Interview with Mark Cuban on AI, Silicon Valley, Politics, Media and more

https://bothsidesofthetable.com/mark-cuban-on-why-you-need-to-study-artificial-intelligence-or-youll-be-a-dinosaur-in-3-years-db3447bea1b4#.ionwzln9o

by espeed • 9 years ago

44 43 9 years ago

bothsidesofthetable.com

gydfi• 9 years ago

Note: article doesn't actually say why he thinks this, only that he said it, so the comment is really just "next big thing is big".

dovdovdov• 9 years ago

Dumb, thin front-end FTW! :)

a_humean• 9 years ago

Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13599074

greenleafjacob• 9 years ago

He thinks even programming is vulnerable to being automated and reducing the number of available programming jobs.

Hmm... Where have I heard this before?

It is far more likely that the programming occupation will become extinct (through the further development of self-programming techniques) [...] More and more, computers will program themselves; and direction will be given to computers through the mediation of compiling systems that will be completely neutral so far as the content of the decision rules is concerned. (Herbert Simon, 1961) [1]

[1] https://www.princeton.edu/~hos/Mahoney/articles/miscellany/i...

djaychela• 9 years ago

While such predictions may have been made before, surely as circumstances change it becomes more likely for it to be possible? If you go back 20 years or so, I can remember people confidently predicting that it would be impossible for computers to have human-like vision, and that it was an 'impossible' problem. And look where we are now.

I think it's often difficult to appreciate that one's own profession could be replaced by some code, but it's an issue that many areas of the working population will have to deal with in our (and our children's) lifetimes - what has happened with physical work - automation such as robots and machines will happen with the work we do with our minds in many cases.

alecmuffett• 9 years ago

I get what you're saying, but it's an "all food will be cooked by machines"* argument; yes there are robochefs which can produce doughnuts, noodles, pizzas, etc; but there's an ever-expanding area of innovation and niche-filling that humans are really good at. Ask any Michelin-starred chef, or freelance software engineer.

Software engineering is not a zero-sum game where the AIs rise to the exclusion of humans - it's an expanding space.

*and then there's the meta: does using an oven qualify as cooked-by-machine?

pjc50• 9 years ago

Computers don't have general human-level vision, but they can now do certain tasks acceptably well (classification, tracking, SLAM, facial biometrics). The general task of "what's in this image and what does it mean" is still handled pretty badly. We still need manual image moderators, for example, although that's undoubtedly being worked on.

The history of what used to be called "CASE" is absolutely full of people promising tools that would automate parts of programming that fail to deliver. The difficult (or at least most time-consuming) parts of programming are all to do with meaning, intent, purpose, communication, and prioritisation.

What is likely is that "code assistants" will gradually improve, both in the form of language constraints (Rust borrow checker) and IDE advice (Visual Studio's endless tooltips).

simias• 9 years ago

The way I see it if we manage to reach a level of AI strong enough to replace software engineers it means that basically anything can be automated. It's not just the end of programming, it's basically the end of jobs altogether. The consequences will be tremendous for humanity as a whole.

So I'm not really selfishly worried about this. We'll go eventually, but we'll probably be amongst the last to go. By then society will have to figure out how to deal with mass unemployment, it's already a massive issue today and it's not going to improve any time soon.

JustSomeNobody• 9 years ago

20 or 30 years ago we were only 5 years from computers doing the work of programmers also.

It's just not gonna happen on a large scale. Nothing beyond simple CRUD if that.

geodel• 9 years ago

I think it's often difficult to appreciate that one's own profession could be replaced by some code

For some reason I had this thought even 15 years back. I used to think once software is written it will continue to run with occasional interference by maintainer. But then people convinced me, look, there is lot of software is to be written so don't worry about losing job.

I now think the kind of software I and many others were writing at typical IT company (CRUDy apps) was very immature and buggy. But over 2 decades people have recognized some patterns and made the software run with much less maintenance work.

I have noticed 5 years back at my workplace where every weekend there will be firefighting with production issues. But now everything seems stable and generally better. No brand new software was written, no stack was replaced. It was things like upgrading to newer versions of software, more logging, more monitoring, more automation, better release process etc.

There used to be ~10 people in team and now there are ~4 people. Everyone who left was supposed to have replacement but no one was hired. The point I am trying to make is, yes, there can be new whizbang features, NoSQL backend with 10 more ppl on team and so on but from business perspective this thing is working fine and just keep it up and running without too many customer issues.

splike2• 9 years ago

I don't believe programmers will be completely replaced by AI for a very very long time.

Suppose such an AI exists, one that can write perfect code and get the job done. How do you tell the AI what to code? Any language specific and accurate enough to tell the AI what to code, is in itself a programming language. Someone needs to write in that language, and that person is a programmer. All the AI does is make for a better compiler.

Programmers will be (and already are) augmented by technology and AI, but someone has to tell the computer what the goal is.

baddox2• 9 years ago

How does a programmer at a company know what to code? Generally they're given instructions in a human language. An AI replacement for human coders would likely have to do that same, which likely means you need something very close to a strong AI. And a strong AI by definition can replace nearly every human job.

jobigoud• 9 years ago

It's speculative at this time so I can tell my point of view: you tell it in English. Sometimes it's going to ask for clarifications, other times it's going to get it slightly wrong, or it will have to fill in the missing parts of the specs and take micro-decisions. Just like a human programmer would.

I don't think it will write "perfect code" whatever that means. It will write code with its own idiosyncrasies its own writing style, etc.

Shivetya• 9 years ago

Good project managers can communicate with people so I doubt there will be issues with AI. Plus the majority of problems the AI could code don't necessarily have to be large endeavors, simply start with the simple stuff and you eliminate the need for quite a bit of coding.

Design is so much more important than code, knowing what you want and knowing what you need is more than half the battle. Finally don't over look that an AI will be 24x7 and no person can have that output

BinaryIdiot• 9 years ago

How do you tell the AI what to code? Any language specific and accurate enough to tell the AI what to code, is in itself a programming language. Someone needs to write in that language, and that person is a programmer. All the AI does is make for a better compiler.

The problem is this is never how the transition would happen.

Today how does it work? Go far enough back. You'll have a user with problem X. Someone translates this problem into requirements to have others implement. You would never take the requirements and give them to a general AI because, as you said, you'd have to ensure it understood them.

What would actually happen is you'll tell your general AI that you need to solve X and it'll figure out the best way to do it and just do it. They wouldn't write software in the sense we have it today. They wouldn't produce an app. They would, instead, solve problems.

Here's an example. Today you think "I'm really hungry. It would be great to have an app that could show me what's around me then have someone pick it up for it after I make a selection". You have some basic requirements in your head, you write some software, you test it out. Maybe your app calls an API to place an order for pizza then calls an Uber to pick up your pizza and then bring it to your current location.

With a general AI you'll feel hungry and the AI will know you're in the mood for pizza from Dave's Pizzeria 3 blocks down. It'll dispatch an automated vehicle to pick up the pizza from a likely automated kitchen and bring it straight to you. You wouldn't even need conscious thought into it if we have a way to perfectly connect the AI and our brain.

fmap2• 9 years ago

"Reducing the number of available jobs" is a very reasonable statement. How much time do you spend gluing together ready made components? How different is the latest CRUD app you wrote from the first one you wrote? That's definitely something that could be automated, and it doesn't need "machine learning"... It needs investment in building new infrastructure, which almost nobody invests in because it's difficult to make money from that.

On the other hand, automating all of programming is a pipe dream. If you could do that, you could also automate mathematics and by extension most of the sciences...

erelde2• 9 years ago

Honest question to logicians:

Is there any proof that it [automating programming, mathematics, scientific method] is or isn't possible? Is there a way to prove or disprove it mathematically?

throwaway7292• 9 years ago

One way to think about this: Simon was right. There are very few people today programming computers at the level at which Simon programmed them in 1961. After all, FORTRAN was an automatic coding system because of its super high level of abstraction! In this sense -- when Simon's words are taken in their accurate historical context -- Simon was spot-on about self-programming (aka compilers for high level languages mostly replacing hoardes of assembly wranglers).

It's just that now the word "self-programming" means something different because we've used all that automation to build ever more complex systems.

And that process will continue. Level of abstraction is increased, we figure out how to automate at that level, and then we raise the bar again to tackle ever more challenging problems.

dandermotj• 9 years ago

Mark Cuban is talking about it - maximal hype has been reached.

entelechy• 9 years ago

Just a matter of time until only Dinosaurs will remember what AI was ;P

e2e4• 9 years ago

Interesting part of the article is also "Mark also pointed out that the number of investments he personally makes in San Francisco has dropped by 90%. "

some1else• 9 years ago

Once a fair number of hackers become dinosaurs, working from home might become the new norm.

kapauldo• 9 years ago

Mark cuban cares about mark cuban. Suster should get qualified opinions on the matter.

jokoon2• 9 years ago

To be honest it smells like AI has become something you just talk about because you have something to sell. It was called web 2.0, then big data, and now it's AI.

minimaxir• 9 years ago

I wrote a rant last post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13599465) about how AI is being oversold. The problem in this case (along with buzzwords like Web 2.0/big data) is that there is some logical advantage to implementing AI/Web 2.0/big data for a business, just not a change-the-world advantage that will not help if everything else is being done incorrectly.

There is a gray area in between the marketing, and the ambiguity is the real danger.

jokoon2• 9 years ago

I don't see any danger with AI, I'm optimist that it will introduce great changes.

I'm just bothered by the whole market tendencies, it often sounds like it's appealing to salesmen, meanwhile doing real stuff with machine learning is tough and it is often the realm of research and universities.

6d6b73• 9 years ago

In reality programming is already fully automated :) Translation to machine code is done in most cases automatically. We just tell the compiler what we want the program to do.

Honestly, if we treated software engineering as a real engineering discipline, we would already have 90% of software created automatically. We just keep ourselves busy by building same CRUD apps, recreating same layouts, building same libraries over and over again.

When we start treating software engineering as engineering not as art, full automation of programming will be a matter of only few years.

elcapitan• 9 years ago

I know that there's an infinite amount of AI/ML books and courses, but does somebody know a good high-level overview of how ML-based solutions can be introduced to replace existing imperative/OO code bases, and how to think about this? That would be a good starting point to avoid the "dinosaur" scenario, without starting from scratch on sample projects that are unrelated to your current work.

Interview with Mark Cuban on AI, Silicon Valley, Politics, Media and more

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