This is where AI could legit change the world for the better in the future. Use fewer pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides as the problems can be fixed mechanically on a highly localized level.
This could even help fix problems with invasive species - imagine a drone fleet that could kill kudzu just as it erupts from the soil.
She rolled her eyes and said, "Well, I’m glad that our contract is only for [a limited period of time].”
It was not a vote against the whole shift, but instead a comment on the volatility of this space. The tech and the associated market is changing so fast that there are no real experts, proven business models, or established long term use cases. Everyone is experimenting, and nothing is set in stone. This change means the dust is not yet settling.
“We keep thinking like OpenAI is a company that has a clue what it is doing because they have this amazing product that is getting used everywhere in business. In reality, they are a startup, and startups are going to have startup problems. We cannot treat them or their product like they are established and stable.”
-my wife, who leads work at another company with OpenAI tech
I know the above quote is from someone “unimportant” in the industry, but to me it encapsulates exactly what we have seen from OpenAI in the past couple weeks. She became simultaneously reassured and more worried when Satya Nadella, the highly respected CEO of Microsoft, became directly involved. I wonder what she will think of this development when she wakes up.
Good documentation should, in part, tell people where to click. I have designed software documentation for high performing individuals at leading global companies, and I have designed software and hardware documentation for minimum wage fast food workers with limited English proficiency. In both extremes, I showed them exactly where to click on the screen at each step.
You might not need that level of help, but many people do. Others do not strictly need it, but they prefer the simple instruction set. “Click here then here,” instructions ease the transition into a new system one needs to learn, or it removes the need entirely to learn a system one uses infrequently.
The problem is that making good documentation is difficult and time consuming. It relies on a fundamentally different skill set than coding or even UI design.
I agree that the ideal is for software to not need any documentation. In my experience, I have yet to see software that rises to that task and is used across a variety of experience levels and societal cross sections.