Note: this was originally posted on LinkedIn, but it disappeared without any notice or explanation: now it has re-appeared. Who knows what happened?
The day there are no more engineers is the day we doom society.
I love science fiction, from Asimov to Star Trek, and I am amazed each and every day at how many of the advancements hypothesized actually turn into reality one way or another.
However, in our constant capitalistic rush towards efficiency and profits, I think we are failing to remember all the warnings the science fiction offers. Smart humans, writers of all genres, have already imagined a good deal of what we're trying to accomplish and have told us tales of what might happen: both good and bad.
The recent trend towards "all code is going to be written by AI" worries me a lot. The issue is not with the code itself: writing code is akin to tightening a bolt, although admittedly more creative, and it is a task that can be automated relatively safely.
However, there is a part of human understanding that comes from doing things. When everybody stops writing code, we will most likely lose our ability to read it and understand it as well.
And when nobody understands the code that is being written, when the systems that we have in place to write it and mange it (AI, in this case) break, then nobody will to be able to do anything about it.
You might say: "Well, it is going to be enough to have someone that is able to fix the AI systems", to which I would say: "Yes, and that's why engineers are never going to go away". There is always something new and that something is going to break.
There is one particular episode of Start Trek TNG, which I'd like everyone to watch (or watch again, if, like me, you are old enough to have seen it first on a CRT TV). The episode is "When the Bough Breaks" (link below).
TLDR: A sophisticated computer system (AI, we could say) named "The Custodian" has been ruling over the Aldean population for centuries, and nobody understands how it works, or that it even is a computer system. It is up to the crew of the Enterprise to solve the crisis that it created.
While at the time of airing the episode was extremely relevant due to issues with our own ozone layer on planet Earth, I think it also provides insight in what a society without engineers looks like.
To all you CEO, founders, and management types: please make your choices carefully.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_Bough_Breaks_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation)
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