In software development a VC-funded gold rush has seen almost $1bn (£760m) invested in AI coding assistants. But the expert human babysitters are growing weary of their moronic robot sidekicks.
“I stopped using AI because it was making me dumber,” one senior developer explained last week to the robotics expert and AI critic, Filip Piekniewski.
Researchers at Microsoft and the University of Edinburgh have found there’s a time penalty to checking and rechecking AI output, which ate into “other productive tasks like writing code or running tests”. The consequence, the researchers reported, was “increased cognitive load, frustration, and time spent on the tasks that GenAI is intended to support”.
In some cases, “using GenAI support can, in fact, lead to productivity loss”.
In addition, you do need to be quite experienced to spot the errors that AI creates, Piekniewski told me. Junior developers outsourcing their work to the AI will lose the ability to ever become experienced seniors themselves.
Think about it: that’s one way Forster’s Machine society deskilled itself. Google’s researchers have warned of another the machine might stop. Poor quality AI-generated code rapidly becomes difficult to understand and maintain, building up something called “technical debt” in the jargon.
Perhaps then we should think of EM Forster’s story not as fiction, but as a practical instruction manual. Ironically, our thought leaders have gone in the opposite direction, retreating from reality into fiction. Our AI policy experts today prefer to speculate about an imaginary AI, creating imaginary problems.
They even persuaded Rishi Sunak to host a world summit to deal with the existential risk from a killer AI that nobody has yet invented or is likely to. Reality barely intruded. So this is really a huge failure of intellectual leadership.
Of all the insights made by the aviation safety’s guru professor Wiener, one seems particularly relevant. He devised a list of 31 rules of safety, which are both flippant and shrewd – he left the first 16 blank. Wiener’s 20th Law was: “Complacency? Don’t worry about it.”
