The long Staircase - How Programming Evolves from Instructions to Intent
A century ago, a computer was a person. Teams of people with pencils turned uncertainties into columns of numbers. The revolution began when Claude Shannon showed that circuits could embody Boolean logic. Transistors became switches, gates became adders, adders became ALUs, instruction sets, compilers, operating systems, and finally applications. Each layer constrained the next. Two plus two equals four not by hope, but because the stack is engineered for repeatability from electrons up to software. Fast-forward to today, and we’re amid another profound shift. Instead of explicitly coding every behavior, we increasingly teach or train computers using data – a trend exemplified by machine learning and AI. Andrej Karpathy terms this new approach Software 2.0. You specify the intent or goal of the program and provide data, then let the computer automatically generate the logic. In practice, this means feeding a large dataset and a rough model architecture into a training process, which then “compiles” the data into a working model. The end result is a neural network that embodies the solution. ...