The ‘HOW’ will be solved by AI. The ‘WHY’ and ‘WHAT’ still remains a human domain.

I started learning how to code in Std 1. They had a brand new computer lab that was air conditioned (big deal back then) because the cpus kept heating up. They taught us logo. It was a programming language designed for kids to understand how to think about programming.

So the first task was ‘Draw a line’. Our teacher smiled and said ‘Computers can’t understand our language. So you must learn their language to instruct them. Be very specific.’

So to make a simple line, you had to tell the turtle

FORWARD 100

The second task was to make a square. Damn exciting! So you had to tell the turtle exactly how to do that. Go forward 100 units, turn 90 degrees to the right, go forward again etc till it drew the full square.

FORWARD 100
RIGHT 90
FORWARD 100
RIGHT 90
FORWARD 100
RIGHT 90
FORWARD 100
RIGHT 90

All this for what? To learn how to code a machine and automate tasks. You slowly picked up more complex tasks and learnt how to make the machines do whatever you wanted them to do.

A friend (a very senior, happy go lucky guy in his 50s, when I was in my 20s) Atanu Bhaumik taught me something that I held on till now.

He asked me ‘How do you teach a computer to make tea?’

I said ‘take 1 cup of milk, 0.5 spoon full of sugar, 0.5 spoon full of tea, mix and boil’. He smiled and said, really dude? How would the computer even understand you and move in physical space? It does not understand context. Does it even know how to open the cupboard door? Damn.

So I started again. “Open the refrigerator door, get the packet of milk…”. He interrupted “but how would it even know where the refrigerator is?”

Ughh. Okay this is irritating. Deep breaths.

Turn your body 20 degrees to the left
Walk 2 feet
Extend your right hand by 45 cm
Rotate your right hand wrist in the right direction by 90 degrees
Grip the refrigerator handle with your right hand
Retract your right hand by 45 cm to open the door
Extend your left hand by 60 cm
Grip the packet of milk with your left hand
Retract your left hand by 60 cm
Extend your right hand by 45 cm to close the door
Ungrip your right hand from the door handle

I yawed, pitched and rolled and only got the milk out. Ha! I needed to write all the instructions to get the sugar, the tea, the pot to make the tea in, get the lighter get the cups to drink the tea in etc etc.

The job of programmers then was ‘How’. This has been evolving for quite some time. Remember X86 assembly language? To add two numbers, you would need to do this

_start:
mov eax, 5
mov ebx, 3

add eax, ebx ;eax now holds 8

People went to the moon because programmers used assembly language to teach computers how to trigger the thrusters, the rudders and what not. They kept adding layers on top like the C language to make it easier for programmers to write instructions. The evolution has been happening since the 70’s and will move towards machines understanding our language rather than us understanding theirs. The ‘HOW’ to make the machine behave the way we want it to will be easier for future generations of programmers.

So what remains? Checking if the machine has reliably done whatever it was tasked for will remain for a few years until that validation is automated.

The ‘WHY’ and ‘WHAT’ still remain. What does that mean? It means thinking on the lines of Why do you want to automate that? What kind of tool do you imagine? How do you imagine the tool? What does the tool do? These solutions still firmly fall in the domain of human skillset for now. Development and Product teams might combine and give fantastic results. Engineering will never go away, for engineering is just problem solving. And the world will always be chock full of problems to be solved.