I suppose you're alluding to his famous quote "I'd like to die on Mars, just not on impact"[0], so yes, having him stay there would be a win-win for everyone.
> I don’t see AI doing either of those things well.
I think I agree, at least in the current state of AI, but can't quite put my finger on what exactly it's missing. I did have some limited success with getting Claude Code to go through tutorials (actually implementing each step as they go), and then having it iterate on the tutorial, but it's definitely not at the level of a human tech writer.
Would you be willing to take a stab at the competencies that a future AI agent would require to be excellent at this (or possibly never achieve)? I mean, TFA talks about "empathy" and emotions and feeling the pain, but I can't help feel that this wording is a bit too magical to be useful.
I don’t know that it can be well-defined. It might be asking something akin to “What makes something human?” For usability, one needs a sense of what defines “user pain” and what defines “reasonableness.” No product is perfect. They all have usability problems at some level. The best usability experts, and tech writers who do this well, have an intuition for user priorities and an ability to identify and differentiate large usability problems from small ones.
Thinking about this some more now, I can imagine a future in which we'll see more and more software for which AI agents are the main users.
For tech documentation, I suppose that AI agents would mainly benefit from Skills files managed as part of the tool's repo, and I absolutely do imagine future AI agents being set up (e.g. as part of their AGENTS.md) to propose PRs to these Skills as they use the tools. And I'm wondering whether AI agents might end up with different usability concerns and pain-points from those that we have.
A good tech writer knows why something matters in context: who is using this under time pressure, what they're afraid of breaking, what happens if they get it wrong
Current AI writing is slightly incoherent. It's subtle, but the high level flow/direction of the writing meanders so things will sometimes seem a bit non-sequitur or contradictory.
It has no sense of truth or value. You need to check what it wrote and you need to tell it what’s important to a human. It’ll give you the average, but misses the insight.
> but can't quite put my finger on what exactly it's missing.
We have to ask AI questions for it to do things. We have to probe it. A human knows things and will probe others, unprompted. It's why we are actually intelligent and the LLM is a word guesser.
Now you just need to add some buttons to let me control things. In particular, I would like to toggle things to bring "Cost of computer memory" down, which I suppose would require a slowdown in "Compute used to train notable AI systems" (which I'm absolutely willing to accept).
> We should be afraid, they say, making very public comments about “P(Doom)” - the chance the technology somehow rises up and destroys us.
> This has, of course, not happened.
This is so incredibly shallow. I can't think of even a single doomer, who ever claimed that AI will destroy us by now. P(doom) is about the likelihood of it destroying us "eventually". And I haven't seen anything in this post or in any recent developments to make my reduce my own p(doom), which is not close to zero.
Though I personally hope that we'll have enough of a warning to convince people that there is a problem and give us a fighting chance. I grew up on Terminator and would be really disappointed if the AI kills me in an impersonal way.
I'm very curious about what's going on there. It's been in a "Major Outage" for over two hours now, with a previous fix rollout apparently not helping matters. I wonder if it has to do with the recent rollout of Cowork.
Kinda sad because I thought of a great, practical use of Cowork to demo to the company today to demonstrate how useful I thought it could be across a range of user types. Such is life.
> the fears around having them probably are more irrational than rational
My $0.02 is that if anything, the fears people have about how much their lives would be transformed are significantly lacking, and a lot of the "it's not so bad" advice is post-hoc rationalization. I mean, it's evolutionarily excellent that we humans choose to have kids, but it's very rational to be afraid and to postpone or even fully reject this on an individual basis. And as an industry and as a society, we should probably do a lot more to support parents of young children.
Ya, this is a fair callout. I moreso meant fears around being a bad parent. If anything, people experiencing those fears will be fine parents because they've got the consideration to already be thinking about doing a good job for their newly born.
Once upon a time, in the magical days of Windows 7, we had the Volume Shadow Copy Service (aka "Previous Versions") available by default, and it was so nice. I'm not using Windows anymore, and at least part of the reason is that it's just objectively less feature complete than it used to be 15 years ago.
reply