My recent experimentation with the Daisy Seed platform for creating a digital guitar pedal has involved a lot of reasonably complex coding. It’s certainly not my first use of GitHub Copilot to increase my coding productivity, but it’s the first project where I have written almost none of the code. The agent models are really good at coding when given the proper direction, and this completely transforms the speed and quality of development.
Generative AI is an ethically complex space with regard to creativity, and at no point would I suggest that AI plagiarism is ok. At the same time, the developer community is heavily biased towards open source, and the GitHub repos and other openly available data that its Copilot uses to execute coding tasks are intended to be freely reused. I would contend that the use of Generative AI for software development is a massively positive step forward.
That does not mean that this revolutionary change to how we code will not require us to adapt as a society. AI will certainly impact our jobs and our daily lives in many ways – some that are easy to predict and others that might be harder to foresee. Just from an IT perspective, there are many global economies that are today entirely dependent on the ability to supply cheap developer resources in volume. AI coding will definitely transform the requirement for these resources in the near future.
For some, there is a belief that AI is an inherently bad thing, but I think this view totally fails to appreciate the positive effect AI can have on our planet and our society. A particular irritation I have is the oft-cited problem of the energy and resources consumed by AI. There is no doubt that endlessly using AI to tart up selfies is not in any way valuable to the environment, but AI will also be used to massively accelerate our development of engineering excellence. This will, in turn, make it far easier to develop cleaner technologies and energy sources that will remove our dependency on fossil fuels and help us to heal the planet.
When we consider our own lives and how we live them today, there is clearly a concern that AI will “steal our jobs”, and we need to actively stop AI from doing things that have previously required human intervention. However, the things that AI does really well is doing tasks that are fundamentally not creative or intellectually fulfilling. There are many things we need to consider, one of which is whether we will need fewer people to be “employed” to do things that add economic value to society. Since the Industrial Revolution, we have tended to see our purpose in life through the lens of our careers – before then, you could argue that survival was the primary goal, coupled with the usual inequalities of class and wealth.
The AI Revolution will be every bit as transformational as the Industrial Revolution, and so the real question is how we respond as a society to all of the implications of this fundamentally positive shift in our capability. That’s not an easy question to answer, and it is a question that has thousands of facets. Does everyone need a job? If not, do we need to think about universal income? How do we break the cycle of wealth and power being concentrated in the hands of the few who are least qualified to hold either? What does it mean to live a fulfilled life?