A call for Ford

It has been 50 years since the first book of the C programming language was published by researchers at Bell labs. It is the foundation of the most popular devices that we have in our palms, on our desks and in the data centers. Ladies and gentlemen code in C. Software is still made by small groups of engineers like shoes were made in the Middle Ages. They formed guilds that used to oversee the society of professionals in a town or a region. Guilds regulated markets, gave protection, provided standards and education for their members. Guilds were the foundation of the university system of medieval Europe.

This is similar to how Silicon Valley operates today. Startups are built up on smart ideas. Each of them have unique philosophy and characteristics driven by their founders and investors. Artisanship and the individual freedom rooted in San Francisco has an impact on the culture of the entire Valley. Even the biggest multinationals are a patchwork of organizations of different engineering and management practices represented by their leaders. The influx of professionals from every country in the world ensures that the products are suitable for consumption everywhere.

Complexity is a bounding factor regardless of the best tools available. As a system becomes more complicated every single change may affect other components increasing the marginal cost of improvements. Issues become more complex and the number of heroes capable of resolving them is limited. A single issue can bring down a whole product at this stage. Assigning more engineers to the problem usually does not help. Good products are designed proactively.

The increasing cost of improvements increasing with the complexity will always limit the abilities of even the biggest companies. Disruptive startups can easily outperform a struggling company in user experience, quality or positive headlines. If a smaller startup becomes successful it is usually acquired by one of the oligopolies of multinationals. If they survive, it is a result of a slight improvement in the engineering or management culture applying their competitiveness to multiple products. The value of the big brand provides sustained revenue growth. These companies are the cash cows of modern society. Their shareholders enjoy the safety of the too big to fail mentality. Public companies are enforced to have predictable revenue and earnings for retirement funds. On the other hand this makes them a bit similar to a 20th century utopia inside.

However, the world has changed, every person produces a similar amount of information. One way to use it is to influence people to shop or vote. This will lead to increasing scrutiny from the public. The result may be that more software is made where the customers are, paying more respect to local standards, history and culture. Artificial intelligence provides the ability to build robotics that act, putting pressure on overseeing and controlling what is happening. It is unethical, unlawful and unacceptable to decline a foreign court that is investigating a fatal accident and not to disclose the full logs, documentation and source code. Ford and the car industry solved this problem in the last century. Software manufacturing should be simple, efficient and friendly. Formal methods already exist to verify the safety and security. It will be more and more affordable to automate software generation and verification due to use of affordable computing from the cloud. The end result will be reliable and affordable machines for everyone.

The generative neural networks used to create deep fake videos on social media can produce logic and user interface. Humans can do what we were designed for by evolution. That is artisanship and creativity and the ability to decide which suggested option is better. Let the machines fix their own problems themselves and reserve the fun stuff for ourselves.