About having fun

This post is somewhat a list of open questions for now and the future.

Now that AI is writing most of my code, I often have time think about life, AI and the future. Whilst I'm drinking my tea, watching some terminals running Claude code on my work Macbook, I start to wonder where we are heading to. I'm staring at a computer which is generating programs to be executed on others computer. Those pieces of software will read tons of bytes in input, transform them and handover another big batch of data to another system, another computer, another cluster. At some point this will land in front of some human user which is working for some of our customers. Or will it, really ? This could just be a customer's computer some day, sooner than I think maybe. And will all this serve Humans after all ?

Data, information, intelligence, is key in our capitalistic world. Good prediction gives a company an advantage over its competitors as it allows to move in the good direction ahead of time. It often means shipping the right product at the right time with the right price to hit an identified target. What if some day the act of purchasing and buying were done by AI based on AI insights ? We already have Alexa, Google Home, and we are one step away to just say "Get me a new pair of shoes", AI will do, knowing your habits and tastes, your likes on Instagram, your views on Tiktok... What will then be the next step ? AI will base its decision from that and from the marketing generated by some other AI. Are we far from that ? I'm observing a lot of people around me, youngster and elders as well, asking ChatGPT for advice about "what to shop". The other day, my sister in law called me to ask what model of waffle iron we own, because she wanted to buy one. After giving my answer she quoted ChatGPT recommendations, which summarized it in a table with a few lines, like price and power. What if AI went a step forward, based on personal knowledge of my sister in law ? The initial list by ChatGPT only listed 3 models, one high end, the others middle end. It could have just placed de purchase for one, based on some additional context. But what is really interesting is how from the dozen of models out there, AI choose those three models specifically ? Advertising as of today is done for humans (and well, traditional SEO), maybe some day it will target AIs as well (it already started) ?

All this raise deeper concerns: are we deferring all of our choices to AI ? I know there are a lot of concerns around politics already. And afterwards, what will remain ? Is it a matter of free will ? Spinoza is knocking at my door questioning me about freedom. Side note, maybe it's time to read Ethics, where a lot of this is discussed. I honestly do not know if AI vendors are overselling it, or if we are just running to the unavoidable end of civilization as we know it in western countries. AI is supposed to remove the burden of repetitive and boring tasks, leaving us more time for more valuable tasks, like solving problems but the thing is, when you know you have a tool which is able to produce answers (quickly), even if it is not perfect, then we all go lazy at some point and handover the fun part to the machine. After all, when you hold a hammer in your hand, everything looks like a nail, isn't it ?

Crazy thing is, at its core Gen AI is just about probabilities : given the past, and a direction, what will be the most probable outcome. Fair enough, it's not exactly comparable to rolling dices, but still.

Maybe AI is an opportunity to take a step back and reflect about what we really care about. What make us thrill in life, what wake us up in the morning or keep us awake on evenings ? As for me, those questions are more open than ever: building pieces of software, writing programs has always been something I enjoyed which full-fielded me. But it all started by trying to understand: how does a computer work, how from code we get to a machine computing stuff ? And if today, I'm happy to build more than ever, I am also sad to not fully understand how things work underneath. There is always a limit on how far you can and want to dig in. Computer science is enabled by electronics which in turn is enabled by Physics of the infinitely small and quantum Physics, so the limit is the one you set to yourself, yet, AI brings in a laziness which is quite annoying.

In the end, I keep wondering. Are we entering a new era or just exiting the tinkering times of our quite new (at the scale of science) field that is Computer Science ? But most importantly, what is the place of Man Kind in this new era ? Ain't the purpose of AI to serve us and allow a better life ? Is AI going to be the golden hammer of capitalism and just serve the purpose of a very few ? Future will tell.