Disconnect: coders, the robots will be coming for your jobs before mine

Disconnect is a weekly column in which Tech in Asia’s Charlie Custer pokes at holes, plays devil’s advocate, or otherwise attempts to rain on the tech industry’s parade.

“Learn to code.” That’s been the anthem of many a startup founder and tech guru for over a decade now. Steve Jobs (who didn’t write code) once said, “Everybody in this country should learn to program a computer.” If you Google the words “everyone should learn,” the words “to code” will be the search engine’s first guess at the end of your sentence. Even Stephen Hawking has said that basic computer programming is an “essential skill” for the 21st century.

I’m now going to say something mildly insane: Steve Jobs, Stephen Hawking, and Google are all wrong.

To be clear: programming is a great thing to learn. Right now there are lots of interesting coding jobs, and even if you’re not looking to go pro, learning a bit of code can help you make your life easier. I’ve learned a bit of Python, and once wrote a script that helped me automate parts of Tech in Asia‘s newsletter, back when I was in charge of it. It saved me loads of time, and I felt pretty cool having accomplished it. It was a challenge, and I’m sure it was good for my brain.

Where the everyone-should-code folks are wrong, though, is in the oft-repeated assertion that because computers are getting more and more common, programming jobs will be similarly common. Computers are here to stay. Dedicated programmers who use specialized languages to talk to them? Not so much.

Sooner than you probably expect, you’ll be able to communicate with your computer directly, without the need for much specialized code.

Why is this possible?

Let’s talk about what computer programming actually is. At its essence, it’s a lot like speaking a foreign language. You start with an idea in your own language about what you want the computer to do. Programming is the act of translating that idea into a language the computer can understand. Computer programming is essentially translation.

In many ways, it’s actually far easier than translation. Inevitably, what you need to communicate to a computer is just a set of instructions, like “Do this, and then this.” You don’t need to try to figure out how to get it to appreciate the cultural background of a poem, or worry about whether the tone of your prose comes off the same in C++ and English. All you need to do is get it to understand what you want it to do.

Admittedly, that’s not easy, because computers are dumb, and they don’t have the shared life experience to draw on that humans do. Still, many of the obstacles that stand in the way of excellent machine translation of human languages don’t really exist for computer languages. And while perfect machine translation is still quite a long ways off, pretty-damn-good machine translation – good enough for most average users – is not. The same, I think, is true of programming.

How will it happen?

Watson stomping everyone at Jeopardy.

Stop typing that angry comment