[cctalk] Re: Why I am not worried about AI taking over the world!

At 10:22 PM 4/1/2025, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote: It's one thing to say that AI methods have been shown to give better diagnoses in some situations than the humans, it's quite another to suggest we won't need doctors. In my neck of the woods, even doctors have been greatly supplanted by physician assistants. I'm as skeptical as they come, and I have plenty of criticisms of AI as implemented today, but I've also been confounded to discover how useful it can be when programming. It's often better than googling and copy-and-pasting from Stackoverflow. I've generally used Copilot as it comes with M365. In a recent Perl tool that needed a few dozen regular expressions, it was very handy, providing not only correct regexs but also snippets of the surrounding code. In another task where I wanted to quickly generate a text-based profile of a computer's specifications and components, it was very helpful in writing a bunch of PowerShell. Did it hallucinate? Perhaps once out of several dozen things I asked it, and in that case, it was easy to see that the two clauses of the if-then were the same. I've heard similar puzzlement from a very experienced programmer friend who told me about the way his IDE would now suggest code to him while he was typing, and he thought the suggested code was good and very similar if not identical to what he was about to write. - John