The End of Programming?

This blog post will discuss my thoughts on the article “The End of Programming” by Matt Welsh linked here… https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2023/1/267976-the-end-of-programming/fulltext

Welsh expressed that he full heartedly believes that AI will take over the world of programming, and the way we teach up and coming computer scientists is going to be completely different in even the next 10 years. The job of a CS would be to “train” the AI to do the computing, rather than sitting down and coding the program themselves. I do agree with him for the sake of agreement or disagreement, but there are some points he make that I have thoughts about.

I fully believe with the advancements AI has been making, they are going to take over a huge part of what programmers do now. But I do not believe that it would be smart to forget about the facts and fundamentals of coding because AIs can code faster, and probably better than we can. That would rather be giving the AIs the job rather than them “taking” it from us. Just because AIs exist and are more proficient at coding doesn’t mean we HAVE to give it all up and loose all the information we have learned about CS. If we have reservations about the AIs taking over, the last thing we would want is to stop teaching new programmers the exact thing the AIs are doing so they are defenseless and are so below the standard at that point. We would then have no choice but to let the AIs have the power because there would be no other option if we want that work done.

Another thing that caught my attention was when Welsh said that we are at the point where we don’t understands how the AIs work. It is incredibly scary to know that we have created an artificial object that essentially has a mind of it’s own. Having no control over something we created for a specific purpose is going to cause more and more problems down the line when these AIs get more and more out of our range of knowledge and capabilities. With this in mind though, I am sure computer scientists today will continue to try and progress AIs to become more human like, throwing the field out of balance.

So in conclusion, I believe AIs will soon take over programming as we know it, but I also believe that if people continue to assume this fact and take it to be the end all be all, we will be aiding the AIs in taking our power. Instead we should keep the potential of AIs in mind, and keep up to date with what we know and continuing to pass it along to new computer scientists as well as teaching them what we know about handling the AIs.