I love Borg episodes on the various Star Trek series. There is something so winsome, so almost child-like about the Borg. They can’t reproduce by natural means (i.e., no sex!). They have no art or literature or music. That can’t research or investigate or create any new technologies on their own. They’ve never actually succeeded at assimilating humankind. And they hold staunchly to the conviction that they are perfect, all the while insisting on “adding” to their perfection with each new species they encounter. (Apparently they’ve never assimilated a species with a basic understanding of logic.)
Nevertheless, everyone agrees that the Borg is the Federation’s most formidable enemy. Even the Q Continuum, despite its vaunted omnipotence, warns that you should never piss off the Borg.
What’s the deal?
People are afraid of robots. (Okay, the Borg are Cyborgs, but close enough.) Judging from science fiction, we always have been, we always will be.
So it should come as no surprise that Sue Halpern, writing in the New York Review of Books, naively quotes Carl Benedikt Frey and Osborne, writing that “there is about a 50 percent chance that programming will be outsourced to machines within the next two decades.” Halpern’s article, starkly titled “How Robots and Algorithms Are Taking Over,” goes on to say, “In fact, this is already happening, in part because programmers increasingly rely on ‘self-correcting’ code – that is, code that debugs and rewrites itself – and in part because they are creating machines that are able to learn on the job.”
Robots are taking over? No more jobs for testers? No more work for programmers? Really?
Not so fast, says Bertrand Meyer, French academic, author, and consultant who created the Eiffel programming language and the idea of design by contract. In one of his recent blogs, Meyer writes, “Current work on automatic bug correction is great, but if you read the papers you will see that the risk of massive tester and programmer unemployment, because robots have taken over their jobs, is not exactly around the corner. I would love to be able to state that tools such as AutoFix solve the program correction problem; but even though my social conscience would not even hurt (these are tools to help programmers, not replace them), I am afraid that we are still far from large-scale applicability of automatic bug detection and correction.”
As Meyer so aptly observes, “The journalist’s tendency to exaggerate is not limited to tabloids. Highbrow publications such as the New York Review generally have higher standards; but there is something about writing on science and technology that leads authors and editors to throw away all caution.”
And there’s just something about robots that scars the business out of mere humans.
But take heart. Resistance is not futile.