It was a staple of Asimov's books that while trying to predict decisions of the robot brain, nobody in that world ever understood how they fundamentally worked.

He said that while the first few generations were programmed by humans, everything since that was programmed by the previous generation of programs.

This leads us to Asimov's world in which nobody is even remotely capable of creating programs that violate the assumptions built into the first iteration of these systems - are we at that point now?

[–] amki@feddit.de 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

No. Programs cannot reprogram themselves in a useful way and are very very far from it.

[–] legion02@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Eh, I'd say continuous training models are pretty close to this. Adapting to changing conditions and new input is kinda what they're for.

[–] Bjornir@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

Very far from reprogramming though. The general shape of the NN doesn't change, you won't get a NN made to process images to suddenly process code just by training it.

[–] yum13241@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Then how does polymorphic/self-modifying code work?

[–] amki@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It doesn't or do you have serious applications for self-modifying code?

[–] yum13241@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

Some use it for causing millions of dollars in damage.

[–] rikudou@lemmings.world 2 points 1 year ago

are we at that point now?

Nope, but we're getting there.