Should I Learn Coding as a Second Language?

“I can't code, and this bums me out because—with so many books and courses and camps—there are so many opportunities to learn these days. Should I at least try?” —Decoder Dear Decoder, Your desire to speak the “language” of machines reminds me of Ted Chiang's short story “The Evolution of Human Science.” The story imagines a future in which nearly all academic disciplines have become dominated by superintelligent “metahumans” whose understanding of the world vastly surpasses that of human experts. In fields like deep learning and other forms of advanced AI, many technologists already seem more like theologians or alchemists than “experts” in the modern sense of the word: Although they write the initial code, they're often unable to explain the emergence of higher-level skills that their programs develop while training on data sets. Meanwhile, algorithms like GPT-3 or GitHub's Copilot have learned to write code, sparking debates about whether software developers, whose profession was once considered a placid island in the coming tsunami of automation, might soon become irrelevant—and stoking existential fears about self-programming. “When information about is made public,” he writes, “it's often either watered down by corporate PR or buried in inscrutable scientific papers.” If Chiang's story is a parable about the importance of keeping humans “in the loop,” it also makes a subtle case for ensuring that the circle of knowledge is as large as possible.