Build Your Own Robot Minion Army (Pt.1)
Also, “AI” Debunked
I was talking to a friend the other day. He’s just getting into programming via asking ChatGPT to create bots for him and gradually working out how coding works.
In watching his progress and giving him a few tips and ideas to try, it actually invigorated my “inspired newbie” interest again like I had when I started programming. (Unfortunately, no AI bots then to replace the tedium of those first steps.)
And then that got me thinking about projects I’d recommended for my friend and projects I could put together for myself.
With AI, everyone seems to be jumping into bed with the idea that it’s a job-stealing, everyone’ll-be-redundant thing on the one hand and Skynet on the other. This, obviously outside the immediate and obvious current use cases of writing shitty lead gen emails and creating millions of anime girls with huge boobs.
Which, OK if you’re into that, everyone needs a hobby.
However… I recommend a different hobby.
Let’s first talk about the limits of AI.
Limits Of AI; They Exist
Back in the lockdown era, I was playing around with programming. At the time, GPT-2 had just been released. Looking back, its ability to create text was absolutely appalling.
That said, I saw the writing on the wall and knew that it’d get better in the future. Correct Prediction Count: 1. Go me!
Furthermore, I saw a particular opportunity that was probably only available to me, and I built a side business doing it. I won’t say what that was because honestly, the sun is shining, I’m making hay and really, few people would be able to put together what I did anyway.
I bring this up not to brag but to frame the conversation; I got in early with LLMs, built a business based around the knowledge and have now been working on it – and improving it all – for 2-3 years now. And nobody else is close to doing what I’m doing in the area. And I feel that needs to be said because it staves off the “you just don’t know” talk that you get when you have an opinion on AI tech.
There are limitations, they’re very real, and they’re not easy to solve.
People are under the impression that what ChatGPT etc. are is AI. They’re not. They’re language modelling algorithms, basically. Predictive text. They have a certain context window – stuff they can draw from that acts as “memory.” They have the algorithm that generates new sentences based on the pool of training data used to create it.
Jargon obfuscates that “AI” LLMs aren’t intelligent. They can give you correct answers if you ask them in the same way a Google search does, and they can generate sentences based on the millions of sentences they’ve digested and can now regurgitate.
That’s fantastic but there are hard limitations.
LLMs can’t write War and Peace and they aren’t ever going to be able to using the current technology. It’s not close, even if you’re a prompt engineer and you specifically train your LLM on Russian literature and tell it to write a sequel to War and Peace.
Nor can it do the same with non-fiction; ask it to write a Ph.D thesis and it’ll fail spectacularly. Because ultimately, it’s not thinking.
This is not trivial.
But what I want to talk about is something far simpler.
You Don’t Need To Replace Yourself With AI To Reap Benefits
Take my friend for instance. He’s programming simple little pieces of code. Grab an API key, get some information from somewhere, and print it somewhere else in a nicely-designed format.
You could do this without AI, and he hopefully will graduate to that, but the knowledge and skills needed for simple coding work just got a lot lighter.
And really, like I wrote about years ago on this blog, (Prediction Count Correct: Another +1 For Me!) you don’t need to do super-complex things like code the next Mars Rover to make benefits with coding.
I told my friend; create a simple reminder bot.
I thought to myself;
- Reminder bots
- Budgeting apps that interface with Google Sheets
- Automated watering systems for your garden
- Automated shopping lists and recipe builders
And any list of business applications that are simple and will save you time and money.
Then I thought that this is another thing to go in the Essays section of The Vault. I’ll probably do DIY Automated Lifestyle coding projects and put them together for everyone.
But in the meantime, the blueprint is all clumsily worded in this little blog article for you.
It’s Sunday evening, so I’m off. See you in the next one.