DWIM (do what I mean) computer systems attempt to anticipate what users intend to do, correcting trivial errors automatically rather than blindly executing users’ explicit but potentially incorrect inputs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DWIM
When I hear about the AI singularity and how no one will have jobs in 10 years I usually just laugh.
Computers and software are really, really dumb.
Consider this, I’m using a terminal on my computer (Windows, Mac, Linux, doesn’t matter).
I’m in my home directory and want to change directory to Documents, but mistype.
C:\Users\Me>cd Document
The system cannot find the path specified.How dumb is this? Any human would immediately see the error and know you meant to access the Documents directory. But computers are dumb. They do what you tell them, not what what you want. Blindly following rules.
We are a million miles from telling computers what result we want and letting them work out for themselves how to get the answer. Imagine if humans worked like this. I’d never ask my daughter to empty the dishwasher because explaining her all the steps involved in the process would take 100x longer than just doing it myself!
We need result based computing, not process based computing.
Two classic programmer jokes highlight the issue. Humans would never do this but computers do it every day.
My wife said: “Please go to the store and buy a carton of milk and if they have eggs, get six.” I came back with 6 cartons of milk She said, “why in the hell did you buy six cartons of milk”
“They had eggs”
and
A programmer goes out to get some dry cleaning. His wife told him, “While you’re out, pick up some milk”
He never came home
Daily Examples of Dumb Errors
UiPath
Alteryx
Tableau
LibreOffice Calc
Python
MacOS
The last message from the ‘Today’ panel on my MacBook is very telling. It’s clear that underlying all the smart AI is still lots of rules-based logic. This is if-then-else login, not AI.
- Look in calendar for events in the next 24 hours
- Parse events and turn into human friendly string
- Use ‘from’ field as the person you’re about to meet
- Fail
My computer has no idea ‘unknownorganizer’ isn’t a person, it doesn’t know how names work or what constitutes a name. It’s just a dumb parser.
While we read stories everyday about facial recognition or predicting flu outbreaks (although we’re a long way from predicting COVID 19 and Google Flu Trends shut down a long time ago due to inaccuracy) AI is still in it’s infancy and trying to do anything that we might call General AI is still a long way off.
The potential to make everyday software so much smarter is there, but I see very little focus on this type of work despite the idea being around for at least 60 years. The productivity gains could be huge but it seems something seemingly as simple as doing what we want is still too complex for computers to achieve.
I’m not sure why so much pessimism here … isn’t training models around what the user intends simply a challenge of collecting data around that, to train them with?
But if it’s so easy why is no one doing it? The answer is because this type of problem is actually really difficult for a computer to work out.