The Coding Precarity

Decoding Alan TuringThere’s a brave new world coming, and it’s something I’ve been considering for the past few years. As artificial intelligence begins writing more and more code, and troubleshooting it, the women and men who have made their money speaking to machines are slowly joining the precariat.

It’s not a bad thing or a good thing. It’s not a matter of the sky falling. It’s a simple reality that the precariat needs to consider and find a way past.

Coding is a part of the Software Engineering discipline – wherever it actually exists as a discipline. Coding, on the other hand, is not the entirety of Software Engineering despite what the market appears to think.

HR departments all over the world are trying to fill what are really glorified code monkey positions. And that’s not the future of Software Engineering as I see it, or as circumspection will show. We’re seeing more and more code generated by AIs, and really, if you actually

It’s going to be about ‘soft skills‘. It’s going to be about getting the right requirements to hand off to the coders, because the coders in time are less and less likely  to be human. It’s going to be about interacting with the people in dealing with what they want and making sure that they get what they want.

Of course, wanting what they actually need is something that they still need to get better at. 


5 thoughts on “The Coding Precarity

  1. I don’t see the point of writing code if you are A.I. because AI is code hence it would like a chicken making a chicken so that people can eat a chicken. There is no need for AI to write code.


  2. Yeah but chicken lay eggs, its not like cell splitting. But the chicken thing may be a analogy. What I mean is that in a A.I. environment writing code would be pointless since A.I. is already code. there would be no need to write new code since A.I. could just do anything you want. I think people like to carry over physical rules into virtual spaces even when there is no point to do it. If the computer is smart enough to do anything, there would be no need to write code. all you would have to do is simply tell it what you want it to do.


    1. When the AI can improve it’s own code, it defies what you are trying to say. And that, Owen, is exactly what’s happening.

      So I don’t see what you’re getting at given AI can update and streamline their own algorithms based on their own data analyses.


      1. basically once the A.I. problem is solved (which it isn’t) you wont need to have code or algorithms or syntax. all software will merge into one all encompassing computation. No one will need to write it, it will just exist and solve problems at will. Big data search masquerading as A.I. is whole other topic.


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