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by petewailes 3712 days ago
I can't help feeling there's a "walking before you run" thing here. Unsurprisingly, no, you couldn't make something to do this yet. Because we haven't yet built anything that passes the Turing test.

But the fact that we can't yet do that doesn't mean that bots are going to be useless. That'd be like looking at the first ocean-going freight vessels and saying "well, it can't move 300,000 tonnes of freight, so it's useless), or the Wright Flyer and saying that because it can't cross the Atlantic, it's a bit rubbish. (I'm aware this is close to straw manning, but bare with me...)

Sure, early proofs of concept are often both limited in scope and fairly dire. But that doesn't mean there's no potential utility in them and what they do. I suspect bots are similar. Initial, narrow use-case versions will be very useful at providing value in specific circumstances, and eventually they'll become more general in nature. But decrying them at this stage seems a bit like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.