Software engineering – The Information Badger

‘For the times, they are a-changin’ sang Bob Dylan in the 1960s. This is particularly apt today given four recent matters which, in the broadest sense, have IT at their core.

First, Meta’s CEO has testified for the first time before a jury to defend against accusations that Meta’s social media platforms harm children’s mental health, and that their platforms are designed to prioritise keeping users scrolling to maximise profits. The trial’s outcome could prove seismic. Second, ‘Epstein Data’ has triggered an inevitable media and political frenzy and repercussions for some individuals, but it has produced little so far that would stand up in a court of law. Nevertheless, ‘Epstein data’ is a reminder of the dangers of email, and that using services underpinned by IT always leaves a record somewhere. The third matter is the impact of AI-driven fears on the share prices of major IT services companies. Investors are anxious about the future demand for IT consulting/services. At the time of writing, the share prices of Accenture, Capgemini, CGI, Sopra Steria, Tata Consultancy Services, and Infosys have dropped by 42%, 36%, 36%, 32%, 28%, and 27%, respectively, over the last 12 months. The market is taking a sober look at the impact of AI.

And the fourth is the AI Impact Summit in Delhi, the largest ever global gathering of world leaders and tech bosses, which ended with 88 nations signing the ‘Delhi Declaration of AI Impact’. Some have called this the ‘Delhi Magna Carta’ to emphasise that it represents a milestone in global cooperation, and consensus about AI’s use for economic growth and social good. The Declaration, however, is not legally binding, and so calling it a Magna Carta is a political metaphor rather than a formal treaty. The Declaration’s a political statement of principles which are far from certain to be embedded into national/international laws, standards, and institutions. A hint about why it may ultimately have little influence is captured by a USA comment which is reported in the item here. The comment is that the USA will not accept ‘global governance of AI’. Why? Because it and China are locked in a structural competition over computational power, microchips, AI-enabled defence systems, and the control of global standards. It’s existential for both and the Declaration doesn’t change that.

Unsurprisingly today ‘For the times, they are a-changin’ is an even louder truth, both geopolitically and for IT services companies and their employees. Dario Amodel, CEO of Anthropic, foresees AI eliminating the jobs of many software engineers. It’s always been important for IT and tech companies to be fleet of foot and for IT people to keep their skills current. The Delhi Declaration highlights that this is more important than ever. With AI-driven transformation gathering pace, the market is showing that a rosy future for IT service companies, and their employees, is not guaranteed…

We’re living in a world where software is the invisible infrastructure for daily life. There doesn’t appear to be any quantitative measure of what proportion of everything we use actually contains software, but it’s not outrageous to assert that almost everything we use depends on it. Whatever the real proportion is, with the advent of AI and the Internet of Things (IoT) it’s only climbing. Software has blossomed from primitive beginnings to become crucial in every facet of life in less than 75 years. In the 1950s software wasn’t a ‘product’ but something bundled with hardware used primarily for scientific calculations, military simulations, and data processing. Most of it was written in machine code or early assembly languages tailored to specific hardware, and it was written by the same engineers who built the hardware. A large program was a few thousand lines of code loaded manually via cards or magnetic tape. FORTRAN only emerged in 1956 and the term ‘software engineering’ was only coined in the late 1960s/early 1970s.

How things have changed. Today’s internet, search tools, social media, cars, medical devices, satellites, aircraft, trains, weapons, smartphones and so on depend on many, many millions of lines of code, see here and here for example. Modern health, financial, energy, government, intelligence, and defence capabilities all rely on huge amounts of software. Indeed, any item in our homes that can sync with a smartphone app contains software. In less than 75 years software has changed life, taken over the world, and become professionalised in the way it’s produced. Writing machine code for specific hardware in a way that ‘every byte counts’ has evolved into the professional, ever changing and improving, discipline of software engineering which incorporates design and development processes, methods, standards, tools and techniques that ensure that production software meets requirements, is scalable, tested, robust, maintainable, secure, and performant. Software engineering, of which coding is today just a subset, continues to evolve with, for example, the likes of Microsoft and Google anticipating that AI will render hand crafting of code redundant by the end of this decade.

The software woven into our lives in recent decades has brought immense convenience and transformed communication, public services, business, and conflict, as world events illustrate. Today it’s undeniably critical infrastructure, but software, unlike most infrastructure, isn’t something you can tangibly touch! Compared to what existed 75 years ago, the software in use today is a vulnerable sprawling metropolis with vulnerabilities that bad actors can use to cause disruption. Are we safer today than in the 1950s now that everything depends on software? Hmm, that’s debateable, but what the Badger senses is that even with the advent of AI, software engineering as a discipline and the career prospects for software engineers focused on solutions, security, quality, robustness, and testing rather than coding, are good for many, many years yet…

Category: Software engineering

Delhi, AI, and a rosy future for IT services companies?

Software – The invisible infrastructure of daily life