[OT] The problem with programming and how to fix it

[Bob Sneidar]

These are great points. This is why I say that computers don't *actually* do anything. All they do is arrange information in a way that humans can understand and act upon. That human may be a software developer who then feeds that information to a manufacturing device to build a widget. Or it may be information provided to the accountant so that a printer can actually pring the paychecks. 

All these are incredibly useful things, but the computer is not "doing" any work in terms of moving mass. And what it looks like they are doing, say flying an airplane or drawing a spreadsheet, is really an illusion created by a long string of software developers to transform information we understand into a binary form, make some calculations, then convery the binary information back to another form of information. 

Bob S


> On Aug 5, 2018, at 14:35 , Mark Waddingham via use-livecode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:
> 
> Hmmmm - I think that is missing the point about what the current 'AI' technologies that exist actually do (as far as I can see anyway - I'd be more than happy to be proved wrong!)...
> 
> They are merely mappings from one form input to another form of input - they themselves don't do any action - the actions still have to be implemented somehow.
> 
> Alexa for example by itself does diddly-squat beyond map voice to a lower level actionable command (with an element of context, certainly which makes it slightly interesting) - it's the skills that people 'like us' implement which actually do the thing Alexa interprets that we want to be done.
> 
> Same with google assistant, siri, wolfram alpha, even google search - I can type 'what is 100 usd in gbp' and it gives me the answer.
> 
> However the reason google search can do that is because some programmer at google has added a hook which knows that when that pattern is searched for it should call a program that has been explicitly written which looks up the current exchange rate and then renders the result in a nicely formatted string which appears at the top of the search results.
> 
> Warmest Regards,
> 
> Mark.
> 
> Sent from my iPhone