Amanuensis: The Programmer's Apprentice

Suppose you could merely imagine a computation, and a digital prostheses, an extension of your biological brain, would turn it into code that instantly realizes what you had in mind. Imagine looking at an image, dataset or set of equations and wanting to analyze and explore its meaning as an artistic whim or part of a scientific investigation. I don't mean you would use an existing software suite to produce a standard visualization, but rather you would make use of an extensive repository of existing code to assemble a new program analogous to how a composer draws upon a repertoire of musical motifs, themes and styles to construct new works, and tantamount to having a talented musical amanuensis who, in addition to copying your scores, takes liberties with your prior work, making small alterations here and there and occasionally adding new works of its own invention, novel but consistent with your taste and sensibilities. Perhaps the interaction would be wordless and you would express your objective by simply focusing your attention and guiding your imagination, the prostheses operating directly on patterns of activation arising in your primary sensory, proprioceptive and associative cortex that have become part of an extensive vocabulary that you now share with your personal digital amanuensis. Or perhaps it would involve a conversation conducted in subvocal, unarticulated speech in which you specify what it is you want to compute and your assistant asks questions to clarify your intention and the two of you share examples of input and output to ground your internal conversation in concrete terms. More than thirty years ago, Charles Rich and Richard Waters published an MIT AI Lab technical report [68] entitled The Programmer's Apprentice: A Research Overview. Whether they intended it or not, it would have been easy in those days for someone to misremember the title and inadvertently refer to it as "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" since computer programmers at the time were often characterized as wizards and most children were familiar with the Walt Disney movie Fantasia, featuring music written by Paul Dukas inspired by Goethe's poem of the same name