Who Wants to be a Telegraph Operator?
In the last year we’ve witnessed a tremendous change in technology. The rise of ChatGPT and its friends in the generative ai field introduced the world a brand new technology that is not one or two steps ahead, it’s twenty steps more advanced than anything we could imagine.
For those of you who lived on an isolated island in the last year and don’t know what chatgpt is — it’s a generative ai engine that can answer your questions, delivered in natural language. Even though chatgpt can answer questions on any subject, I’ll focus naturally on programming.
I’m teaching in the academy and software industry for more than twenty years. During those years I’ve composed hundreds of programming exercises for my students. Here is an example for one of them:
Write a method in java that accepts a one dimensional array of numbers, and returns true if all the numbers are even, or false if not.
It’s a nice exercise, aimed to practice students in their first steps at programming, with arrays and loops.
Nowadays, this exercise is useless. Not that it’s not good anymore, it still gives a good practice. The problem is that one can type the exercise into chatgpt prompt and get the answer immediately.
That means that a first year undergrad student who would get this exercise can simply get the answer without solving it by him/herself. That’s for its own is a problem, but I think the problem is deeper — the fact that a machine can perform this task as equally well as a human being, means (as always with technology) that the human is not necessary.
Over the years, I’ve always been asked by young people who consider their future “should I study programming?”. All of those years my answer was “Absolutely Yes! Programming is a well paid profession, it’s interesting and challenging, and if you are into it — this is probably the best profession you can get in the modern era”.
That was my answer up until last year. But now if someone asks me, my answer would be “I’m not sure”. Students that had started their studies this year would already find it hard to find a job. Students that would start in the next academic year would find it harder. What would the world look like in three or four years? I’m not a prophet, but by looking at the normal rate of technological advances, I can’t see a reason why the abilities of generative ai wouldn’t increase and exceed its current abilities. It means that if now, chatgpt can easily write pieces of code that are accurate and good as a human programmer would, in the next coming years, generative ai tools would be able to write more complex and sophisticated code, tasks that up until now were considered as human only abilities.
What I’m saying is that the profession of programming, like so many other professions in the past, is going to disappear, at least in its current form.
Does it seem to you too radical? Let’s take an example from the past –
Up until the 19th century, the only means of long distance communication was mail. I mean written letters. If you lived in Ney York, and wanted to say something to a friend in Washington, you would write a letter, and this letter would probably arrive its destination in a week or so. The latency became higher when you wanted to write to someone in Europe, and if you wanted to talk with an acquaintance in Australia, it might took a whole month.
Around 1830 the telegraph was invented. The telegraph was based on long wires that carried electric streams. You could transmit a long pulse (“Line”) or a short one (“Dot”). Then the Morse code was invented. The morse code encodes every letter in the alphabet (as long with some punctuations) to a series of lines and dots. Now if you were in New York and wanted to say something to a friend in Washington, you could transmit your message via telegraph, encoding it in morse code. It would take seconds instead of days. The telegraph really changed the world in any aspect. The world had become small and connected.
In order to send a message via the telegraph you had to deliver the message to a telegraph operator — a person that took your hand written message and transmitted it in morse code to its destination. The telegraph operator should also be able to receive incoming messages as morse code, and decrypt it into English. In these years, a telegraph operator was a very desirable job. It was well paid, and demanding job — a person that wanted to be a telegraph operator should have a good memory, quick responses and a huge patience to sit long hours and transmitting and receiving lines and dots. It was a very respectable job. The big communication companies back then administrated their own training paths for operator’s jobs, and only the best could be telegraph operators.
And what had happened next we all know. Somewhere in the 20th century the telephone and radio communication were invented. People discover that it’s much faster and efficient to communicate via spoken words instead of enigmatic dots and lines. The use of telegraph became more and more rare, and therefore, telegraph operator became a very not needed profession, until it had disappeared completely.
So, is the same thing can happen to us, programmers? I think it surely can and will. I can’t see any option of technology stop advancing, hence in the coming years we are expected to see more sophisticated and advanced ai tools that would perform more complex tasks. Consequently, software companies would use those tools more intensively, replacing some of their programmers with ai tools, and then most of their programmers.
Is there a future for programmers? I think there is no such future, exactly as the telegraph operators disappeared when a new and superior technology overcame the telegraph.
