep living in a comfortable and save, automated world without engineers. Wording might be changed. Role, goals and spirit - can’t be replaced. We are never able to build anything that’s better than we. And we, people, are far from being ideal.
The Tower of Babel
So what’s wrong with that tower? Actually, nothing is wrong there. While people think this story is providing reasons why people are speaking different languages it provides much more deeper explanation.
Language isn’t a set of rules, symbols and sounds. That’s the transport, the form. The core is communication. And communication is based on exchanging concepts. Abstractions. Think about the home. “I’d like to be home right now”. I guarantee each and every human being imagines completely something different. Such a simple concept of home has a completely different meaning for each people. Even they may talk about physically the same place. Perception matters a lot.
And now, someone imagined AI can resolve these misunderstandings and provide a unified interface for each and everyone to use almost random concepts to define reality on their own. And make it understandable for everyone else. And someone even imagined such a precise area of life like programming, and other math-related areas can be done with approximate, unambiguous plain language.
Have you tried to express yourself precisely? Think how rules and law is build. Each word, letter and coma makes a difference. How hard it is to understand it for most of the people, who are not prepared to interpret and think about what they read.
We can’t use plain language to define rules for ourselves. This is funny to think we can explain machines (maybe we’ll get to robots one day) what exactly shall they do. Machines thinks in math. Programming languages are not just abstractions - these are very precise abstractions. And math rarely uses proximity. Most of the math is based on equations, not approximations.
Precision is the key
It’s nice to see we’re advancing and are able to move from status quo that’s been here for a while in the IT area. Lack of precision demonstrates our lack of perfection. And perfection isn’t reachable.
Question is - do we want to master precision and attempt to be precise but imperfect, or letting things happens the way they happens. Without a real understanding about reality.
Is that the time to get towards spirituality, and start believing again?