ChatGPT is not a total panacea, and it doesn’t negate the skill and intelligence required to be a great developer. There are significant benefits to reap from much of traditional programming education.

But this objection is missing the point. People who couldn’t build anything at all can now build things that work. And the tool that enables this is just getting started. In five years, what will novice developers be able to achieve? 

A heck of a lot. 

See, now this is the sort of insight that would’ve played well in a TEDx speech.

So yes, the same jokers who want to show you how to get rich quick with the latest fad are drawn to this year’s trendiest technology, just like they were to crypto and just like they will be to whatever comes next. All I would suggest is that you look back on the history of Birchtree where I absolutely roasted crypto for a year before it just felt mean to beat a clearly dying horse, and recognize that the people who are enthusiastic about LLMs aren’t just fad-chasing hype men.

More than everything, my increasing personal reliance on these tools for legitimate problem solving convinces me that there is significant substance beneath the hype.

And that is what is worrying; the prospect of us starting to depend indiscriminately on poorly understood blackboxes, currently offered by megacorps, that actually work shockingly well.

I keep oscillating between fear and excitement around AI.

If you saw my recent post where I used ChatGPT to build a feature for my website, you’ll recall how trivial it was for me to get it built.

I think I keep falling back on this tenet: AI, like all our tech, are tools.

When we get better tools, we can solve bigger problems.

Systemic racism and prejudice, climate change, political division, health care, education, political organization… all of these broad scale issues that have plagued humanity for ages are on the table to be addressed by solutions powered by AI.

Of course there are gonna be jabronis who weaponize AI for their selfish gain. Nothing we can really do about that.

I’d rather focus on the folks who will choose to use AI for the benefit of us all.

In his best selling book, “Range”, author David Epstein profiled a chess match between chess-master Gary Casparov and IBM’s Supercomputer Deep Blue in 1997. After losing to Deep Blue, Casparov responded reticently that,

“Anything we can do, machines will do it better. If we can codify it and pass it to computers, they will do it better”.

However, after studying the match more deeply, Casparov became convinced that something else was at play. In short, he turned to “Moravec’s Paradox”, which makes the case that,

“Machines and humans have opposite strengths and weaknesses. Therefore, the optimal scenario might be one in which the two work in tandem.”

In chess, it boils down to tactics vs. strategy. While tactics are short combinations of moves used to get an immediate advantage, strategy refers to the bigger picture planning needed to win the game. The key is that while machines are tactically flawless, they are much less capable of strategizing because strategy involves creativity.

Casparov determined through a series of chess scenarios that the optimal chess player was not Big Blue or an even more powerful machine. Instead, it came in the form of a human “coaching” multiple computers. The coach would first instruct a computer on what to examine. Then, the coach would synthesize this information in order to form an overall strategy and execute on it. These combo human/computer teams proved to be far superior, earning the nickname “centaurs”.

How?

By taking care of the tactics, computers enabled the humans to do what they do best — strategize.

I’m working on an upcoming talk, and this here essentially serves as the thesis of it.

For as long as we’ve had tools, we’ve had heated arguments around whether each tool will help us or kill us.

And the answer is always “both.”

Ursula Franklin wrote, “Central to any new technology is the concept of justice.”

We can commit to developing the technologies and building out new infrastructural systems that are flexible and sustainable, but we have the same urgency and unparalleled opportunity to transform our ultrastructure, the social systems that surround and shape them.

Every human being has a body with similar needs, embedded in the material world at a specific place in the landscape. This requires a different relationship with each other, one in which we acknowledge and act on how we are connected to each other through our bodies in the landscapes where we find ourselves.

We need to have a conception of infrastructural citizenship that includes a responsibility to look after each other, in perpetuity.

And with that, we can begin to transform our technological systems into systems of compassion, care, and resource-sharing at all scales, from the individual level, through the level of cities and nations, all the way up to the global.

If women are “bitches” and “cunts” and “whores” and the people we’re killing are “gooks” and “japs” and “rag heads” then they aren’t really people, are they? It makes them easier to erase. Easier to kill. To disregard. To un-see.

But the moment we re-imagine the world as a buzzing hive of individuals with a variety of genders and complicated sexes and unique, passionate narratives that have yet to be told – it makes them harder to ignore. They are no longer, “women and cattle and slaves” but active players in their own stories.

And ours.

Extend forgiveness to your idiot friends; extend forgiveness to your idiot self. Make it a practice. Come to rest in actuality.

It turns out that conversations with friends are not so different. Even when you think you know somebody, you never have all the information; something always gets lost in translation. Sometimes you strip away unnecessary banality but, often, something essential is cut. Friends might avoid the truth because they are afraid of being judged. They might be unable to put their thoughts into words, or they might be held back by motives or concerns they don’t even fully understand themselves. Or they might be expressing themselves perfectly well to you, but you twist their words because you are superimposing your own models of the world onto them. To varying degrees, there is an uncrossable chasm between you and everybody you care about.

I've never heard any of DHH's RailsConf keynote speeches before, so I guess I kind of expected it to be more about the state of Rails and where things are going.

In a way, I suppose this is that. But really, it's a personal manifesto about the intrinsic value of software, human worth, and capitalism.

This was mind bending and well worth the watch.