Is it possible for professional programmers to become good writers?

Programming is a language largely disconnected from reality. After working with such an alien language all day, can someone cross the bridge and write beautiful prose at the end of the day?

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I think ted chiang studied cs

is it possible to program a literature writing machine?

Yes, we are not far off and articles are already being written by AIs.
It's ignorant to think creativity and its offspring is only a human aspect.

but can machines be creative in the same sense as us?

what if theirs is a different kind of creativity we could never grasp, and viceversa.

and then, do cats have cat-creativity and birds have bird-creativity and so on...

maybe there's such a thing as just "creativity" and we can share it with machines.

Maybe when we have brain emulation technology, but until then, not at all. Writing an article does not require creativity, most journalists use the same standard formula for their articles

If we changed one of your neurons with a mechanical pen which simulated the behavior of the neuron it replaced perfectly. Would you still be you? Would you lose creativity?

What if we changed one more after that? What if we continued until no neurons were left?
Would you still be you? If not, when did the change happen?

There is no reason to think machines can't be creative in the same way as humans, and probably in far superior ways too.

Programming attracts large numbers of people with IQ 105-115, and indeed this IQ range dominates the IT job market. Such people are capable of repeating but not creating, and will rarely be able to write well. However, there are some more intelligent programmers, generally those working in science and with strong mathematics backgrounds, who can be highly creative and literate.

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Yes, of course. No, not you.

We've gone from scanning the web, to posting on forums to writing articles in just a few years.
Progress is extremely quick, and there is nothing special about creativity. In fact look at Alpha Go Zero, that machine made moves there were incredibly innovative and creative that no one could grasp, but was winning moves.

Judge for yourself: catb.org/~esr/sf-words/essay.html

I don’t think they’re incompatible. And if you expand your definition of “writing” to include video game writing, there have been plenty of successful programmer authors.

Also not all programmers use LISP, user.

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>Programming attracts large numbers of people with IQ 105-115

Proof please

Yes, but showing creativity within the fixed parameters of a game like Alpha Go Zero is completely different to creativity within the unlimited indefinable parameters of the universe. I don't think we are so close, but I think it will happen

Good if you're the first poster I replied to then we both agree pretty much.

>there is nothing special about creativity

I guess you think quoting me will make it special.

Explain why you think it's special and why that means AI can't achieve it?
Do you need me to help you move the goal post a couple of times before you even reply?

Coetze was a programmer.

The Dusklands author? I loved that slim little book.

>Go
I don't know anybody who cares about Go. Look up Alpha Zero in Chess.
Chess is nothing like writing. The reason why this software is good at Chess is because the software has a larger memory than us and has access to a much larger range of moves than humans do. This software has zero creativity, it only knows the best move because it has access to the data taken from millions or billions of randomly simulated chess games. The fact that you believe the Chess software is creative shows that you don't at all understand the software behind it.
Let us assume that software could be creative, and that it could create works of literature greater than man can. If this were the case, that literature would be totally outside of any man's comprehension in the same way that the software's chess moves are incomprehensible. That literature would be worthless to humans as we could spend a lifetime studying it and never understand it.

yes, he is a good writer IMO. really underrated.

He only did it for 3 years.

I've only ever read Dusklands, but I was impressed. The two stories in that book were evocative and powerful; to portray his colonialist ancestor in such a visceral way took a lot of courage, if you ask me.

95 iq

Anecdotal evidence points to "yes".
I'm not hugely successful or anything, but I have a title out on amazon that gives a decent bonus income to my day job as a software dev.

IDK why but that scares the shit out of me.

Ken Liu

Do you think we will see super human designer babies or creative artificial intelligence first? I think the former

I hope the world ends before.

Designer babies are too much of an ethical risk. Genomes are stochastic systems. So many genes depend on each other that the network of relationships becomes untenable at the ordinality of the degree of separation approaches the maximum.

To get to a designer baby that has anything but superficial customization (hair and eye color for example) would require an unethical amount of trial and error. You'd wind up with a lot of stillbirths and mutants before you succeeded.

Unless of course, China does all the R&D.

Compelling argument.

>nobody cares about go, just look at chess
Your argument is that because chess is a very simple problem to solve, AI is not powerful. The AI that played Go demonstrated what could be described as creativity, that's the whole point. Go back to playing league of legends or something

how you describe creativity?

Thats not the point. The point is that your argument was beyond retarded, and you wrote a whole paragraph of broken english trying to get it out.

Im another user.

I want to know what creativity is.

If you weren't 95 iq you would be able to figure it out yourself. Now, I will no longer be responding to your posts because you are incoherent and I am busy making business moves.

ok, good luck.

This is the problem, we cant even define the most basic objects, such as a chair, in an objective fashion, so how will machines? How will they deal with abstract concepts such as creativity?

People call AlphaZero chess creative as well. That doesn't make it creative. You know nothing about Chess as well as nothing about the software.

>If you weren't 95 iq you would be able to figure it out yourself. Now, I will no longer be responding to your posts because you are incoherent and I am busy making business moves.

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