# Australia can, and must, get R under 1.0

Summary: By using better masks, monitoring and improving indoor air quality, and rolling out rapid tests, we could quickly halt the current outbreaks in the Australian states of New South Wales (NSW) and Victoria. If we fail to do so, and open up before 80% of all Australians are vaccinated, we may have tens of thousands of deaths, and hundreds of thousands of children with chronic illness which could last for years.

## We can get R under 1.0

Pandemics either grow exponentially, or disappear exponentially. They don’t just stay at some constant level. If the reproduction number R, which is how many people each infected person transmits to, is greater than 1.0 in a region, then the pandemic grows exponentially and becomes out of control (as we see in NSW now), or it is less than 1.0, in which case the virus dies out.

No Australian state or territory is currently using any of the three best “bang for your buck” public health interventions: better masks, better ventilation, or rapid testing. Any of these on their own (combined with the existing measures being used in Vic) would likely be enough to get R<1. The combination of them would probably kill off the outbreaks rapidly. At that point life can largely return to normal.

Stopping delta is not impossible. Other jurisdictions have done it, including Taiwan and China. New Zealand appears to be well on the way too. There’s no reason Australia can’t join them.

Scientists have found that using better masks is the single best way to decrease viral transmission in a close indoor setting. They showed that if all teachers and students wear masks with good fit and filtration, transmission is reduced by a factor of around 300 times. The CDC has found that two free and simple techniques to enhance the fit of surgical masks, “double masking” and “knot and tuck”, both decrease virus exposure by a factor of more than ten compared to wearing a cloth or surgical mask alone. For more information, see my article (with Zeynep Tufekci) in The Atlantic.

### Ventilation

We now know that covid is airborne. That means that we need clean air. A recent study has shown that the key to managing this is to monitor CO2 levels in indoor spaces. That’s because CO2 levels are a good proxy for how well air is being circulated. Without proper ventilation, CO2 levels go up, and if there are infected people around virus levels go up too.

CO2 monitors can be bought in bulk for around $50. Standards should be communicated for what acceptable maximum levels of CO2 are for classrooms, workplaces, and public indoor spaces, and education provided on how to improve air quality. Where CO2 levels can not be controlled, air purifiers with HEPA filtration should be required. Better ventilation can decrease the probability of infection by a factor of 5-10 compared to indoor spaces which do not have good airflow. ### Rapid tests Rapid antigen lateral flow tests are cheap, and provide testing results within 15-30 minutes. They have very few false positives. A Brisbane-based company, Ellume, has an FDA approved rapid test, and is exporting it around the world. But we’re not using it here in Australia. If every workplace and school required daily rapid tests, around 75% of cases in these locations would be identified. Positive cases would isolate until they have results from a follow-up PCR test. Using this approach, transmission in schools and workplaces would be slashed by nearly three quarters, bringing R well under 1.0. In the UK every child was tested twice a week in the last school term. Recent research suggests that daily rapid tests could allow more students to stay at school. ### Hitting a vaccination target The Grattan Institute found we need to vaccinate at least 80% of the total population (including children) this year, and continue the vaccination rollout to 90% throughout 2022. Clinical trials for the vaccine in kids are finishing this month. If we can quickly ramp up the roll-out to kids, and maintain the existing momentum of vaccinations in adults, we may be able to achieve the 80% goal by the end of the year. It’s important to understand, however, that no single intervention (including vaccination) will control covid. Many countries with high vaccination rates today have high covid death rates, due to waning immunity and unvaccinated groups. The point of all of these interventions is to reduce R. When R is under 1 and cases are under control, restrictions are not needed; otherwise, they are needed. ## We must get R under 1.0 ### Over 200,000 children will develop chronic illness The Doherty Report predicts that over three hundred thousand children will get symptomatic covid, and over 1.4 million kids will be infected, in the next 6 months if restrictions are reduced when 70% of adults are vaccinated. This may be a significant under-estimate: a recent CDC study predicts that 75% of school-kids would get infected in three months in the absence of vaccines and masks. New research has found that one in seven infected kids may go on to develop “long covid”, a debilitating illness which can impact patients for years. Based on this data, we are looking at two hundred thousand kids (or possibly far more) with chronic illness. The reality may be even worse than this, since that research uses PCR tests to find infected kids, but PCR testing strategies have been shown to fail to identify covid in kids about half the time. Furthermore, this study looked at the alpha variant. The delta variant appears to be about twice as severe. It’s too early to say when, or if, these children will recover. Some viruses such as polio led to life-long conditions, which weren’t discovered until years later. Long covid has a lot of similarities to myalgic encephalomyelitis, which for many people is a completely debilitating life-long condition. In regions which have opened up, such as Florida, schools were “drowning” in cases within one week of starting term. In the UK, lawsuits are now being filed based on the risks being placed on children. Delta rips through unvaccinated populations. For instance, in England delta took hold during May 2021. English schools took a cautious approach, placing school children in “bubbles” which did not mix. After school children were required to go directly home and not mix with anyone else. Nonetheless, within three months, more kids were getting infected than had ever been before. Cases in July 2021 were around double the previous worst month of December 2020. ### The Doherty Model greatly underestimates risks The Doherty Model, which is being used as a foundation for Australian reopening policy, has many modeling and reporting issues which result in the Doherty Report greatly underestimating risks. (These issues are generally a result of how the report was commissioned, rather than being mistakes made by those doing the modeling.) The Doherty Model has to work with incomplete data, such as the very limited information we have about the behavior of the delta variant. The recommended practice in this kind of situation is to not make a single assumption about the premises in a model, but to instead model uncertainty, by including a range of possible values for each uncertain premise. The Doherty Model does not do this. Instead, “point estimates”, that is, a single guess for each premise, are used. And a single output is produced by the model for each scenario. This is a critical deficiency. By failing to account for uncertainty in inputs, or uncertainty in future changes (such as new variants), the model also fails to account for uncertainty in outputs. What’s the probability that the hospitalizations are far more rapid than in their single modeled outcome, such that Australian ICUs are overloaded? We don’t know, because that work hasn’t been done. The Doherty Model makes a critical error in how it handles the Delta variant: “we will assume that the severity of Delta strains approximates Alpha strains”. We now know that it is incorrect: latest estimates are that “People who are infected with the highly contagious Delta variant are twice as likely to be hospitalized as those who are infected with the Alpha variant”. The model also fails to correctly estimate the efficacy of Test, Trace, Isolate, and Quarantine (TTIQ). It assumes that TTIQ will be “optimal” for “hundreds of daily cases”, and “partial” for thousands of cases. However, in NSW optimal TTIQ was no longer maintained after just 50 cases, and the majority of cases were no longer isolating after 100 daily cases. The Doherty Model assumes that vaccines are equally distributed throughout the country. This is mentioned in the report, and has also been confirmed by talking directly with those doing the modeling. However, there are groups where that’s not true. For instance, indigenous communities are only around ⅛ vaccinated. In this group, if restrictions are removed, then R will return towards 5.0 (the reproduction number of delta without vaccines or restrictions). As a result, nearly the entire population will be infected within months. The same thing will happen with kids. The Doherty model fails to model school mixing, but instead makes a simplifying assumption that children have some random chance of meeting random other children each day. In practice however, they have a 100% chance of mixing with exactly the same children every day, at school. The Doherty Model misses the vast majority of cases. That’s because it entirely ignores all cases after 180 days (when most cases occur). Another model has estimated the full impact of covid without such a time limitation. It finds that there would be around 25,000 deaths in Australia in the absence of restrictions. A major problem with the National Plan based on the Doherty Report is that it goes directly from vaccination rate to actions, and bakes in all the model assumptions. It can’t take into account unanticipated changes, such as more transmissible variants, or mass infections of hospital staff. It would be far better to decide actions in terms of measurements that reflect changing current conditions — that is, R and remaining health-care Capacity. The Doherty Institute models could be reported as estimated R and Capacity at 70% and 80% vaccination rates of adults, which is 56% and 64% of the full population. Reducing transmission restrictions when R>1 or there is insufficient remaining capacity would be madness regardless of the vaccination rate. ### “Live with covid” means mass hospitalizations and ongoing outbreaks Based on current projections, the best case scenario in one month’s time there will be over 2000 people hospitalized with covid in NSW, with over 350 in ICU. This is going to be a big stretch on the state’s resources. The same will happen in other states that fail to control outbreaks prior to achieving at least 80% vaccination rates of all populations, including children and indigenous communities. Even when most adults are vaccinated, covid doesn’t go away. Immunity wanes after a few months, and there will continue to be groups where fewer people have been vaccinated. We can estimate the longer term impact of covid by looking at other countries. In the UK, 75% of 16+ residents are vaccinated. There are currently 700 covid deaths and 250,000 cases per week in the UK. If our death rate is proportionate, that would mean 266 Australians dying per week even after we get to 75% vaccinated (along with thousands of long covid cases, with their huge economic and societal cost). By comparison, there were 9 weekly deaths from flu in Australia in 2019. ## Conclusion We are now hearing political leaders in Victoria and NSW giving up on getting the outbreaks under control. But we haven’t yet deployed the three easiest high-impact public health interventions we have at our disposal: better masks, better ventilation, and rapid tests. Any one of these (along with the existing measures) would be likely to neutralize the outbreaks; their impacts combined will be a powerful weapon. If we don’t do this, then covid will leave hundreds of thousands of Australian children with chronic illness, and kill thousands of Australians. This is entirely avoidable. Acknowledgements: Thanks to Dr Rachel Thomas for many discussions about this topic and for draft review. Thanks also to the many Australian scientists with whom I consulted during development of this article. # 11 Short Videos About AI Ethics I made a playlist of 11 short videos (most are 6-13 mins long) on Ethics in Machine Learning. This is from my ethics lecture in Practical Deep Learning for Coders v4. I thought these short videos would be easier to watch, share, or skip around. What are Ethics and Why do they Matter? Machine Learning Edition: Through 3 key case studies, I cover how people can be harmed by machine learning gone wrong, why we as machine learning practitioners should care, and what tech ethics are. All machine learning systems need ways to identify & address mistakes. It is crucial that all machine learning systems are implemented with ways to correctly surface and correct mistakes, and to provide recourse to those harmed. The Problem with Metrics, Feedback Loops, and Hypergrowth: Overreliance on metrics is a core problem both in the field of machine learning and in the tech industry more broadly. As Goodhart’s Law tells us, when a measure becomes the target, it ceases to be a good measure, yet the incentives of venture capital push companies in this direction. We see out-of-control feedback loops, widespread gaming of metrics, and people being harmed as a result. Not all types of bias are fixed by diversifying your dataset. The idea of bias is often too general to be useful. There are several different types of bias, and different types require different interventions to try to address them. Through a series of cases studies, we will go deeper into some of the various causes of bias. Humans are biased too, so why does machine learning bias matter? A common objection to concerns about bias in machine learning models is to point out that humans are really biased too. This is correct, yet machine learning bias differs from human bias in several key ways that we need to understand and which can heighten the impact. 7 Questions to Ask About Your Machine Learning Project What You Need to Know about Disinformation: With a particular focus on how machine learning advances can contribute to disinformation, this covers some of the fundamental things to understand. Foundations of Ethics: We consider different lenses through which to evaluate ethics, and what sort of questions to ask. Tech Ethics Practices to Implement at your Workplace: Practical tech ethics practices you can implement at your workplace. How to Address the Machine Learning Diversity Crisis: Only 12% of machine learning researchers are women. Based on research studies, I outline some evidence-based steps to take towards addressing this diversity crisis. Advanced Technology is not a Substitute for Good Policy: We will look at some examples of what incentives cause companies to change their behavior or not (e.g. being warned for years of your role in an escalating genocide vs. threat of a hefty fine), how many AI ethics concerns are actually about human rights, and case studies of what happened when regulation & safety standards came to other industries. You can find the full playlist here. # Getting Specific about AI Risks (an AI Taxonomy) The term “Artificial Intelligence” is a broad umbrella, referring to a variety of techniques applied to a range of tasks. This breadth can breed confusion. Success in using AI to identify tumors on lung x-rays, for instance, may offer no indication of whether AI can be used to accurately predict who will commit another crime or which employees will succeed, or whether these latter tasks are even appropriate candidates for the use of AI. Misleading marketing hype often clouds distinctions between different types of tasks and suggests that breakthroughs on narrow research problems are more broadly applicable than is the case. Furthermore, the nature of the risks posed by different categories of AI tasks varies, and it is crucial that we understand the distinctions. One source of confusion is that in fiction and the popular imagination, AI has often referred to computers achieving human consciousness: a broad, general intelligence. People may picture a super-smart robot, knowledgeable on a range of topics, able to perform many tasks. In reality, the current advances happening in AI right now are narrow: a computer program that can do one task, or class of tasks, well. For example, a software program analyzes mammograms to identify likely breast cancer, or a completely different software program provides scores to essays written by students, although is fooled by gibberish using sophisticated words. These are separate programs, and fundamentally different from the depictions of human-like AI in science fiction movies and books. It is understandable that the public may often assume that since companies and governments are implementing AI for high-stakes tasks like predictive policing, determining healthcare benefits, screening resumes, and analyzing video job interviews, it must be because of AI’s superior performance. However, the sad reality is that often AI is being implemented as a cost-cutting measure: computers are cheaper than employing humans, and this can cause leaders to overlook harms caused by the switch, including biases, errors, and a failure to vet accuracy claims. In a talk entitled “How to recognize AI snake oil”, Professor Arvind Narayanan created a useful taxonomy of three types of tasks AI is commonly being applied to right now: • Perception: facial recognition, reverse image search, speech to text, medical diagnosis from x-rays or CT scans • Automating judgement: spam detection, automated essay grading, hate speech detection, content recommendation • Predicting social outcomes: predicting job success, predicting criminal recidivism, predicting at-risk kids The above 3 categories are not comprehensive of all uses of AI, and there are certainly innovations that span across them. However, this taxonomy is a useful heuristic for considering differences in accuracy and differences in the nature of the risks we face. For perception tasks, some of the biggest ethical concerns are related to how accurate AI can be (e.g. for the state to accurately surveil protesters has chilling implications for our civil rights), but in contrast, for predicting social outcomes, many of the products are total junk, which is harmful in a different way. The first area, perception, which includes speech to text and image recognition, is the area where researchers are making truly impressive, rapid progress. However, even within this area, that doesn’t mean that the technology is always ready to use, or that there aren’t ethical concerns. For example, facial recognition often has much higher error rates on dark-skinned women, due to unrepresentative training sets. Even when accuracy is improved to remove this bias, the use of facial recognition by police to identify protesters (which has happened numerous times in the USA) is a grave threat to civil rights. Furthermore, how a computer algorithm performs in a controlled, academic setting can be very different from how it performs when deployed in the real world. For example, Google Health developed a computer program that identifies diabetic retinopathy with 90% accuracy when used on high-quality eye scans. However, when it was deployed in clinics in Thailand, many of the scans were taken in poor lighting conditions, and over 20% of all scans were rejected by the algorithm as low quality, creating great inconvenience for the many patients that had to take another day off of work to travel to a different clinic to be retested. While improvements are being made in the area of category 2, automating judgement, the technology is still faulty and there are limits to what is possible here due to the fact that culture and language usage are always evolving. Widely used essay grading software rewards “nonsense essays with sophisticated vocabulary,” and is biased against African-American students, giving their essays lower grades than expert human graders do. The software is able to measure sentence length, vocabulary, and spelling, but is unable to recognize creativity or nuance. Content from LGBTQ YouTube creators was mislabeled as “sexually explicit” and demonetized, harming their livelihoods. As Ali Alkhatib wrote, “The algorithm is always behind the curve, executing today based on yesterday’s data… This case [of YouTube demonetizing LGBTQ creators] highlights a shortcoming with a commonly offered solution to these kinds of problems, that more training data would eliminate errors of this nature: culture always shifts.” This is a fundamental limitation of this category: language is always evolving, new slurs and forms of hate speech develop, just as new forms of creative expression do as well. Narayanan labels the third category, of trying to predict social outcomes, as “fundamentally dubious.” AI can’t predict the future, and to label a person’s potential is deeply concerning. Often, these approaches are no more accurate than simple linear regression. Social scientists spent 15 years painstakingly gathering a rich longitudinal dataset on families containing 12,942 variables. When 160 teams created machine learning models to predict which children in the dataset would have adverse outcomes, the most accurate submission was only slightly better than a simple benchmark model using just 4 variables, and many of the submissions did worse than the simple benchmark. In the USA, there is a black box software program with 137 inputs used in the criminal justice system to predict who is likely to be re-arrested, yet it is no more accurate than a linear classifier on just 2 variables. Not only is it unclear that there have been meaningful AI advances in this category, but more importantly the underlying premise of such efforts raises crucial questions about whether we should be attempting to use algorithms to predict someone’s future potential at all. Together with Matt Salganik, Narayanan has further developed these ideas in a course on the Limits to Prediction (check out the course pre-read, which is fantastic). Narayanan’s taxonomy is a helpful reminder that advances in one category don’t necessarily mean much for a different category, and he offers the crucial insight that different applications of AI create different fundamental risks. The overly general term artificial intelligence, misleading hype from companies pushing their products, and confusing media coverage often cloud distinctions between different types of tasks and suggest that breakthroughs on narrow problems are more broadly applicable than they are. Understanding the types of technology available, as well as the distinct risks they raise, is crucial to addressing and preventing harmful misuses. Read Narayanan’s How to recognize AI snake oil slides and notes for more detail. This post was originally published on the USF Center for Applied Data Ethics (CADE) blog. # fastdownload: the magic behind one of the famous 4 lines of code Summary: Today we’re launching fastdownload, a new library that makes it easy for your users to download, verify, and extract archives. ## Background At fast.ai we focussed on making important technical topics more accessible. That means that the libraries we create do as much as possible for the user, without limiting what’s possible. fastai is famous for needing just four lines of code to get world-class deep learning results with vision, text, tabular, or recommendation system data: path = untar_data(URLs.PETS) dls = ImageDataLoaders.from_name_func(path, get_image_files(path/"images"), label_func, item_tfms=Resize(224)) learn = cnn_learner(dls, resnet34, metrics=error_rate) learn.fine_tune(1)  There have been many pages written about most of these: the flexibility of the Data Block API, the power of cnn_learner, and the state of the art transfer learning provided by fine_tune. But what about untar_data? This first line of code, although rarely discussed, is actually a critical part of the puzzle. Here’s what it does: 1. If required, download the URL to a special folder (by default, ~/.fastai/archive). If it was already downloaded earlier, skip this step 2. Check whether the size and hash of the downloaded (or cached) archive matches what fastai expects. If it doesn’t, try downloading again 3. If required, extract the downloaded file to another special folder (by default, ~/.fastai/archive). If it was already extracted earlier, skip this step 4. Return a Path object pointing at the location of the extracted archive. Thanks to this, users don’t have to worry about where their archives and data can be stored, whether they’ve downloaded a URL before or not, and whether their downloaded file is the correct version. fastai handles all this for the user, letting them spend more of their time on the actual modeling process. ## fastdownload fastdownload, launched today, allows you to provide this same convenience for your users. It helps you make datasets or other archives available for your users while ensuring they are downloaded correctly with the latest version. Your user just calls a single method, FastDownload.get, passing the URL required, and the URL will be downloaded and extracted to the directories you choose. The path to the extracted file is returned. If that URL has already been downloaded, then the cached archive or contents will be used automatically. However, if that size or hash of the archive is different to what it should be, then the user will be informed, and a new version will be downloaded. In the future, you may want to update one or more of your archives. When you do so, fastdownload will ensure your users have the latest version, by checking their downloaded archives against your updated file size and hash information. fastdownload will add a file download_checks.py to your Python module which contains file sizes and hashes for your archives. Because it’s a regular python file, it will be automatically included in your package if you upload it to pypi or a conda channel. Here’s all you need to provide a function that works just like untar_data: from fastdownload import FastDownload def untar_data(url): return FastDownload(base='~/.myapp').get(url)  You can modify the locations that files are downloaded to by creating a config file ~/.myapp/config.ini (if you don’t have one, it will be created for you). The values in this file can be absolute or relative paths (relative paths are resolved relative to the location of the ini file). If you want to give fastdownload a try, then head over to the docs and follow along with the walk-thru. # Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse? ## Background GitHub Copilot is a new service from GitHub and OpenAI, described as “Your AI pair programmer”. It is a plugin to Visual Studio Code which auto-generates code for you based on the contents of the current file, and your current cursor location. It really feels quite magical to use. For example, here I’ve typed the name and docstring of a function which should “Write text to file fname”: The grey body of the function has been entirely written for me by Copilot! I just hit Tab on my keyboard, and the suggestion gets accepted and inserted into my code. This is certainly not the first “AI powered” program synthesis tool. GitHub’s Natural Language Semantic Code Search in 2018 demonstrated finding code examples using plain English descriptions. Tabnine has provided “AI powered” code completion for a few years now. Where Copilot differs is that it can generate entire multi-line functions and even documentation and tests, based on the full context of a file of code. This is particularly exciting for us at fast.ai because it holds the promise that it may lower the barrier to coding, which would greatly help us in our mission. Therefore, I was particularly keen to dive into Copilot. However, as we’ll see, I’m not yet convinced that Copilot is actually a blessing. It may even turn out to be a curse. Copilot is powered by a deep neural network language model called Codex, which was trained on public code repositories on GitHub. This is of particular interest to me, since in back in 2017 I was the first person to demonstrate that a general purpose language model can be fine-tuned to get state of the art results on a wide range of NLP problems. I developed and showed that as part of a fast.ai lesson. Sebastian Ruder and I then fleshed out the approach and wrote a paper, which was published in 2018 by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). OpenAI’s Alec Radford told me that this paper inspired him to create GPT, which Codex is based on. Here’s the moment from that lesson where I showed for the first time that language model fine tuning gives a state of the art result in classifying IMDB sentiment: A language model is trained to guess missing words in a piece of text. The traditional “ngram” approach used in previous years can not do a good job of this, since context is required to guess correctly. For instance, consider how you would go about filling in the missing words in each of these examples: Knowing that in one case “hot day” is correct, but in another that “hot dog” is correct, requires reading and (to some extent) understanding the whole sentence. The Codex language model learns to guess missing symbols in programming code, so it has to learn a lot about the structure and meaning of computer code. As we’ll discuss later, language models do have some significant limitations that are fundamentally due to how they’re created. The fact that Copilot is trained on publicly available code, under a variety of licenses, has led to many discussions about the ethical and legal implications. Since this has been widely discussed I won’t go into it further here, other than to point out one clear legal issue for users of Copilot discussed by IP lawyer Kate Downing, which is that in some cases using Copilot’s suggestions may be a breach of license (or require relicensing your own work under a GPL-compatible license): The more complex and lengthy the suggestion, the more likely it has some sort of copyrightable expression. ## Walk-through Before we dive into Copilot more deeply, let’s walk-through some more examples of using it in practice. In order to know whether that auto-generated write_text function actually works, we need a test. Let’s get Copilot to write that too! In this case, I just typed in the name of my test function, and Copilot filled in the docstring for me: After accepting that suggestion, Copilot got a bit confused and suggested a meaningless function containing many lines of near duplicate code: No problem – Copilot can show us other suggested options, by hitting Ctrl-Enter. The first listed actually looks pretty reasonable (except for an odd extra tab character in the first line): Here Copilot assumes there’s a function available called read_text, which doesn’t actually exist. But it’s easy enough for us to ask Copilot to write and test that for us too. I also asked Copilot to create a function for me that would “Tar and optionally compress directory dir to dest in bz2, xz, or gzip format”, which resulted in: def tar_dir(dir, dest): "Tar and optionally compress directory dir to dest in bz2, xz, or gzip format" if dest.endswith('.bz2'): with tarfile.open(dest,'w:bz2') as f: f.add(dir, arcname=os.path.basename(dir)) elif dest.endswith('.xz'): with tarfile.open(dest,'w:xz') as f: f.add(dir, arcname=os.path.basename(dir)) elif dest.endswith('.gz'): with tarfile.open(dest,'w:gz') as f: f.add(dir, arcname=os.path.basename(dir)) else: raise ValueError('bad dest: {}'.format(dest))  I also had Copilot create a test using the same basic approach as above, and it wrote: with TemporaryDirectory() as tmp: write_text(os.path.join(tmp,'a.txt'),'hello') write_text(os.path.join(tmp,'b.txt'),'world') tar_dir(tmp,'out.tar.bz2') assert os.path.exists('out.tar.bz2') with tarfile.open('out.tar.bz2') as f: assert f.getnames()==['a.txt','b.txt']  That test doesn’t actually pass, since getnames in the last line includes the parent directory, but it’s an easy enough fix from there. Copilot even cleverly decided to use the write_text function I created earlier, which is something I wasn’t expecting. You can even use Copilot to write prose. I’m writing this blog post in vscode right now, and just clicked the “enable Copilot” button. After I typed the previous sentence, here’s what Copilot recommended as a completion: I can now write my blog post in a single line of text, and Copilot will generate the rest of the post for me Clearly Copilot has a rather inflated understanding of its own prose generation capabilities! ## Code problems The code Copilot writes is not very good code. For instance, consider the tar_dir function above. There’s a lot of duplicate code there, which means more code to maintain in the future, and more code for a reader to understand. In addition, the docstring said “optionally compress”, but the generated code always compresses. We could fix these issues by writing it this way instead: def tar_dir(dir, dest): "Tar and optionally compress directory dir to dest in bz2, xz, or gzip format" suf = ':' + Path(dest).suffix[1:] if suf==':tar': suf='' with tarfile.open(dest,f'w{suf}') as f: f.add(dir, arcname=dir)  A bigger problem is that both write_text and tar_dir shouldn’t have been written at all, since the functionality for both is already provided by Python’s standard library (as pathlib’s write_text and shutil’s make_archive). The standard library versions are also better, with pathlib’s write_text doing additional error checking and supporting text encoding and error handling, and make_archive supporting zip files and any other archive format you register. ## Why Copilot writes bad code According to OpenAI’s paper, Codex only gives the correct answer 29% of the time. And, as we’ve seen, the code it writes is generally poorly refactored and fails to take full advantage of existing solutions (even when they’re in Python’s standard library). Copilot has read GitHub’s entire public code archive, consisting of tens of millions of repositories, including code from many of the world’s best programmers. Given this, why does Copilot write such crappy code? The reason is because of how language models work. They show how, on average, most people write. They don’t have any sense of what’s correct or what’s good. Most code on GitHub is (by software standards) pretty old, and (by definition) written by average programmers. Copilot spits out it’s best guess as to what those programmers might write if they were writing the same file that you are. OpenAI discuss this in their Codex paper: As with other large language models trained on a next-token prediction objective, Codex will generate code that is as similar as possible to its training distribution. One consequence of this is that such models may do things that are unhelpful for the user One important way that Copilot is worse than those average programmers is that it doesn’t even try to compile the code or check that it works or consider whether it actually does what the docs say it should do. Also, Codex was not trained on code created in the last year or two, so it’s entirely missing recent versions, libraries, and language features. For instance, prompting it to create fastai code results only in proposals that use the v1 API, rather than v2, which was released around a year ago. Complaining about the quality of the code written by Copilot feels a bit like coming across a talking dog, and complaining about its diction. The fact that it’s talking at all is impressive enough! Let’s be clear: The fact that Copilot (and Codex) writes reasonable-looking code is an amazing achievement. From a machine learning and language synthesis research point of view, it’s a big step forward. But we also need to be clear that reasonable-looking code that doesn’t work, doesn’t check edge cases, and uses obsolete methods, and is verbose and creates technical debt, can be a big problem. ## The problems with auto-generated code Code creation tools have been around nearly as long as code has been around. And they’ve been controversial throughout their history. Most time coding is not taken up in writing code, but with designing, debugging, and maintaining code. When code is automatically generated, it’s easy to end up with a lot more of it. That’s not necessarily a problem, if all you have to do to maintain or debug it is to modify the source which the code is auto-generated from, such as when using code template tools. Even then, things can get confusing when debugging, since the debugger and stack traces will generally point at the verbose generated code, not at the templated source. With Copilot, we don’t have any of these upsides. We nearly always have to modify the code that’s created, and if we want to change how it works, we can’t just go back and change the prompt. We have to debug the generated code directly. As a rule of thumb, less code means less to maintain and understand. Copilot’s code is verbose, and it’s so easy to generate lots of it that you’re likely to end up with a lot of code! Python has rich dynamic and meta-programming features that greatly reduce the need for code generation. I’ve heard a number of programmers say that they like that Copilot writes a lot of boilerplate for you. However, I almost never write any boilerplate anyway – any time in the past I found myself needing boilerplate, I used dynamic Python to refactor the boilerplate out so I didn’t need to write it or generate it any more. For instance, in ghapi I used dynamic Python to create a complete interface to GitHub’s entire API in a package that weighs in at just 40kB (by comparison, an equivalent packages in Go contains over 100,000 lines of code, most of it auto-generated). A very instructive example is what happened when I prompted Copilot with: def finetune(folder, model): """fine tune pytorch model using images from folder and report results on validation set"""  With a very small amount of additional typing, it generated these 89 lines of code nearly entirely automatically! In one sense, that’s really impressive. It does indeed basically do what was requested – finetune a PyTorch model. However, it finetunes the model badly. This model will train slowly, and result in poor accuracy. Fine tuning a model correctly requires considering things like handling batchnorm layer statistics, finetuning the head of the model before the body, picking a learning rate correctly, using an appropriate annealing schedule, and so forth. Also, we probably want to use mixed precision training on any CUDA GPU created in the last few years, and are likely to want to add better augmentation methods such as MixUp. Fixing the code to add these would require many hundreds of lines more code, and a lot of expertise in deep learning, or the use of a higher level API such as fastai, which can finetune a PyTorch model in 4 lines of code, resulting in something with higher accuracy, faster, and that’s more extensible.) I’m not really sure what would be best for Copilot to do in this situation. I don’t think what it’s doing now is actually useful in practice, although it’s an impressive-looking demonstration. ## Parsing Python with a regular expression I asked the fast.ai community for examples of times where Copilot had been helpful in writing code for them. One person told me they found it invaluable when they were writing a regex to extract comments from a string containing python code (since they wanted to map each parameter name in a function to its comment). I decided to try this for myself. Here’s the prompt for Copilot: code_str = """def connect( host:str, # host to connect to port:int=80, # port to connect to ssl:bool=True, # whether to use SSL ) -> socket.socket: # the connected socket """ # regex to extract comments from strings looking like code_str  Here’s the generated code: comment_re = re.compile(r'^\s*#.*$', re.MULTILINE)


This code doesn’t work, since the ^ character is incorrectly binding the match to the start of the line. It’s also not actually capturing the comment since it’s missing any capturing groups. (The second suggestion from Copilot correctly removes the ^ character, but still doesn’t include the capturing group.)

These are minor issues, however, compared to the big problem with this code, which is that a regex can’t actually parse Python comments correctly. For instance, this would fail, since the # in tag_prefix:str="#" would be incorrectly parsed as the start of a comment:

code_str = """def find_tags(
input_str:str,     # the string to search for tags
tag_prefix:str="#" # prefix marking the start of a tag
) -> List[str]:        # list of all tags found


It turns out that it’s not possible to correctly parse Python code using regular expressions. But Copilot did what we asked: in the prompt comment we explicitly asked for a regex, and that’s what Copilot gave us. The community member who provided this example did exactly that when they wrote their code, since they assumed that a regex was the correct way to solve this problem. (Although even when I tried removing “regex to” from the prompt Copilot still prompted to use a regex solution.) The issue in this case isn’t really that Copilot is doing something wrong, it’s that what it’s designed to do might not be what’s in the best interest of the programer.

GitHub markets Copilot as a “pair programmer”. But I’m not sure this really captures what it’s doing. A good pair programmer is someone who helps you question your assumptions, identify hidden problems, and see the bigger picture. Copilot doesn’t do any of those things – quite the opposite, it blindly assumes that your assumptions are appropriate and focuses entirely on churning out code based on the immediate context of where your text cursor is right now.

## Cognitive Bias and AI Pair Programming

An AI pair programmer needs to work well with humans. And visa versa. However humans have two cognitive biases in particular that makes this difficult: automation bias and anchoring bias. Thanks to this pair of human foibles, we will all have a tendency to over-rely on Copilot’s proposals, even if we explicitly try not to do so.

Wikipedia describes automation bias as:

the propensity for humans to favor suggestions from automated decision-making systems and to ignore contradictory information made without automation, even if it is correct

Automation bias is already recognized as a significant problem in healthcare, where computer decision support systems are used widely. There are also many examples in the judicial and policing communities, such as the city official in California who incorrectly described an IBM Watson tool used for predictive policing: “With machine learning, with automation, there’s a 99% success, so that robot is—will be—99% accurate in telling us what is going to happen next”, leading the city mayor to say “Well, why aren’t we mounting .50-calibers [out there]?” (He claimed he was he was “being facetious.”) This kind of inflated belief about the capabilities of AI can also impact users of Copilot, especially programmers who are not confident of their own capabilities.

The Decision Lab describes anchoring bias as:

a cognitive bias that causes us to rely too heavily on the first piece of information we are given about a topic.

Anchoring bias has been very widely documented and is taught at many business schools as a useful tool, such as in negotiation and pricing.

When we’re typing into vscode, Copilot jumps in and suggests code completions entirely automatically and without any interaction on our part. That often means that before we’ve really had a chance to think about where we’re heading, Copilot has already plotted a path for us. Not only is this then the “first piece of information” we’re getting, but it’s also an example of “suggestions from automated decision making systems” – we’re getting a double-hit of cognitive biases to overcome! And it’s not just happening once, but every time we write just a few more words in our text editor.

Unfortunately, one of the things we know about cognitive biases is that just being aware of them isn’t enough to avoid being fooled by them. So this isn’t something GitHub can fix just through careful presentation of Copilot suggestions and user education.

## Stack Overflow, Google, and API Usage Examples

Generally if a programmer doesn’t know how to do something, and isn’t using Copilot, they’ll Google it. For instance, the coder we discussed earlier who wanted to find parameters and comments in a string containing code might search for something like: “python extract parameter list from code regex”. The second result to this search is a Stack Overflow post with an accepted answer that correctly said it can’t be done with Python regular expressions. Instead, the answer suggested using a parser such as pyparsing. I then tried searching for “pyparsing python comments” and found that this module solves our exact problem.

I also tried searching for “extract comments from python file”, which gave a first result showing how to solve the problem using the Python standard library’s tokenize module. In this case, the requester introduced their problem by saying “I’m trying to write a program to extract comments in code that user enters. I tried to use regex, but found it difficult to write.*” Sounds familiar!

This took me a couple of minutes longer that finding a prompt for Copilot that gave an answer, but it resulted in me learning far more about the problem and the possible space of solutions. The Stack Overflow discussions helped me understand the challenges of dealing with quoted strings in Python, and also explained the limitations of Python’s regular expression engine.

In this case, I felt like the Copilot approach would be worse for both experienced and beginner programmers. Experienced programmers would need to spend time studying the various options proposed, recognize that they don’t correctly solve the problem, and then would have to search online for solutions anyway. Beginner programmers would likely feel like they’ve solved the problem, wouldn’t actually learn what they need to understand about limitations and capabilities of regular expressions, and would end up with broken code without even realizing it.

In addition to CoPilot, Microsoft, the owners of GitHub, have created a different but related product called “API Usage Examples”. Here’s an example taken directly from their web-site:

This tool looks for examples online of people using the API or library that you’re working with, and will provide examples of real code showing how it’s used, along with links to the source of the example. This is an interesting approach that’s somewhere between Stack Overflow (but misses the valuable discussions) and Copilot (but doesn’t provide proposals customized to your particular code context). The crucial extra piece here is that it links to the source. That means that the coder can actually see the full context of how other people are using that feature. The best ways to get better at coding are to read code and to write code. Helping coders find relevant code to read looks to be an excellent approach to both solving people’s problems whilst also helping them improve their skills.

Whether Microsoft’s API Usage Examples feature turns out the be great will really depend on their ability to rank code by quality, and show the best examples of usage. According to the product manager (on Twitter) this is something they’re currently working on.

## Conclusions

I still don’t know the answer to the question in the title of this post, “Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?” It could be a blessing to some, and a curse to others. For those for whom it’s a curse, they may not find that out for years, because the curse would be that they’re learning less, learning slower, increasing technical debt, and introducing subtle bugs – are all things that you might well not notice, particularly for newer developers.

Copilot might be more useful for languages that are high on boilerplate, and have limited meta-programming functionality, such as Go. (A lot of people today use templated code generation with Go for this reason.) Another area that it may be particularly suited to is experienced programmers working in unfamiliar languages, since it can help get the basic syntax right and point to library functions and common idioms.

The thing to remember is that Copilot is an early preview of a very new technology that’s going to get better and better. There will be many competitors popping up in the coming months and years, and GitHub will no doubt release new and better versions of their own tool.

To see real improvements in program synthesis, we’ll need to go beyond just language models, to a more holistic solution that incorporates best practices around human-computer interaction, software engineering, testing, and many other disciplines. Currently, Copilot feels like a product designed and implemented by machine learning researchers, rather than a complete solution incorporating all needed domain expertise. I’m sure that will change.