Surely it shouldn’t be surprising that a technology which literally can only regurgitate bits of things which others have already made, when put into the hands of people whose imagination is limited to what already exists (or alternatively, is not meaningfully directed) precisely because they lack an understanding of the underlying principles, results in only slight variations of the things we already have.
I can’t immediately give you a smartphone app concept that completely breaks an existing, arbitrary taxonomy, but there are two good reasons for that. One; anything that can still run on a smartphone can almost certainly be shoehorned into any existing taxonomy by carefully-worded arguments. Two; by the time a break with tradition is clear enough that such arguments become impossibly tenuous, smartphones will be things that our great-grandparents used to use.
To counterpoint the author’s smartphone analogy, think of how people looked at their TVs in the early 1970s. It was a society-changing but by that time relatively established technology with high growth. And people had all sorts of ideas for “new” things to do with it. You could’ve made arguments regarding most of them in the same vein as the arguments in this article. Most of those ideas were half-baked and failed at the time… only to resurface decades later, altered, refined, and successful, on PCs and smartphones. But PCs and smartphones are not, in any real sense, TVs.
Which surprisingly, once I hunkered down and pushed my way through this lengthy essay, is essentially one of the points that I think the author is making (although obliquely): That by the time this technology has evolved beyond its current limits, it will no longer be something that we recognize as “software” in the current sense.
I suggest trying to keep the concepts of “integrated system design” and “algorithmic process definition” separate from “digital computer software” in a similar way. Which, funnily enough, are the parts of all of this at which humans arguably still beat LLMs.
This article reads like OP was expecting us to build God through an app or something. When, if you’re like me, you don’t share your slop apps cause its kind of rude. You use them for yourself and keep it quiet for fear of being chastised.
I use my slop apps every day at work. My boss was pretty impressed when I was sharing my screen and I told AI to invoke a bunch of utilities I had built and pull together a report based on the output and set that to work while we did other things. It does a pretty good job for slop. It keeps trying to infer things and provide bad analysis based on bad inferences, but the data it pulls and the spreadsheets it builds are pretty solid.
Viva la slop.
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I get the point being made, and it makes sense, however the ending begins to sound a lot like the “640k is enough” (that wasn’t actually said) but was used by a lot of people for their incredulity of how much more progress could there be, or be necessary. It also reminds me of an old Popular Science article of the 50s that tried to imagine how life would be in 2000. They got a lot of the technical things close, which is sort of what this post is trying to suggest, that we can imagine what’s technically possible for science. But they got a lot of the social aspects of how things could be used wrong or totally didn’t see it, as the necessity of use changes.
If they’re just keeping the suggestion of categories of software very broad, then I suppose new needs could be pushed under existing headings, but I think they’re reaching to say more that everything we might need in the future already has a category with something there, and anything else isn’t a need.
