The Economist on how AI is transforming coding: “Several firms are already using GPT-3 and its predecessor GPT-2 to add AI to the software that their programmers use to write code. Much of what these programmers type out has already been written elsewhere at some point in the past. This means that by feeding oodles of pre-existing code into such packages, they can be trained to predict the lines a programmer needs next. As a programmer types, potential “code completions” of one or a few lines pop up on the screen.”
Arnold Kling: “Higher education has turned into a self-licking ice cream cone, meaning an institution that has lost its sense of purpose and instead is focused on self-perpetuation. For many reasons, we need to do away with college as we know it. Broadly speaking, we need to replace two aspects of college. One is the process of obtaining knowledge and demonstrating what one has obtained. The other is the rest of the college experience—its extracurricular aspects.”
Sagarika Ghose: “A passive middle class — when citizens fail fellow citizens — poses dangers for us all. Freedom is indivisible. When one citizen’s freedom is threatened by a repressive state, the freedom of all is imperiled. In a democracy, there is no substitute for the right to peaceful protest, enabling crucial public negotiations with governments and functioning as a social balm for citizens’ grievances…It’s time for India’s middle class to break out of the insular, social media comfort zone and realise that Lady Justice and Lady Liberty badly need robust support from educated citizens. If the educated middle class refuses to take up the challenges and opportunities of citizenship, only students, cartoonists and standup comedians will remain as the last guardians of our freedom.”
