TLDR
- If there’s one area in which artificial intelligence could actually be useful, it’s in the writing of computer code
- Computer programming has often been seen more as an art than an engineering challenge
As you have doubtless noticed, we are in the middle of a feeding frenzy about something called generative AI. Legions of hitherto normal people – and economists – are surfing a wave of irrational exuberance about its transformative potential. It’s the newest new thing. For anyone suffering from the fever, two antidotes are recommended. The first is the hype cycle monitor produced by consultants Gartner, which shows the technology currently perched on the “peak of inflated expectations”, before a steep decline into the “trough of disillusionment”. The other is Hofstadter’s law…
Just because a powerful industry and its media boosters are losing their marbles about something doesn’t mean that it will sweep like a tsunami through society at large. Reality moves at a more leisurely pace. In its Christmas issue, the Economist carried an instructive article entitled “A short history of tractors in English”…History suggests, therefore, that whatever transformations the AI hype merchants are predicting, they’ll be slower coming than they expect.
There is, however, one possible exception to this rule: computer programming, or the business of writing software…And then along came ChatGPT and the astonishing discovery that as well as composing apparently lucid sentences, it could also write software. Even more remarkable: you could outline a task to it in plain English prompts, and the machine would write the Python code needed to accomplish it…
In the New Yorker recently, programmer James Somers wrote an elegiac essay about the implications of this development. “Bodies of knowledge and skills that have traditionally taken lifetimes to master are being swallowed at a gulp,”…
That sounds a bit OTT to me. Such evidence as we have suggests that programmers are taking to AI assistance like ducks to water. A recent survey of software developers, for example, finds that 70% are using, or are planning to use, AI tools in their work this year and 77% of them have “favourable or very favourable” views of these tools…
But just as the tractor eventually transformed agriculture, this technology will eventually transform the way software is developed…
About time too, (says this engineer-cum-columnist).