Is A.I(M.L) a Threat to Software Engineering?
Software engineering has come a long way and has a very key impact in the lives of people. Most especially, in the areas of ease and connections/communications of any sort.
Apart from software engineering, the impact of software is great, because a need was demanded and problems needed to be solved.
Today, software is mostly around us. Each of the devices we use each day is organized by an operating system(OS), which is a complex piece of software with many inter-related functions.
Software is mostly used for a lot of functions and no matter what, software has simplified and will continue to simplify life’s challenges.
Whatever thing the future holds, it is an undeniable fact that software would always be a part of it.
Although, for computers and software — apart from humans benefitting from the creation of software, several wrong/harmful inventions have been introduced and it seems like we should be threatened if these kinds of wrong things that were created with S.E would also be done with/using A.I.
Won’t it be really bad? Should we be extra conscious and protective of how any kind of an A.I algorithm is released into our world?
Can we say, computers and software have provided more benefits to human lives than they have caused harm?
Absolutely yes and no.
Whatever action a human takes in life or every choice he or she makes is very consequential to what he or she gets back, whether it is a painful reflection, cold hard karma or a joyous fulfillment.
We can all get to create and control software once we understand the logic behind how it’s done, and it’s also entirely up to our values what kind of software we create. To help humanity/to destroy it or to destroy it the more.
This will exactly be the place of A.I.
So is Artificial Intelligence/Machine learning a threat to Software Engineering?
Or to what extent exactly?
Software engineers write codes that follow specific syntaxes with a core algorithm. Now if we have a team of ten software engineers to develop a product and they could pull it off in months, what if the machine equivalence could pull it off in only two weeks?
Isn’t that a massive threat — faster and high-quality?
But we can argue that software engineers bring more to the table and not just a set of skills. Can the machines provide soft skills?
Actually what makes us humans is the fact that — we are humans and we possess the ability to process things emotionally, accurately, decipher, which makes the development of any software product better.
One of the goals of A.I research is to create machines that can learn on their own, to be autonomous and without the need for human input. But in the case of S.E, it is massively based on the need for human input, or else, nothing gets done.
Today, A.I is exceeding some human capabilities in the fields in which it is trained. Instead of the kind of burden once used in trying to load everything in the memory of a machine that’s in a human brain for a particular area, programmers now create virtual neural networks.
This is modeled after the human brain, where the information coming in is processed in layers and the connections between the layers grow stronger based on what is learned.
Will A.I take all of our jobs?
Will it make human existence easier or make humanity more miserable?
A. I use a whole lot of data, the more the analysis of the data, the more the intelligence will increase.
By using machines that can learn rather than software engineers programming everything into them, the amount of money used in manpower, production, and research might go down as machines might do the work better and more efficiently.
A.I/M.L is not a threat to the practice of S.E, rather A.I is an advanced heir that takes all its principles(S.E) and brings out a better version on how to go about things that will generally make it a lot easier, reduction in workload and a bigger eye-opener for research.
Software engineering still holds the basics for the creation of software, while A.I might advance on the basics.
Moreover, A.I might be a threat to the job- “Software Engineer”.
As it is still all tangled up, it is still very difficult to make predictions. Software engineers can not be thoroughly kicked out because developmental decisions still need to be made.
Nevertheless, the machine will still just submit to a bunch of instructions no matter how intelligent it is.
The only thing we can ever do is prepare for the future and give it all it takes. Hey! I’m not scared but excited.
REFERENCES:
Jones, C. (2013, December 23). Prelude: Computing from Ancient Times to the Modern Era.
[Blog Post]. Retrieved from
https://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=2163344&seqNum=5
Huc, J. (2016, June 23). Will the Scientists of Tomorrow Still be Human?. [Blog Post]. Retrieved
from https://software-development.blog/2016/06/23/cto-robotics-and-artificial-intelligence/
Richards, L. (2018). How Software changed the World. [Blog Post]. Retrieved from
https://www.mapcon.com/us-en/how-software-changed-the-world
The Economic Times (2018, June 6). Software Engineering. [Blog Post].
