alt Hacker NewsThere are a few thresholds of usefulness for this. Right now it’s a gimmick. I can see a world in a few years or maybe decades in which we almost never look at the code just like today we almost never look at compiled bytecode or assembly.
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There was a story written by (IRRC?) Stanisław Lem: technology went to absurd level of complexity, yet was so important to daily lives that the species' survival depended on it. The knowledge of how everything worked has been long forgotten; the maintainers would occasionally fix something by applying duct tape or prayers.
Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
We're basically headed in that direction.
It lets you do things that are simply not possible with traditional programs, like add new features or adapt to new situations at runtime.
It’s like the strong form of self-modifying code.
There's not much of a world in which we don't check up and verify what humans are doing to some degree periodically. Non-deterministic behavior will never be trusted by default, as it's simply not trustable. As machines become more non-deterministic, we're going to start feeling about them in similar ways we already feel about other such processes.