In the last few years, there has been a trend that has been pushed by the most market-valued companies in the world, and that was in the lines of “making computing and development accessible to the masses”. Low-code, No-code, everybody can make an app, a website or anything, really.
Now ? Just ask AI to do it for you! Nvidia’s CEO – the same Nvidia that is currently ranked second in the market cap global ranking list – said “Coding Is Dead”, and that kids don’t need to learn programming because english will be sufficient.
Great right ?
… Right ?
1. No-code is your friend! Or is it ?
Okay, so you’ve been hired at a company as an executive; your boss asks you to make an app, but, not having learned programming, your only way of making it is using a commercial, subscription-based service that will let you drag and drop tiles into place in a matter of hours.
Great! You’ve made an app! Not only have you done your job, you’ve also done the job of an app developper somewhere. But have you been paid for both ? Of course not! Surely, paying the service/subscription has been wayyyy cheaper than hiring an engineer to do it. But for whom has it been cheaper ? Did it empower you ? Are you even an executive if you don’t have a team to manage anymore ?
Low-code and No-code are becoming more and more popular, because it lets you build okay-ish solutions to problems that used to be way more expensive to solve.
Think Excel macros, but make it drag-and-drop.
Great. But I can say with confidence it is not benefiting most people who use it. It makes them more efficient at their jobs, but are they getting raises ? Are they leaving the office early because they could do their job faster ? Well… No. Sorry to break it to you, in corporate jobs, it’s a productivist tool to the sole benefit of your employer and the subscription services they used to reduce short-term production costs.
But the problem does not stop there. Now those same companies that invented it and pushed it to your doorstep want you to drop learning how to do it yourself, because “
I’m a teacher in a computer science school – a computer science school –, and No-code is deemed important enough that we are now teaching it in first year. We’re also apparently generating module descriptions from a few lines of targetted skills and a prompt on ChatGPT, then asking real humans to proof-read them, but I’m babbling.
I swear, the cognitive dissonance of working there regularly is killing me.
So what is it gonna do, in the long run ? Can we stop programming ? Should we stop teaching it in favour of No-code tools and – for f*cks’s sake – prompting ?
You’ve guessed it if you know my editorial line and my values : please, please, please, do not do that 🙅.
2. “We can stop teaching math since we have calculators”
That’s basically the idea. But worse.
Is math a lot easier now that we have calculators ? Are calculators making countless jobs easier ? Yes! Do you have a monthly subscription to your calculator, is it stored in someone else’s house behind a locked door and does it need the electrical equivalent of a small country to run, along with dozens of years worth of stolen scrapped data on the internet ? That’s where the comparison ends.
Yet, we have not stopped teaching math at school, even if we have made it a bit less mandatory. Why is that ? Does the public system value the knowledge and understanding more than it does sheer corporate productivity? Does it assume that giving intellectual tools to children will make them more independant by owning the skills instead of renting or buying them ?
You see the point.
To learn C++, you need a computer. Or you don’t, you can actually learn programming with a sheet of paper and a pen. You’ll be missing precious real-world practice, but you can. The skill itself is free. Most programming languages are free to use and run – sometimes I wonder how this is still possible, given today’s economic environment. You don’t need a subscription. Hell, you can even teach yourself from all the content you can find for free on the internet, or if you don’t have an internet connection, old fashionned books.
Then if you have a computer, you can make an app. Just like that. You don’t even need Windows or MacOS, if you have a text processor and a compiler, both of which are usually FOSS.
There is freedom and independance in that. You own all of that.
You don’t own a no-code app, nor the skill it took to make it. You don’t own anything. We don’t even own cars or property anymore, why would we own skills ? Skill is a mean of production, it is power. People up there are well aware. You don’t need skill anymore. Just rely on our commercial product instead.
Being a good programmer requires skills and practice, a logical mind and a good approach to problem-solving. It’s often an engineer-level job. And that’s why it’s so expensive. That is also why it’s important to be able to replace it with cheaper machines.
Now that we replaced factory workers, supermarket cashiers, writers, etc with machines, and that we are now blaming them for not finding a job, it’s the turn of high-education and technical workers, with the rise of smarter-than-you AI. You thought you were safe ?
3. The term “Prompt Engineer” is a f*cking disgrace
So we’re planning on replacing actual engineers with cheaper, “more efficient”, prompt engineers. Their job? Figure out the best way to get the output they want from an LLM. OK. It does require a bit of technical skill and experience.
But are you making an engine or are you just using one ?
If learning how to use an engine the right way is engineering, then I’m a car engineer since I can drive one, I’m tax engineer since I’ve learned to fill them out, and the list goes on and on.
That is something I’m more and more upset about; Big Tech is trying to make us believe that using their tools is equivalent to knowing how to build them. And by doing that it’s attacking the last bastion of power we have that justifies our price and value: skill.
If skill is becoming a diffuse, expandable value, “what value can you bring to the company” ? How do you prove you deserve more than minimal wage ? If there even is a job to land in the first place.
4. Disclaimer : AI is great… but
… Outside of reality.
Don’t get me wrong, AI is a great tool capable of great things and in many fields, it has its place as a technical tool, but AI under capitalism is f*cking terrible. Most of AI today does not aim at making people’s lives better, it aims at making some people’s pockets larger. At the expense of everyone else.
Have you seen a lot of AI project aimed at helping with disability and accessibility ? At solving the climate crisis ? In proportion, how many dumb chatbots are there to replace an actual support team ? How many AI generators are used to replace illustrators, writers, marketers, journalists, etc ?
Most of AI is aimed at maximizing productivity and reducing expenses and is also a climate-change bomb, and somehow nobody in the tech industry seems to be concerned about it – To be fair, some people are concerned, but obviously not enough. They’re even pretending AI will save us from Climate Change (by adding a virtual country to the load of the global power grid and forcing countries to reopen fossil fuel-based power plants, while not investing a cent in climate change research).
You can’t stop technical progress, but apparently you can stop and even reverse social and environmental progress.
What makes me even angrier is that good people really believe AI can save the world and that it can benefit “All of Humanity” as the blog from OpenAI boldly claimed in 2023. The fact is, it is in no way doing that right now, and there is no evidence to even begin to believe it will change.
Capitalism saw the potential of AI to serve its purpose and seized it. Now one good climate-focused AI project will barely start to negate the effects of the rest of productivist AI uses.
That’s why I think tech workers actively supporting that new world order are not only shooting themselves in the foot, but shooting everybody in the leg while doing it, and it makes me really mad.
Are we racing towards a world filled with executives and prompt engineers, all lead by a few shareholders ?
Gosh I hope rapid climate change kills me before that happens. I would be out of a job, anyway, being both a developer and a CS teacher. 🤷