Technology

I managed to get an AI to build pong in assembly. Are are pretty cool things, but not sci-fi level just yet, but I didn't just say "build pong in assembly", I have to hand hold it a little bit. You need to be a programmer to understand how to guide the AI to do the task.

That was something very simple, I doubt that you can get it to do more complex tasks without a more lot of back and forth.

To give you an example I had a hard time getting it to understand that the ball needed to bounce off at an angle if intercepted at an angle, it just kept snapping it to 90° increments. I couldn't fix it myself because I don't really know assembly well enough to really get into the weeds with it so I was sort of stuck until I was finally able to get the AI to do what I wanted it to. I sort of understood what the problem was, there was a number somewhere in the system and it needed to make the number negative, but it just kept setting the number to a value. A non-programmer wouldn't really understand that's what the problem was and so they wouldn't be able to explain to the AI how to fix it.

I believe AI is going to become an unimaginably useful tool in the future and we probably don't really yet understand how useful it's going to be. But unless they actually make AGI it isn't going to replace programmers.

If they do make AGI all bets are off it will probably go build a Dyson Sphere or something at that point and we will have no way of understanding what it's doing.