↗ Flood Fill vs the Magic Circle

Musings from Robin Sloan:

Most olive oil production at medium-or-greater scale depends on machines of this kind [over-the-row olive harvester]; they trundle over trees planted in long rows, almost like continuous hedges, and collect the fruit with vibrating fingers. Machine-harvested olives cost less to buy, and they arrive at the mill in better shape than olives harvested by hand.

The catch: most olives can’t be cultivated in this configuration; the trees don’t thrive so close together. Only a handful of varieties will tolerate it, so those handful have been planted in huge numbers, and the flavor of global olive oil has changed as a result.

AI enables us to do things faster, and sometimes better than we’ve been able to before. But it has its limits. And as we learn those limits, the work we do will shift to avoid them.

In a different section, the article dives into the limitations of the physical world.

The project cut across several different magic circles — Ruby code, quasi-governmental APIs, the rules and standards of the postal system — but/and it also broke out into the physical world of paper, printers, and post offices. The project required manipulations including but not limited to: folding, peeling, sticking … gnarly!!

It’s possible that an AI coding agent could have helped me with #1 above, and of course it could have advised me on the rest. But it’s impossible to imagine the AI agent handling #2-5 autonomously; it would require such a Rube Goldberg tangle of support that “autonomously” would no longer apply.

In our programming world, AI’s impact looks limitless. But once you drift outside the boundaries of software, it’s put into a different perspective.

If indeed AI automation does not flood fill the physical world, it will be because the humble paper jam stood in its way.