Loved this blog post by Robin Sloan on whether AI is okay. The subject is complicated and deserves longer posts like this. It’s a whole new thing. It’s not definitely good or bad.
The part about writing code also resonated with me:
I think the case of code is especially clear, and, for me, basically settled. That’s both (1) because of where code sits in the creative process, as an intermediate product, the thing that makes the thing, and (2) because open-source code has carried the expectation of rich and surprising reuse for decades. I think this application has, in fact, already passed the threshold of “profound social good”: opening up programming to whole new groups of people.
As a programmer, my reaction could be that I don’t want to be replaced by AI, but I’ve said forever — I know Daniel and I talked about it on Core Intuition — that I actually don’t like writing code. I like building products, and it turns out you have to write code to do that. Making sure we’re building the right thing will always be more important than the code itself.
Alan Jacobs’s comment is also great:
It’s perfect that Robin is doing this in a blog post — the first of several, perhaps — because this kind of open-ended thinking is what blogs are best suited for.
You could try to split Robin’s post into a series of tweets, but you would inevitably butcher it of nuance in the process, and so you’d lose everything good about it.
