• They employed folks like Nyquist and Shannon, who laid the foundations of modern information theory and electronic engineering while they were employees at Bell.
• They discovered the first evidence of the black hole at the center of our galaxy in the 1930s while analyzing static noise on shortwave transmissions.
• They developed in 1937 the first speech codec and the first speech synthesizer.
• They developed the photovoltaic cell in the 1940, and the first solar cell in the 1950s.
• They built the first transistor in 1947.
• They built the first large-scale electronic computers (from Model I in 1939 to Model VI in 1949).
  -They employed Karnaugh in the 1950s, who worked on the Karnaugh maps that we still study in engineering while he was an employee at Bell.
• They contributed in 1956 (together with AT&T and the British and Canadian telephone companies) to the first transatlantic communications cable.
  -They developed the first electronic musics program in 1957.
  -They employed Kernighan, Thompson and Ritchie, who created UNIX and the C programming language while they were Bell employees.

/via https://manganiello.social/notice/AukwkbWFAQDB0uXM80

Many developers are terrified of losing their jobs for this very reason: AIs sometimes program better than them. And, in my opinion, they are right to be afraid. But I’m more afraid of a world (and not just in IT) where code will depend exclusively on the companies that sell us AIs.

Today, writing code is something free, potentially doable even on a beat-up laptop. But tomorrow? Will we be completely dependent on AIs (even) for this?

I will just have to concede that maybe I’m wrong. I don’t have the skill, or the knowledge, or the energy, to demonstrate with any level of rigor that LLMs are generally, in fact, hot garbage. Intellectually, I will have to acknowledge that maybe the boosters are right. Maybe it’ll be OK.

Maybe the carbon emissions aren’t so bad. Maybe everybody is keeping them secret in ways that they don’t for other types of datacenter for perfectly legitimate reasons. Maybe the tools really can write novel and correct code, and with a little more tweaking, it won’t be so difficult to get them to do it. Maybe by the time they become a mandatory condition of access to developer tools, they won’t be miserable.

Sure, I even sincerely agree, intellectual property really has been a pretty bad idea from the beginning. Maybe it’s OK that we’ve made an exception to those rules. The rules were stupid anyway, so what does it matter if we let a few billionaires break them? Really, everybody should be able to break them (although of course, regular people can’t, because we can’t afford the lawyers to fight off the MPAA and RIAA, but that’s a problem with the legal system, not tech).

I come not to praise “AI skepticism”, but to bury it.

Maybe it really is all going to be fine. Perhaps I am simply catastrophizing; I have been known to do that from time to time. I can even sort of believe it, in my head. Still, even after writing all this out, I can’t quite manage to believe it in the pit of my stomach.