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There are words that should frighten us all. “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” “You’re not in trouble.” “We are just following procedure.” “You don’t need a lawyer for this.” Or, my personal favourite, “I’ve got an MBA”.
Why does the last one cause me concern? It stems from times in my career when shiny new people with shiny new MBAs were brought in to sort out “problems”. I found there was an almost standard playbook, and it started with the question: “What is the core business?”
One of the recurrent answers I heard was along the lines of, well, we make widgets and IT is not a core function, so we can and should outsource this to save money.
Now I do IT, so I obviously have something in the game with this statement, but you don’t hear this about other business support functions like accounting.
Don’t get me wrong: we are all ultimately replaceable, but those staff that you want to fire also hold important institutional knowledge.
I mention this because there has always been and will always be management pressure to reduce costs. IT is often seen as a large lump of money that isn’t revenue building, so attempts are made to cut that large lump down to a smaller lump. Or, as I mentioned above, to outsource the function altogether.
History has repeatedly shown that this a strategic mistake. Get IT wrong and you’ll suffer system failures and data breaches, with nearly every customer then offered compensation at best and disappearing into the ether due to a lack of trust at worst.
I fear we are about to repeat this mistake again.
This time it’s due to AI, everyone’s favourite topic. Now, models like Claude or ChatGPT are amazing and I use them on almost daily basis to find answers and help me solve problems. AI is changing what computing can do for every one of us.
One of those things these models do very well is write program code, in whatever language you want. I use this to help me a lot, so I will talk about it in software development specifically here because that is one of AI’s real strengths today. But it will apply to other areas in the future.
Let me start by saying these models can and do help me work smarter when I need to write code for something. However – in fact I feel I should say HOWEVER – I will state straight away that AI isn’t going to replace developers.
It appears that Amazon and Microsoft disagree with me. Right now, I’m seeing many ads from those two companies and others that claim their AI can replace developers and staff. Simply use their tools instead!
So not only do you make savings, but incidentally help Amazon or Microsoft’s bottom line. These ads aren’t aimed at the developers: they’re aimed at management, and these people don’t really use AI. Worse, sometimes they use it when they shouldn’t; I’m looking at the West Midlands police chief who had to apologise after an AI error was used to justify Maccabi Tel Aviv ban.
My worry is that people believe the hype rather than the actuality, and we again build up a legacy that will bite us in the bum in the future. Although I should say my worries, for they are twofold.
You can’t see into an AI or even tell how it has done the task. It takes your input and spits out a result, just like any other ‘black box’. You train the black box by giving weight to the input until you get the output you want, at which point you stop. But how the input becomes the output, you can’t know.
In fact, it’s possible that the same input at different times will give different output, but you will never know why this occurs. This might be trivial right now, but as we start to build these black boxes into systems how do we know that the system is working as it should? More importantly, how can we pick out the mistakes and feed that back?
Once a system is built it is very difficult to argue with. We’ve all heard the expression “computer says no” but that was when we could follow the computer’s logic. Now we have an unknown built into the heart of the computer.
Then I come back to the people side. As I said, AI is great and it helps me a lot with little coding problems I have. It can take a simple description and turn it into code that would take me hours to write but that it completes in seconds.
It may not always work exactly how I want straight away, but I find it will mostly work reliably within a couple of iterations.
The issue I have is that this type of work typically goes to the junior developers in the real world; it is how they learn, what they discuss with senior developers to develop their skills, and how they ultimately progress to become senior developers themselves.
I fear that the junior developers of today won’t have jobs. Only the senior developer role will exist and they will be supported by AI, and with AI they can hold things together writing the code and the testing. It will probably work well for the short term, and provide those all-important savings for the business.
But what happens to those juniors that are being cut out of the system to save some money now? They can never become a senior developer in the future because there is no experience to be gained with the existing set of seniors.
If we go down this road, we either get low-quality seniors or no seniors in the future. We will all be the poorer for that, just as we were with the MBAs outsourcing IT departments as they “are not a core function”.
However, I fear I am a Cassandra only to be read on the internet and have this piece ingested into an AI model as data. With a bit of luck maybe it will break the governor module.
