Four years ago I predicted top-down programming using speech, refining the details as you go. (Today everybody still uses bottom-up, fill in all the details first, programming.) I also said humans were to dumb produce that kind of quality with the technology at hand then.
Just a few weeks ago, text-to-source code became a reality. This is completely and utterly mind-boggling:
What changed? OpenAI created GPT-3, an ANN with 175B parameters. I can already imagine the low-level attorney jobs fading...
So. We went from not even close to very good in four years. Two things happens in me as I realize this. For one I have to learn more about what's going on, both personally and professionally. And number two: for the first time I'm afraid of where this is taking us.
The Fermi paradox/The Great Filter, have we discovered the cause? Our minds are not evolved enough to comprehend what we're up to. We've survived all the other dumb shit we've done, right? So of course we're going to explore more. And more. The best comparison I can think of is to hand out Xbox controllers for ballistic missiles to the smartest kid in every school in the world.
I still don't think that a computer can live. But could it take over? I'm not sure any more.
