> **If AI is great at writing code and proofs, humans are left to write specs. Your work has shown that humans are bad at that. What are then humans actually for?** (a) People have always done things that they can only do poorly. The entire human history of technology — and I don't just mean computers — is about aids to augment our cognition (writing, numbers, place notation, etc.). I'm not very good at remembering phone numbers, but I still make phone calls; I'm not great at remembering addresses, and yet I go to new places. We build tools to help us do these things, We then _educate_ people about these tools. Sometimes we create an interface so natural that it requires little education — though never no education — but in general we build tools and teach people how to use them. I don't see why specification-writing should be any different. (b) When I take out my phone and open the phone app, it doesn't automatically start calling someone. When I get in a Waymo, it presumably doesn't automatically start driving. The key is that for all the tools we have, we need humans to express their _intent_. Sometimes their intent is so generic that it requires very little expression, but any time their intent is specific to them, unusual, out of distribution, or whatever, they will absolutely need to specify it, and be careful to check that they're getting exactly what they wanted.

> **If AI is great at writing code and proofs, humans are left to write specs. Your work has shown that humans are bad at that. What are then humans actually for?** (a) People have always done things that they can only do poorly. The entire human history of technology — and I don't just mean computers — is about aids to augment our cognition (writing, numbers, place notation, etc.). I'm not very good at remembering phone numbers, but I still make phone calls; I'm not great at remembering addresses, and yet I go to new places. We build tools to help us do these things, We then _educate_ people about these tools. Sometimes we create an interface so natural that it requires little education — though never no education — but in general we build tools and teach people how to use them. I don't see why specification-writing should be any different. (b) When I take out my phone and open the phone app, it doesn't automatically start calling someone. When I get in a Waymo, it presumably doesn't automatically start driving. The key is that for all the tools we have, we need humans to express their _intent_. Sometimes their intent is so generic that it requires very little expression, but any time their intent is specific to them, unusual, out of distribution, or whatever, they will absolutely need to specify it, and be careful to check that they're getting exactly what they wanted.
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