alt Hacker NewsAh I think I see where things went off the rails. I should've explicitly added "would have to do" to purposes for creating software; it was just on my mind, and left as an implicit.
I don't think there's anything out there that a computer can do but humans can't do per se. Whether it's manually doing what an MRI does, or sending people with the Mars rover. It would be anything from tedious/inefficient through crazy difficult/dangerous to totally impossible at this time (at some point in time it would at least be possible). Though that's just being pedantic, especially re video games.
> "this is just an implementation detail to let us run other software, so it shouldn't count"
That's essentially what I said, but in different words.
The main point in my original reply was to question the point of software creation, if not to stand in for human capability, wholly or partially. I don't see people creating software explicitly to just let it gather dust for example, even though that happens very often.
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> The main point in my original reply was to question the point of software creation, if not to stand in for human capability, wholly or partially. I don't see people creating software explicitly to just let it gather dust for example, even though that happens very often.
Are you referring to the developer's/organization's motivations? Maybe this is a proximate-vs-ultimate-cause sort of thing, but people are also motivated to create software by a desire to express themselves, to win competitions, to stave off boredom, to commit crimes, to prove theorems, to earn money, to show off, to learn things, and so on.
I write software to automate away plenty of my own activities (and occasionally others' too), but even when counting things like test suites, build scripts, etc, I'd estimate that less than a third of the code I've written was because I sat down at the keyboard thinking "I want to replace a human capability".
> I don't think there's anything out there that a computer can do but humans can't do per se.
The first thing that comes to mind is complex calculations that need to happen within a certain time budget to be useful. Like, sure, I could "play GTA 5" by sending each of my inputs to a room full of mathematicians frantically doing calculations who then instruct artists how to paint the next frame to send back to me[0], but even if you could somehow get that to run at 1 frame per day, I'd argue that's not really "playing GTA 5" anymore (a core aspect of the game is reacting to things in real time). For a more tangible scenario, imagine trying to pilot a quadcopter by manually controlling each actuator individually (there's no way you could do that quickly/accurately enough to avoid crashing).
[0]: Also this is arguably still "a computer", just one with an unconventional architecture.