How Artificial Intelligence will change the way I code

[shmem]

This post will be going from fun to unfun.

The whole mess of all projects will be laid out on your screen as a landscape like google maps; you can zoom in and out in layers like, say, ERM and ORM and whatnot, and attack vectors will show up as missile trajectories in real time, which you could mitigate applying some python brushing as in photoshop, or fortify the targets with more test harnesses. Black spots in the map will mean "Here Be Dragons" and will inevitably point to the perl source code, and if you zoom in, you'll be invited to play tetris, piling rhinos.

I'm sure there's already effort being put into this, because I know from experience that whenever I have a crazy idea, somebody else already had it and probably had it already worked out. A genuinely own idea is as seldom as a coin of gold in the gutter (G.C.Lichtenberg).

That was the fun part.

Less fun is the fact that we are mostly involved in automation of whatever kind, mostly of processes which already exist in real life, bundling and optimizing them, and speeding them up, thus shoving more money up the ass of those which already have enough. What we do is their rent. Who is them? They are of the kind of Bezos, Thiel, Zuckerberg, clever dudes which pay us for the work done implementing the automation in the first place, but gather all the revenue produced after the fact. It is theirs, not yours, you're not entitled for a rent, unless extorting your part via patent filed or copyright or intelectual property or blather.

AI is about statistics and steering of algorithms given some parameters, but AI is a misnomer. Scott, beam me up, no intelligence here.

Diversion: shortly after I dug into computation, I realized its enormous irruptive potential, and have been starry-eyed out of hope that this revolution would necessarily re-define our social fabric, much in the way a marxist sees capitalism as transitional towards socialism. This seems not to be the case, at least not yet.

We are automating ourselves away and outsourcing human skills. Multiplication tables with two digit factors anyone? Quick, what's 16 * 18 ? Grab your calculator. Communication over long distances? The Aborigines of Australia do that all the time via a very skilled sort of empathy; we have our smartphones. What to buy, what to eat next? Give an algorithm your preferences and a sufficiently large set of your biological data, and it will tell you what is best for you, according to season and market prices, and also what to buy where from, if you don't have it on stock. And so on. Alexa, next wife please.

Decision making via statistical averages will lock us into the boring average of mediocrity.

IT is the cult of our time, having Big Data in its temple and AI in its tabernacle. The High Priests of that cult are those who deem the singularity of a friendly artificial superintelligence based on CEV (coherent extrapolated volition) as possible, capable of simulating anyone, and are working to bring it into existence. Of course, this cult has its devil looming - Roko's basilisk - which of course only exists within their way of thinking.

So, how will AI change the way I code? Well, it will change with the tools, that's all - but what I code could shift strongly into coding myself out of (or blurring myself in) algorithms and helping others to do so, because that's coding for a living and not coding for money. This might require a bit of criminal energy which I don't have. But I know that criminal energy is close to ideals, so I know where to draw from, and might begin attempting to turn gold into shit.

Sad end: currently, after nearly 30 years of coding, I am utterly bored with and dismayed over the IT world I too (with minuscule contributions) helped to create.