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THEJEDI
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THEJEDI

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What If?

THEJEDI, 8 d.
The concept of work has always baffled me. That every day of a person's life, they get up and go somewhere to do something; sometimes different, sometimes repetitive. The understanding that it is ultimately towards a goal of either changing society, impacting lives and satisfying personal desires, both financially and in all other respects sometimes makes it make sense. So, what if every person belonging to some nation shared a common goal to make their country better and impact the lives of the people within that country while satisfying their personal desires that are tied to that nation. Would this be our common work? What if all Africans wherever they are in the world shared in the goal of making the continent better than it has ever been? An African living and working in the United Kingdom complained one day about how things are so bad in their home country. Then they were asked by a local that if things are so bad then why are they working in the UK instead and not in their home country. It was a casual question with no connotations of condescension, race or disgust, but a clear incomprehension of the reasoning that drove the decision to leave one's country to build another's. I have heard folks from many countries complain about their own countries. Africans complain, Europeans complain, Americans complain. The only people I have not heard complain are Asians by the way. This means that leaders are generally bad. So, what if we disregarded them anyway? The whole idea here is that each person has a lifetime. It lasts for a few years that even pass quickly before we could even catch it. Wherever you work within that time, wherever you put all of your energy, you build that place. You impact the lives of the people within that place, and you satisfy your personal desires tied to that place. If you complain about Africa while none of your life's work is in Africa, know that you are not getting satisfaction for all of your personal desires. What if you did some work in your home country today heh?

Innovation

THEJEDI, 10 d.
Is there really anything that is new under the sun anymore? Maybe you should take a moment and think about that question for your personal opinion before you read what I think. Some people hold the view that everything that humans could do or are doing these days have been thought of (even in the smallest way) by either other ancient humans, or by very recent humans, but there is nothing new to make or no newer ways to make anything anymore. Contrary to that, I ask this question: "do we have newer problems?" If indeed the world does not face newer problems, then only would I agree that there are no new things under the sun. Because we only innovate to solve problems and so long as there are problems that have no ancient roots, we will always need and have innovation. From climate change and environmental degradation, digitization of economies i.e. bit-driven economies, globalization where continents and regions are more reachable and have changing policies, increasing mental health rates, unemployment increases etc., we cannot hide the fact that there are now problems that many thinkers of old never fathomed would exist. These problems demand ideas. They demand thinkers to figure out means to resolution that do not negatively affect the population. These problems demand innovation.

The future of AI: Originality gains more value

THEJEDI, 23 d.
With the spread of artificial intelligence and Large Language Models, everyone is wondering what the future looks like. Well, I'll tell you what it looks like. If today you made a post on LinkedIn or you wrote a book, or a research paper and you wrote it so well that it read as smooth as butter, and everyone could truly verify that it was originally written by you without the assistance of any AI like chatgpt, claude, gemini etc, then you would really be impressing a lot of people. That is what the future looks like to me. It is just like how the part of the population who can do math without calculators are considered geniuses in present times, whereas in the past it was either that or nothing.

Free people in a tapestry of rules

THEJEDI, 2 mon.
I quote Ralph Waldo Emerson's saying that "do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail". In doing so, I am telling you that there are men no smatter and no dumber than us who have been here before and by the things they have said, they knew - in that time - that whatever rulebook and pattern that was written for life - go to school, learn our ways, speak our tongue, do this work, find a companion, have some fun, leave some kids behind, grow old, die - these rules were conjured by some persons before them. Steve Jobs in an interview (find link attached to this story), said that once you discover one simple fact that everything around you that you call life was made up by people that are no smarter than you, and you can change it, influence it, poke at it and something would actually pop out at the other side, then you would have discovered the most important thing in life. I have known the very lowest points of life. I have doubted about tomorrow. And I am not clear of life's tribulations. But it took these things for me "to shake off this erroneous notion that life is just there, and I am just going to live in it". Shun evil, be kind, be obedient, listen to reason and be humble. But never for once think that you are not free to carve a good path and lead others on it.
youtu.be/kYfNvmF0Bqw?si=xXxFwpCb...

All are abstractions

THEJEDI, 2 mon.
Some people take a lifetime to never have been able to see the real reasons of life. Time is a trickery. All what we live for is abstractions. Take heed of time.

In the age of AI Engineering; the frantic craze to replace Software Engineers

THEJEDI, 6 mon.
4 years have passed, and I have been engineering software for machine learning models. I have seen models for pest disease identification, chest conditions localization and detection, food classification and identification and now predominantly chatbots for generally anything. Somehow, the goal now is to automate the work of software engineers by developing models that are able to build end-to-end software. Is this goal profound? I think it is, and I say, "bring it on, let's go crazy with it". There has been uncertainty and fear associated with the future prospects of Artificial Intelligence, especially with the replacement of software developers. Despite this uncertainty and fear, a future where it is possible to build applications by just saying the word seems intriguing. In that future, there would be no application solely owned by "big tech" companies anymore because everyone can literally build one. The flexibility and ease of application development would push popular social media companies like Snapchat, Instagram etc. to make their APIs public (if not already public), portable and free in order to maintain their user base. This results in absolute privacy and freedom for users and thus makes it a desired future. As a rule of thumb, automation of any kind is good. It improves processes and speeds up productivity and delivery. However, one could argue that whenever there is a speed up, there is a time and human resource surplus. Because in the history of humanity, we automated food production by way of mechanized farming and created enough time and manpower surplus which we used to create abstractions around our lives in forms of finance, and industry, etc. So, in the race to automate engineering, what do we intend to use the time and manpower surplus for? But this question is only a different coining to the very important question: "what are the engineers whose jobs would be automated going to be doing?". And the answer is that when we think of the situation as a surplus of manpower, we can view it as an opportunity to create something new rather than an unemployment problem. For example: As a software engineer, if Devin (the new AI software development tool that was touted as being able to build end-to-end software applications) was successfully launched and offered at a fee, I would gladly pay for it and let it do all my tasks while I supervise. I would then spend the rest of my time on other activities pleasing to me. What these other activities would constitute is the question left unanswered. Would they be profitable, or would they be recreational? Regardless, the benefits we stand to gain from automating software engineering are immeasurable. It makes absolute sense to do it. On the other hand, though, we also stand to lose one enormous thing as a human species: our knowledge and brilliance. Drawing again from history, we see that today any lay person could engineer software easily. This was not possible in the early days of Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Linus Torvalds etc. More and more as engineering becomes easier to do, we lose the hard-core knowledge and understanding of the fundamentals of systems. For example, today, there is a lot of demand for COBOL engineers because a lot of financial trading applications which were built in the 90's needs to be updated or ported to more modern languages. The only problem is that no one knows how to write COBOL anymore. It is not that the COBOL language is too old. In my opinion, it is rather that all the engineers who could have learnt to write COBOL decided to go for what was easier and simpler, leaving a debt for COBOL knowledge. So, one big question to answer is whether there would be any engineers knowledgeable enough to recover, resurrect or revive the supporting systems to automated AI systems in scenarios of failure just like in the case of COBOL? When we make things easier for everybody, we somehow make everybody a bit dumber. AI Assisted Engineering: Having discussed the benefits of autonomous software engineering tools and also demonstrated that full automation could cause a decline in basic software engineering knowledge, what then is the best means by which automation due to machine learning could be applied to software engineering? Assistive engineering. This conclusion is based on studies of pull-requests from engineers who use copilot and those who do not. Let us present some examples: `console.log` is a debugging tool which many JavaScript engineers use to debug their code. It prints out variable values wherever it is placed during code execution. Some engineers fail to remove `console.logs` in their code before committing. Pull requests from engineers who use Github's copilot usually do not have any missed `console.log` entries while those from engineers who do not use copilot, do. Clearly, the assistive AI tool prompts engineers who use them about unnecessary `console.logs` before they commit their code. Another example is the level of convolution in code written by AI assistants. With copilot specifically, it was observed that engineers grew to be able to write complicated code. This was expected due to the level and depth of knowledge possessed by the AI tool. Sometimes though, this level of convolution and complication seemed unnecessary for the tasks involved. Amongst all the applications of ML to industry, it is observed that full autonomous agents are not possible yet and might ultimately not be possible in the future. Really, if humans are to trust and use any systems as autonomous agents without any form of human intervention or supervision, it is likely not going to be possible with ML. The reasons being the probabilistic nature of these systems and the inhumanity of ML. The only systems achievable using ML that humans would accept as autonomous agents are superintelligent systems. Some call it artificial general intelligence or super AI systems. Such systems would know, and reason more than humans could even comprehend. The definition of how much more intelligent they would be than humans is not finite. Due to this, an argument is made that if the degree of intelligence of such superintelligent systems is not comprehensible by humans, then by induction, it would never exist. In other words, we can only build what we can define. That which we cannot define, we cannot build. In the grand scheme of things, every workforce whose work can be AI automated, is eventually going to be "somewhat" replaced by Artificial Intelligence. But the humans in the loop cannot be "totally" replaced. In essence, in a company of 5 software engineers, only 2 software engineers might be replaced by AI. This is because in the end, humans know how to use tools and whatever we build with AI, remain as tools, and cannot be fully trusted as domain experts. We will always require a human to use these tools trustfully and responsibly.