The other day I was trying to find out what percentage of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky's works were published before the age of 60 vs after the age of 60, something that's almost impossible to find on the internet (I don't speak Russian). I spent a lot of time trying to get Bing to answer it for me (didn't succeed), and one of the times I asked it to look up all the bibliographic information it could on Tsiolkovsky, go through each file and count the dates of publication, then tell me how many were after his 60th year. It said "Sorry, that would require me to download and analyse a large number of PDFs, which is outside my current capabilities. I'm sorry I couldn't be of more assistance this time. "
They've improved a lot on the Yes Man aspect of it.
3) This is why we developed the programmer personality that loves to tell the designers how they haven't thought this thing through very well yet!
- Another human, named Programmer, generate some solution based on his expirence.
- ProductDesigner, refines the spec to get closer to "the thing he has in mind"
- Programmer, while annoyed, tries to his best effort to write a close solution
- And we call it iteration of development
Is it really that different from your experience? Ok, maybe not your experience, but in the world of outsourcing works it's really kinda like that.
The solution to the above is never "ProductDesigner should learn to speak a deterministic language." It's "when Programmer feels the spec is too ambiguous, he should give feedback to ProductDesigner."
You can't eliminate the "vagueness of natural languages" from the equation. The only differences are, to me, 1) AI is really not that smart yet. 2) AI doesn't admit it doesn't know something. Humans are reluctant to admit it as well, but as least we do it when it's necessary.