A couple of years ago, I re-read Neuromancer and I remember commenting about the way that Case interacts with his deck by talking to it; he just tells his deck to write him some code and it does it. Being a data cowboy was more about visualizing possibilities and exploiting them than being a brilliant coder. I don’t recall exactly what I said but as a coder myself, I was skeptical that we would ever have such technology. Yet, here we are. Not only are the AI doing coding, they’re becoming more proficient every few months, to the point where “software engineering” is already becoming less about being an expert code composer and more about being an expert AI wrangler. We can, today, tell our computer to “write me a program that does X” and it can do it. We depend on the frontier models to be our remote brain but even that is changing fast. If RAM ever becomes plentiful and cheap again, the only bar to running a local coding agent will be the amount a person is willing to put into building their “deck”. Gibson imagined the Matrix as an actual space - it had volume and coordinates, even if the space itself was virtual. Moving your consciousness around the Matrix meant literally moving around in the virtual space. Data stores occupied space in proportion to the amount of data, and corporations deliberately created visual models of their datastores with public interfaces (and private ones as well). There were also unpublished things out in the depths of the Matrix - wandering around in cyberspace was the equivalent of “exploring the Dark Web”. We may not yet be able to put electrodes into our nervous system and use our brain as a peripheral, but we are perfectly capable of creating an internet client that visualizes the IP network as a road atlas of sorts and data sites as visual metaphors instead of as informational metaphors. The World-Wide Web is not some holy thing - in fact, what we have today is already very different from the pure remote file access protocol that Tim Berners-Lee first designed. There’s no reason why the Web is the ‘best’ interface into the Internet - One could just as easily create a client that presents a gazetteer of known public datastores with published API endpoints that navigates them visually. Your local coding agent would already have skills for published public datastores and if you wanted more, you just tell it what you want and it creates it. So, the question - how does that change the internet for you? If cyberspace was a place you navigated instead of searching, how would you use it differently? What’s preventing you from doing that today? submitted by /u/slickriptide
Originally posted by u/slickriptide on r/ArtificialInteligence