bloviation

What will programming look like in the future?

High Scalability

09 Oct 2017 — 2 min read

Update: Ólafur Arnalds built a robotic music system to accompany him on the piano. He calls his system of two semi generative, self playing pianos—STRATUS. You can hear his most recent song re:member. There's more explanation in The Player Pianos pt. II and a short Facebook live session. His software reacts to his playing in real-time. Then he has to react to the robots because he's not sure what they're going to do. He's improvising like a jazz band would do, but it's with robots. It's his own little orchestra. The result is beautiful. The result is also unexpected. Ólafur makes the fascinating point that usually your own improvisation is limited by your own muscle memory. But with the randomness of the robots you are forced to respond in different ways. He says you get a "pure unrestricted creativity." And it's fun he says with a big smile on his face.

Maybe programming will look something like the above video. Humans and AIs working together to produce software better than either can separately.

The computer as a creative agent, working in tandem with a human partner, to produce software, in a beautiful act of co-creation.

The alternative vision—The Coming Software Apocalypse—is a dead end.

Better requirements and better tools have already been tried and found wanting. Requirements are a trap. They don't work. Requirements are no less complex and undiscoverable than code.

Tools are another trap. Tools are just code that encode an inflexible solution to a problem that's already been solved.

Admittedly, I'm cheating. I have no idea how any of this will work, but here are the seeds of how it has already started:

Here's what we do know: neither tools or requirements are a silver bullet, they are a method of incrementally improving software quality. Software production quantity is not increased at all.

What we need is a manufacturing process that puts software production on an exponential curve. The only conceivable tool we have at the moment to put software on an exponential production curve is AI. That's the only way software can truly eat the world.

Right now, limited as we are by human programmers using methods that haven't changed much in 30 years, software is just nibbling at the world. And that won't scale. We need more software. A lot more software. And humans are the bottleneck.

Are humans and AIs working together to co-create software the solution? I don't know, but what else is there?