Are we on the verge of a major social and technological change driven by AI?
Even if I have been living under a rock for quite some time now, it has been absolutely impossible to not be aware that a new version of the ChatGPT bot has been recently released.
In between all the hype, the raving reviews, there has also been a steady influx of stories by various bloggers and pundits about “coding coming to an end, sometime in the next 5 years”.
If you are currently finishing high-school and having second thoughts about choosing IT, be assured, coding is not coming to an end, at least not before the current generation of students retire. It might come an end one day, but we won’t be here to see it for sure.
I have 30 years of software development experience and I admit that I do not know anything about AI. It is one of those technologies that intrigues me — as much as everyone else in fact — but at the end, it never really captured my attention span long enough for something meaningful to come out of it.
In fact, I simply don’t like it.
First of all, progress in AI has always been a very bumpy road. Software engineering is a field that has experienced a tremendous growth and progress in the last 50 years. And every decade has built upon the achievements of the previous one. When it comes to AI, however, every decade has brought a new fashion — but not necessarily progress — I mean linear progress of the type that builds upon everything that came before it.
Once every 10 years, there will be that new spectacular AI technology that will make me rethink my choice and start reading about its inner workings. (I would like to specially thank the Stable Diffusion team for publishing their amazing work and making it accessible to the average layman). Every 10 years, there will be some new AI breakthrough — that will make me reconsider this stance — until I sink a few days into it. And invariably, every 10 years I will discover that what I am reading about is an absolute revolution in making it appear that it was AI.
The previous time I did this was during the mass hysteria surrounding Deep Blue. Since, computers have finally mostly surpassed humans when it comes to chess, but there remain many other games in which humans are simply unbeatable.
AI is a very difficult technology. While many scientific discoveries were made by chance, no engineer ever designed a product that he did not understand. Well, Evolution, Our Creator (the author subscribes to a modern, evolution-based religion) did so — but it took hundreds of millions of years. You know, if you give an infinite number of monkeys and infinite number of typewriters, given an infinite time, one of them will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. We, simple mortal engineers however, we don’t have infinite time or infinite resources. We are limited to designing the systems we understand. And when it comes to human intelligence, it is remarkable how little we currently understand. Especially when compared to the rest of our bodies.
Now repeat after me: we won’t design an AI before understanding the inner workings of the human brain. Not before neurology and psychiatry, the two scientific fields tackling this problem — from the two opposing sides — have advanced to the point they can merge completely into one full and complete understanding of ourselves.
Now, many AI technologies have been based on our limited understanding of the human brain: neural networks, reinforcement learning, fuzzy logic, even the genetic algorithms come from what we have seen from nature. However our current understanding can probably be compared to the first European explorers touring the Chinese coast without disembarking from their ship, then coming back to Europe trying to recreate Chinese cuisine from a smell they picked up along a way. True, it starts smelling like an AI. But the similarities stop here. Because you don’t even know what exactly they were cooking.
If you have been following chess-playing computers, you will know how different the computer playing style is. It is largely an exercise in raw computing power and optimization techniques. Same goes for Alpha Star — if you are a StarCraft fan you should definitely watch some of its games. While very good, it is definitely not human-like. The same applies to the current generation of text to image algorithms — a field that has progressed tremendously in the last five years — go read about them and you will understand why they tend to produce humans with three arms or birds with two heads and why these problems will likely persist for some time.
So, don’t hold your breath for the end of coding. At some point, ChatGPT, or some other related technology, could probably replace Google, but do not expect much more to come out of it. And coding is not coming to an end anytime soon.
