Comment by sfink

Comment by sfink 4 days ago

Only if by "solving it", you mean being able to write any program to do anything.

Software engineering is a hubris-complete problem. Somehow, being able to do so much seems to make us all assume that everyone else is capable of so little. But just because we can write 1000 programs to do 1000 different things, and because AI can write 1000 programs to do 1000 different things, it doesn't mean that we can write the million other programs that do a million other things. That would be like assuming that because someone is a writer and has written 1 book, that they are fully capable of writing both War & Peace and an exhaustive manual on tractor repair.

Financial analysis is not easier than programming. You don't feed in numbers, turn a crank, and get out correct answers. Some people do only that, and yeah, AI can probably replace them.

"Computing" as a field only made sense when computers were new. We're going to have to go back to actually accomplishing things, not depending on the fact that computers are involved and making them do anything is hard so anyone who can make them do things is automatically valuable. (Which sucks for me, because I'm pretty good at making computers do things but not so good at much of anything else with economic value.) "What do you do?" "I use computers to do X." "Why didn't you just say you do X, then?" is already kind of a thing; now it's going to move on to "I use AI to do X."

Then again: the AI-dependent generation is losing the ability to think, as a result of leaning on AI to do it for them. So while my generation stuck the previous generation with maintaining COBOL programs, the next generation will stick mine with thinking. I can deal with that. I like thinking.

</end-of-weird-rant>

LPisGood 4 days ago

> Financial analysis is not easier than programming. You don't feed in numbers, turn a crank, and get out correct answers

It’s not, but if software engineering is solved then of course so is financial analysis, because a program could be written to do it. If the program is not good enough, then software engineering is not solved.

I think this what you were getting at with this part, but it’s not clear to me, because it seems like you were disagreeing with my thesis: “ because AI can write 1000 programs to do 1000 different things, it doesn't mean that we can write the million other programs that do a million other things”

I’m not sure if you’re saying that people weren’t using computers to solve problems before, but that’s pretty much everything they do. Some people were specifically trained to make computers solve problems, but if computers can solve X problem without a programmer, then both the computer programmer and the X problem solver are replaced.

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hattmall 4 days ago

I don't think software engineering is ever going to be solved, but financial analysis will definitely never be solved. It's impossible, the nature of it dictates that, whatever changes happen will further change the results. Financial analysis requires novel thinking, and even if you have AGI that can engage in novel thought they will just be another input into the system.

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- nick49488171 4 days ago
  
  Just like AI, the winners will (continue to) be the ones with the most access to data and the technical and financial capital to make use of it.
  
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jayers 4 days ago

This is the crux of it. The digital world doesn't produce value except when it eases the production of real goods. Software Development as a field is strange: it can only produce value when it is used to make production of real goods more efficient. We can use AI to cut out bureaucratic work, which then means that all that is left is real work: craftsmanship, relationship building, design, leadership.

There are plenty of "human in the loop" jobs still left. I certainly don't want furniture designed by AI, because there is no possible way for an AI to understand my particular fleshly requirements (AI simply doesn't have the wetware required to understand human tactile needs). But the bureaucratic jobs will mostly be automated away, and good riddance. They were killing the human spirit.

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SJC_Hacker 4 days ago

> Software Development as a field is strange: it can only produce value when it is used to make production of real goods more efficient. We can use AI to cut out bureaucratic work, which then means that all that is left is real work: craftsmanship, relationship building, design, leadership.
Thats a really odd take. Software is merely a way of ingesting data and producing information. And information often has intrinsic value. This can scale from simple things like minor annoyances of forgetting your umbrella, to avoiding deaths/millions of dollars in losses due to ships sinking in storms.
Now the long term value of software does approach zero, because it can usually be duplicated quite easily.

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- boh144 3 days ago
  
  Extraction and manufacturing are considered the primary and secondary economic sectors. In a closed loop system, tertiary and onward sectors, like services and technology, cannot exist without the primary and secondary.
  
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apsurd 4 days ago

I value your weird rant. Yes it did go on as a thought stream, but there's sense in there.

I've been thinking a lot around a kind of smart-people paradox: very intellectual arguments all basically plotting a line toward some inevitable conclusion like super intelligence or consciousness. Everything is a raw compute problem.

While at the same time all scientific progress gives us more and more evidence that reality is non-computable, non linear.

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SJC_Hacker 4 days ago

> While at the same time all scientific progress gives us more and more evidence that reality is non-computable, non linear.
What scientific problems are non-computable?
ANNs are designed to handle non-linearities BTW, thats the entire point of activation functions and multi layer networks

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- apsurd 4 days ago
  
  non computable, non-linear as in given known input parameters you can determine the output parameters.
  we can't do that for mostly any complex physical system, as would be for something like living organisms.
  
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  SJC_Hacker 3 days ago
  
  > non computable, non-linear as in given known input parameters you can determine the output parameters.
  These two words do not mean the same thing.
  Non-linear functions do not mean you cannot determine the output for a given input.
  All non-linear means is that the condition f(x+y) = f(x) + f(y) and f(kx) = kf(x) do not hold for arbitrary x,y,k
  For example f(x) = x^2 is a non-linear function. Can you determine what f(x) for arbitrary x?
  Perhaps you meant what used to be called "chaotic systems", those which were highly sensitive to initial conditions. Yes, they are non-linear but they are completely deterministic. A classic example would be the n-body problem in physics under most conditions.
  And I'm not sure what you understand what non-computable means. It means that the computation will not halt in a finite amount of time for a general input. For a particular input, it may indeed halt in a finite amount of time.
  Most real numbers are non-computable, such as the square root of 2 or Pi.
  Practically speaking however, we can get approximations as close as we want. In other cases, such as the Busy Beaver function, we can set bounds
  
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  apsurd 3 days ago
  
  You're correct. I only have a very casual understanding of these things. For the non-linear thing, I just mean that for any advanced system there are say trillions of parameters, like cellular systems, and even if you mapped them in you couldn't be sure what the output would be.
  > And I'm not sure what you understand what non-computable means. It means that the computation will not halt in a finite amount of time for a general input. For a particular input, it may indeed halt in a finite amount of time.
  Sounds familiar, the "halting problem"? I suppose I'm too loosely tying concepts together. Particular vs general input is same as simple vs complex input above, given a complex enough input, the compute involved approaches boundless/infinite.
  In practice, yes, as I understand it, modern science is all about stochastic approximations and for all intents and purposes it's quite reliable.
  I probably should stop using "non-linear" terminology. I really just mean that it's not 1:1. You mention how systems can be deterministic and I looked it up and yes wave function collapse specifically says:
  > The observable acts as a linear function on the states of the system
  We can compute the possible states, but not the exact state. We can't predict the future.
  Thanks for the reply, this is much more interesting to me as it approaches philosophy, so admittedly I too loosely throw words-that-mean-things around.
  
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