Mr. Cusack is part of a growing army of “citizen developers,” who use new products that allow anyone to apply artificial intelligence without having to write a line of computer code. Proponents of the “no-code” A.I. revolution believe it will change the world: It used to require a team of engineers to build a piece of software, and now users with a web browser and an idea have the power to bring that idea to life themselves.
“We are trying to take A.I. and make it ridiculously easy,” said Craig Wisneski, a no-code evangelist and co-founder of Akkio, a start-up that allows anyone to make predictions using data.
A.I. is following a familiar progression. “First, it’s used by a small core of scientists,” Jonathan Reilly, Akkio’s other co-founder, said. “Then the user base expands to engineers who can navigate technical nuance and jargon until, finally, it’s made user-friendly enough that almost anyone can use it.”
Just as clickable icons have replaced obscure programming commands on home computers, new no-code platforms replace programming languages with simple and familiar web interfaces. And a wave of start-ups is bringing the power of A.I. to nontechnical people in visual, textual and audio domains.
There's more at the link.
I make no predictions about the future of this technology. It seems likely to improve, increase its range of competence, and be used by more and more people. But how far and how many more? I note, however, that the world of computation is AI's natural environment and so is readily accessible to it. It's a "natural" environment for machine learning.
The thing is, this is not software that's demonstrating human-level intelligence, this is not artificial general intelligence (AGI). It's what Michael Jordan calls Intelligence Augmentation. I think we're going to see more of this in the future.
Of, there are also those who believe that AGI is inevitable, even that it will arrive within half a century or less. Some among those fear that AGI will go rogue. I don't know how much time and energy is devoted to these ends, but I can't help but think it blinds people to what is actually happening.
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