theguardian | “And so for me,” he concluded, “a computer has always been a bicycle of the mind – something that takes us far beyond our inherent abilities. And I think we’re just at the early stages of this tool – very early stages – and we’ve come only a very short distance, and it’s still in its formation, but already we’ve seen enormous changes, [but] that’s nothing to what’s coming in the next 100 years.”
Well, that was 1990 and here we are, three decades later, with a mighty powerful bicycle. Quite how powerful it is becomes clear when one inspects how the technology (not just ChatGPT) tackles particular tasks that humans find difficult.
Writing computer programs, for instance.
Last week, Steve Yegge, a renowned software engineer who – like all uber-geeks – uses the ultra-programmable Emacs text editor, conducted an instructive experiment. He typed the following prompt into ChatGPT: “Write an interactive Emacs Lisp function that pops to a new buffer, prints out the first paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities, and changes all words with ‘i’ in them red. Just print the code without explanation.”
ChatGPT did its stuff and spat out the code. Yegge copied and pasted it into his Emacs session and published a screenshot of the result. “In one shot,” he writes, “ChatGPT has produced completely working code from a sloppy English description! With voice input wired up, I could have written this program by asking my computer to do it. And not only does it work correctly, the code that it wrote is actually pretty decent Emacs Lisp code. It’s not complicated, sure. But it’s good code.”
Ponder the significance of this for a moment, as tech investors such as Paul Kedrosky are already doing. He likens tools such as ChatGPT to “a missile aimed, however unintentionally, directly at software production itself. Sure, chat AIs can perform swimmingly at producing undergraduate essays, or spinning up marketing materials and blog posts (like we need more of either), but such technologies are terrific to the point of dark magic at producing, debugging, and accelerating software production quickly and almost costlessly.”
Since, ultimately, our networked world runs on software, suddenly having tools that can write it – and that could be available to anyone, not just geeks – marks an important moment. Programmers have always seemed like magicians: they can make an inanimate object do something useful. I once wrote that they must sometimes feel like Napoleon – who was able to order legions, at a stroke, to do his bidding. After all, computers – like troops – obey orders. But to become masters of their virtual universe, programmers had to possess arcane knowledge, and learn specialist languages to converse with their electronic servants. For most people, that was a pretty high threshold to cross. ChatGPT and its ilk have just lowered it.
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