A sane article. Looks like Ben Evans has real corporate experience and understands how things work in big corporations.
Giving people AI is just like giving people Google Wave (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave), which can do pretty much anything collaboratively, ended up doing nothing.
> You need audit, security, maintenance and accountability.
I think this is where the role of humans will move towards in the future. Things like accountability can't really be outsourced to AI.
This relates to solving the alignment problem: if you give the AI a specific goal and it has to plan sub-goals, how can you be sure the sub-goals align with your interests.
For tasks in an isloated environment, this doesn't really become an issue. You can give a sandbox the least privileges it needs to do the job you want it to do.
It becomes a problem if you give it open-ended access to systems that connect to the real world and which can have real consequences. There have been stories about openclaw deleting someones email inbox because it though that was what the owner wanted. AI taking control of public wikis to coordinate, which was recently posted is another one.
For software concerns with potential real catastrophic consequences are security, durability, availability. I think for future software systems these are the concerns where you need to limit the AI in a way that it cannot circumvent guarantees that you give around these concerns.
Minor nit:
> AI doesn’t change the question: it creates new choices and moves the thresholds.
This cause an adverse reaction when I read the post. This was probably not written by an LLM since the rest of the article doesn't look like it, but maybe in the future we need to all be more concious about leaving LLM-tells out of our writing.
The way I see it is AI collapses hierarchy. Abstraction layers will become more flat both in software and in society. Because ultimately software and layers of heirarchy in society exists to serve a function. But now those functions are being replaced.
Imagine this you used to need a library for common things in your software project. Even if you just need one function but because it was easier to just import a library that would have been the standard practice. But now the AI will just go “I can just implement that thing you need in 10 lines”. You used to need things like react native or flutter if you wanted to build cross platform apps. Now not anymore you just need to tell the LLM and it does it in both, and you get better results too.
In society we also had all these layers of abstractions and hierarchies that we used to need but will become more and more irrelevant collapsing the hierarchy.
There is a saying “as above so below, as below so above” I think this applies here. It will propagate all through our social construct, software, society.
I think "any apps" and probably "most apps" is too strong. It wouldn't be very productive to hand-roll your own filesystem, browser, cryptographic library, etc. At some point you have to delegate to another party. No person or corporation has the time and expertise to own and maintain every layer of the stack.
A sane article. Looks like Ben Evans has real corporate experience and understands how things work in big corporations.
Giving people AI is just like giving people Google Wave (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave), which can do pretty much anything collaboratively, ended up doing nothing.
> You need audit, security, maintenance and accountability.
I think this is where the role of humans will move towards in the future. Things like accountability can't really be outsourced to AI.
This relates to solving the alignment problem: if you give the AI a specific goal and it has to plan sub-goals, how can you be sure the sub-goals align with your interests.
For tasks in an isloated environment, this doesn't really become an issue. You can give a sandbox the least privileges it needs to do the job you want it to do.
It becomes a problem if you give it open-ended access to systems that connect to the real world and which can have real consequences. There have been stories about openclaw deleting someones email inbox because it though that was what the owner wanted. AI taking control of public wikis to coordinate, which was recently posted is another one.
For software concerns with potential real catastrophic consequences are security, durability, availability. I think for future software systems these are the concerns where you need to limit the AI in a way that it cannot circumvent guarantees that you give around these concerns.
Minor nit:
> AI doesn’t change the question: it creates new choices and moves the thresholds.
This cause an adverse reaction when I read the post. This was probably not written by an LLM since the rest of the article doesn't look like it, but maybe in the future we need to all be more concious about leaving LLM-tells out of our writing.
The way I see it is AI collapses hierarchy. Abstraction layers will become more flat both in software and in society. Because ultimately software and layers of heirarchy in society exists to serve a function. But now those functions are being replaced.
Imagine this you used to need a library for common things in your software project. Even if you just need one function but because it was easier to just import a library that would have been the standard practice. But now the AI will just go “I can just implement that thing you need in 10 lines”. You used to need things like react native or flutter if you wanted to build cross platform apps. Now not anymore you just need to tell the LLM and it does it in both, and you get better results too.
In society we also had all these layers of abstractions and hierarchies that we used to need but will become more and more irrelevant collapsing the hierarchy.
There is a saying “as above so below, as below so above” I think this applies here. It will propagate all through our social construct, software, society.
It doesn't look like ai will enhance existing tools. AI allows everyone to build their own. Or at all eliminate necessity of any apps
I think "any apps" and probably "most apps" is too strong. It wouldn't be very productive to hand-roll your own filesystem, browser, cryptographic library, etc. At some point you have to delegate to another party. No person or corporation has the time and expertise to own and maintain every layer of the stack.