AI

AI is going through a new phase at the moment. The initial wave of hype and fear is starting to settle into a more grounded, honest evaluation of AI: how will it impact the software industry? Does the value justify the cost? How can we bridge the gap between our existing workflows and the alluring promise of flashy demos and vibe coding? It’s been a wild ride for GenAI, but for me personally it’s gone a bit like this: big initial enthusiasm, soured as usual by big-tech involvement and marketing hype. My decision to return to work was driven partly by the risk of not just my skills but my entire profession becoming obsolete - a desire to remain employed while I’m still employable. That’s still a possibility, but I’ve since taken a more optimistic outlook: AI is going to change software development, not make it obsolete, and has the potential to improve our productivity and capability in significant ways. It’s still very early in terms of understanding how to leverage AI to amplify human ability, and software engineers have an excellent opportunity now to build skills that will be lucrative in future. ...

Our AI-Assisted Future We are entering a world where we can create any kind of content we can dream of, just by asking an AI (Artificial Intelligence) to make it for us. This isn’t some distant future either - more like within the next 12 months. AI-generated text is basically here already, and it’s practically indistinguishable from human writing. The main limitation is it can only generate small amounts of text at a time, but that’s just a matter of scaling it up. Image generation, too, is already shockingly good. Take a look at Google’s Imagen or OpenAI’s DALL·E 2 that were both announced recently. It has a similar limitation in that the images are limited to low resolution, but again that won’t be the case for long. ...

I have been having the most troubling dreams lately. I have my doubts as to whether I should share them with you here, as merely recalling their details causes me to question my sanity. But I must tell someone, and you are the only one who will listen. I dream that I am in Singapore, though it is not the Singapore of today. The geometry is wrong in a way that I can see with extreme vividness in my dreams yet cannot describe in adequate terms when awake. The buildings are too tall, too thin, and they tower over the streets like grasping fingers. ...