People like communicating in natural language.

LLMs are the first step in the movement away from the "early days" of computing where you needed to learn the logic based language and interface of computers to interact with them.

That is where the inevitabilism comes from. No one* wants to learn how to use a computer, they want it to be another entity that they can just talk to.

*I'm rounding off the <5% who deeply love computers.

People also like reliable and deterministic behavior, like when they press a specific button it does the same thing 99.9% of the time, and not slightly different things 90% of the time and something rather off the mark 10% of the time (give and take some percentage points). It's not clear that LLMs will get us to the former.

> LLMs are the first step in the movement away from (...) the logic based language

This dumb thing again.. The logic based language was and remains a major improvement [0] in being able to build abstractions because it allows the underlying implementations to be 'deterministic'. The natural language misses that mark by such a wide margin that it is impossible to explain in nicer language. And if one wants to make the argument that people achieve that anyway, perhaps you reading through one [1] will put that thought to rest :)

[0] www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667.html

[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/1/te...

> People like communicating in natural language

It does puzzle me a little that there isn't more widespread acclaim of this, achieving a natural-language UI has been a failed dream of CS for decades and now we can just take it for granted.

LLMs may or may not be the greatest thing for coding, writing, researching, or whatever, but this UX is a keeper. Being able to really use language to express a problem, have recourse to abbreviations, slang, and tone, and have it all get through is amazing, and amazingly useful.

> Ordinary language is totally unsuited for expressing what physics really asserts, since the words of everyday life are not sufficiently abstract. Only mathematics and mathematical logic can say as little as the physicist means to say.

- Bertrand Russell, The Scientific Outlook (1931)

There is a reason we don't use natural language for mathematics anymore: It's overly verbose and extremely imprecise.

If there was a way to explain contracts in natural language, don’t you think lawyers would have figured it out by now? How much GDP do we waste on one party thinking the contract says they paid for one thing but they got something else?

Spoken language is a miserable language to communicate in for programming. It’s one of the major detractors of LLMs.

Programming languages have a level of specification orders of magnitude greater than human communication ones.

The thing is, people also dislike natural language for its ambiguity. That's why we invented things like legalese and computers; to get more reliable results. There will always be a need for that.

> LLMs are the first step in the movement away from the "early days" of computing where you needed to learn the logic based language and interface of computers to interact with them.

Even if one accepts the framing (I don’t), LLMs are far from the first step.

The article is about questioning “inevitabilism”! To do that, we need to find anchoring and assuming the status-quo. Think broader: there are possible future scenarios where people embrace unambiguous methods for designing computer programs, even business processes, social protocols, governments.

Dijkstra would like to have a word here

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667...

> No one* wants to learn how to use a computer, they want it to be another entity that they can just talk to.

No, we don't.

Part of the reason why I enjoy programming, is because it is a mental exercise allowing me to give precise, unambiguous instructions that either work exactly as advertised or they do not.

Logic based languages are useful because they are unambiguous. Natural language is far less efficient for communicating hard requirements. Why do you think mathematical notation exists? It’s not just because the ivory tower elites want to sound smart. It’s a more efficient medium for communicating mathematical ideas.

Many people love games, and some of those even love making games, but few truly love to code.

I'm designing a simple game engine now and thinking, I shall have to integrate AI programming right into it, because the average user won't know how to code, and they'll try to use AI to code, and then the AI will frantically google for docs, and/or hallucinate, so I might as well set it up properly on my end.

In other words, I might as well design it so it's intuitive for the AI to use. And -- though I kind of hate to say this -- based on how the probabilistic LLMs work, the most reliable way to do that is to let the LLM design it itself. (With the temperature set to zero.)

i.e. design it so the system already matches how the LLM thinks such a system works. This minimizes the amount of prompting required to "correct" its behavior.

The passionate human programmer remains a primary target, and it's absolutely crucial that it remains pleasant for humans to code. It's just that most of them won't be in that category, they'll be using it "through" this new thing.

LLMs are nowhere near the first step. This is Python, an almost 35 year old language:

    for apple in sorted(bag):
        snake.eat(apple)

“People like communicating in natural language”

I would actually want to see some research on this. Maybe? But I’d think there would be a lot of exceptions. At its most basic, I’d rather flick my thumb than constantly say “scroll down”. And I think that you’d want to extrapolate that out.

Let’s reframe your world view:

No one wants to communicate with a computer. Computers are annoying, vile things. They just want things to work easily and magically.

Therefore, for these people, being able to communicate in a natural language isn’t going to be anymore appealing than a nice graphical user interface. Using a search engine to find stuff you want already requires no logic, the LLM does the same but it just gives you better results.

Thus the world of LLMs is going to look much like the world of today: just with lazier people who want to do even less thinking than they do now.

It is inevitable.