I added a GrokBot, told it that it is my food logger, and to create a Google spreadsheet with the columns and sheets I need. After a couple of short iterations it was ready to go. Now to log anything I just prompt the bot with a little voice, text, or a photo of a meal, and it makes a (usually accurate) guess about what exactly I mean, looks up the nutrient stats, and logs it to the spreadsheet. To change any feature or refactor the spreadsheet I just describe the change and boom.
Before LLMs this would have been magic for a sophisticated developer, now it's table stakes for the frontier AI vendors available to any muggle. This was Eunice slapping me in the face and shouting Wake Up!
There's a discussion to be had about whether we software engineers can still say we made something or not. I think that with sufficient effort put in, we can still make that claim but should be careful about how we phrase it.
I also think that if you put in just 30 minutes of effort you absolutely cannot claim to have written it or had much input into it at all.
Another one that comes to mind constantly is 'The Peripheral'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peripheral_(novel)
I'm pretty sure Gibson has a wormhole with a lens attached stashed away somewhere.
That too is not far off now.
Or even better write something about whatever the book is if you've read it. Linking to Wikipedia all the time is so lazy and lowbrow. I'm not much of a Wikipediaphile. Only as a first stop or last ditch, and even then.
Likewise, what with your shot-from-the-hip response that lambastes OP in a non-constructive way, the very kind of unhelpful "dialogue" that is all too common on the Internet these days.
Perhaps someone is genuinely ignorant and it could've behooved you to have kindly offered suggestions as to which of the "thousands decent science fiction and literature sites out there" your strongly opinionated, holier than thou self finds most valuable? Seems like a better place to start than whatever... this is.
Seems like rage is maybe a tad misplaced?
The fact they got so angry at you calling them out seems to indicate the latter.
With friends like that, who needs enemies?
Slashdot had the concept of the 'AC', an 'anonymous coward'. It's not the most prestigious label to aspire to but it is interesting to see the kind of venom on display here, which I highly doubt that person would commit to if they weren't anonymous.
So if I can't really be bothered to speak with other humans, why would I want to speak out loud with an AI? I may be wrong and soon we'll all have Jarvises, HALs and Samanthas but not sure the adoption will be as fast and broad as these companies want to makes us believe.
https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2054961-welcome-to-my-meme-p...
...and fifteen years after Stross' Accelerando opened with a man who spent every waking hour doing what his autonomous AI agents told him to do via his smartglasses...
...and twenty-seven years after AT&T's "You Will" ad campaign sold a future including agents, teleconferences, gps navigation, video on demand, and many more things, pretty much none of which were actually brought into daily life by AT&T...
Apple may have built the phone, but AT&T is the network that carries it. Wasn't the first iPhones on ATT only?
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1130452/000095014407...
i don't care about facts, tom selleck convinced me it was at&t
(Consider, for example, that the first chapter of Neuromancer alone would have exceeded the stock memory capacity of many personal computers at the time, at ~46 kB.)
when it appeared as a feature, spell checking was impressive for the technical feat of compressing word lists with tens of thousands of entries into representations suitable for tiny memories.
N = 1, but I wrote a science fiction novel in Wordstar on a DOS computer circa 1983.
Were they? [0]
A legitimate early use of personal computers was to replace the typewriter, as the modest requirements of basic word processing lent themselves well to the equally modest capabilities of these early machines.
By the early 1980s, the word processing market was dominated by two main rivals: WordPerfect and WordStar. Microsoft wasn’t even in the running yet, as the 1983 MS-DOS release of what would become Microsoft Word (then called Multi-Tool Word) came and went with hardly a splash.
This article [1] on use of word processors by well-known authors in the early 80's (and before) is worth reading too.
Oh, and as far as memory goes, remember these devices had floppy drives that could store at least 360Kb and, in March 1983, the IBM PC XT came out with a 10MB hard drive.
[0] From https://retrotechreads.substack.com/p/the-rise-fall-and-surp...
[1] https://newrepublic.com/article/133011/literature-became-wor...
In Novemember 1994 he said:
"I don't have an e-mail address, I don't even have a modem. As much as I admire the Internet I suffer literally agoraphobia, which in it's original sense means a fear of the marketplace. I do not want to receive three hundred e-mail messages per week from strangers wanting to communicate with me. If only because I'd be tempted to open them all and look at them. And there goes, you know, half the time that I have to write. I mean, the amount of physical mail and other communications I get these days is already swamping me. "
If you haven't, it's pretty bad and definitely a factor in why the original didn't have very much cultural impact.
Yep. He _has_ to come from the future.
The idea that anyone ever read a Gibson novel and thought, “can’t wait,” truly boggles my mind.
I'm always amazed at the handwringing over whether language models are "aligned" properly when we are actively developing devices that can - as autonomously as possible - seek out and kill.
And I don't even think we have a choice - we can't stop the Putins of the world from developing this technology.
People in technology read science fiction. That reading in part informs and inspires the kinds of things they work on and explore. This is illustrated pretty directly with the new Tesla vehicle and various deferred dreams of flying cars—this is not an innovation influenced by practicality, it is influenced by regressive adolescent fantasy.
I think there's some degree of that in a lot of technical innovation. Yes, it's still uncanny how well Gibson tracked developments (or perhaps equally, how much his fiction has influenced the kinds of things people pursue, consciously or otherwise).