Oly Sourbut

Who knows what language we'll be programming next?

It'll be like gestures or dance or something.

But so in some sense, it's literally the same process.

And, you know, it's got us this far.

So maybe we shouldn't be scared of it.

I think that's kind of right.

I mean, English is much squishier, though.

So all so far, all of these kind of intermediate stages, they have like fairly well defined semantics and so on, whereas English is kind of fuzzier.

But maybe that just enables more flexibility.

In another sense, especially when we're not talking about coding in particular, it's more analogous than literally the same thing.

But by building tools which enable us to carry out operations which would have been laborious previously, sometimes much faster, or certainly at less expense, we're able to...

not only operate the same kinds of activities more quickly, potentially we're able to kind of creatively move beyond and open up new prospects because we're able to access, reason about, and actually achieve these kind of lower level activities faster and more fluently and so on, and able to then compose them into kind of bigger things.

I've forgotten who said it, but there's some quote on this, which is something like society progresses faster

by the number of operations it can perform kind of atomically or something.

I'm probably mangling that.

But there's some, I think there's some cyberneticist or others that have said this kind of thing or some early kind of computer pioneer.

I think I believe in that to some extent.

And certainly for AI for human reasoning, we're hoping that

the systems that we're supporting and building and so on can be tools which enable people to perform important operations more effectively or enable operations at all, but without just sort of handing off entirely and sitting back and not really understanding what's going on.

But there's a gradient there, isn't there?