The Fun Part
ChatGPT was released just over a year ago. Early on I didn’t use it much. With most technical products, I’m not the earliest adopter. I prefer to wait a bit while the bugs and bad design decisions are worked out. It’s only in the last few months that I’ve started using it in earnest.
I was skeptical of initial claims it would disrupt Google, but now I get it. More and more I find myself using to ChatGPT to ask questions I might have Googled in the past. Recent examples include:
What is an example of an algorithm that is O(log n)?
Show some examples of how something done with object oriented programming would be done in OCAML.
Write a program using lambda calculus to perform a factorial operation that mimics recursion without using actual recursion
(That last one was inspired by this 2012 Ruby Conf talk. What’s interesting is not only did it spit out the algorithm, it also explained that this kind of code—which is impenetrable to understand—is not good programming practice.)
I also ask it more general questions like “How is analytic philosophy different from continental philosophy?” and “Why is Mitch McConnell sometimes called cocaine Mitch?”
My favorite is this response to “write a haiku about [Denver Nuggets superstar ] Nikola Jokic”
Denver's gentle giant,
Jokic's passes so divine,
Basketball's delight.
In my coding, I’ve been using the Codeium plug-in for VS Code to help me debug and even generate whole blocks of code for me. I love not only that it generates the code, but also that I can ask why it made certain decisions, and what the underlying fundamentals are.
The Fear Part
The New Yorker recently featured a piece about AI called A Coder Considers the Waning Days of His Craft.
The author is James Somers. I am jealous of James because a) he’s younger than me and b) he’s apparently a good programmer who is c) also a good enough writer to regularly appear in the New Yorker. Anyway, I stalked his LinkedIn so you don’t have to. You’re welcome. The About section part just says “Writer and Programmer,” a refreshing change from the personal brand stuff you can find on r/LinkedInLunatics
Somers drills into a key aspect of the craft of software that’s hard to describe to a non-programmer.
The actual work product of most programmers is rarely exciting. In fact, it tends to be almost comically humdrum. A few months ago, I came home from the office and told my wife about what a great day I’d had wrestling a particularly fun problem. I was working on a program that generated a table, and someone had wanted to add a header that spanned more than one column—something that the custom layout engine we’d written didn’t support. The work was urgent: these tables were being used in important documents, wanted by important people. So I sequestered myself in a room for the better part of the afternoon. There were lots of lovely sub-problems: How should I allow users of the layout engine to convey that they want a column-spanning header? What should their code look like? And there were fiddly details that, if ignored, would cause bugs. For instance, what if one of the columns that the header was supposed to span got dropped because it didn’t have any data? I knew it was a good day because I had to pull out pen and pad—I was drawing out possible scenarios, checking and double-checking my logic.
But taking a bird’s-eye view of what happened that day? A table got a new header.
I feel that in my bones. Some of my most joyful programming experiences have been solving extremely narrow problems that look simple on the surface but are fiendishly difficult to express in code. Very early on in my career, before I even called myself a programmer, I wrote a series of macros in Quattro Pro that allowed the user to press a button and auto-fill a bunch of expense projections based on a user-supplied inflation coefficient. Exciting stuff, right? I remember feeling extremely impressed with myself, and I was annoyed when the user I designed it for didn’t see how powerful it was. It fills the row automatically! You just have to push this button!
Now that kind of thing can be built in just a few minutes with Excel. It may even be that you can just ask Excel Copilot to do it for you.
I am of course extremely glad to have Codeium and other LLMs help me solve problems, but… am I becoming obsolete? There are obviously lots of applications of this technology beyond code. You can use it create legal documents, draft a newsletter, design an SEO strategy, even write answers to forum questions on Quora.
AI generated Quora answers are already showing up in Google results, and it feels like it could be the beginning of the end for Google and generic user-provided answer sites like Quora and StackOverflow. If Google is just going to take me to an AI-generated answer, why bother with the middleman?
In recent years I managed an apartment complex geared toward lower-income residents. Being a tech guy, I was excited to implement several technologies to make life easier for property managers: a smartphone app for payment and service requests, an AVR for inbound phone calls, an online video surveillance system to deter crime, and an electronic leasing system that all but eliminated paper in our office.
AI has potential to assist property managers in several other ways: answering questions from potential tenants via phone or on Facebook, responding to current residents who have questions about their lease, reviewing video surveillance for suspicious activity and so on.
But you know what it can’t do?
Help a tech-phobic resident set up the smartphone app
Slowly and patiently show a senior citizen how to sign an electronic lease
Repair a clogged toilet
Run to Home Depot to pick up new deadbolt locks, then take those locks to a locksmith to rekey them
Hang Christmas decorations in the clubhouse
Mow the grass
Periodically inspect a unit for cleanliness
Treat bedbugs
I have hired and contracted capable people to do these things for us. Though these jobs are on the lower end compensation-wise, I’m very skeptical that AI will ever replace them.
But my role as an asset manager who mostly just balances the books and sends reports to investors? I’m not so sure.
We Are the 9.9%
Discussions of wealth inequality often focus on the 1%, particularly the top 0.1% who make up the billionaire class. This is the capital class — their income comes from ownership of assets, not labor. This cohort has benefitted greatly from America’s entrepreneurial dynamism over the last 50 years or so.
It’s easy to get mad at billionaires, but the truth is there is another cohort that has benefited from that same dynamism — readers of this newsletter. We are in the 9.9% — the class of people who have gotten great returns on education and skills developed for the information economy. In 2018 the Atlantic ran a cover story about our cohort, the “new aristocracy.” At the time I thought it was prescient but not actionable.
Now with AI I wonder if it is actionable, just not by you and me. Are we headed for the 60%?
Median personal income in the US is roughly $31,000. That’s about 25% less than we pay our property managers and maintenance people, but not by much.
Get ready.