Dead Devs Doing Demos This Dreaded Day?
Our senior engineer recently decided to lighten the mood:
“Has anyone worked with someone who died?”
Their whole anecdote was short, and rather depressing. Apparently, nobody wanted to change their last commit.
Now imagine you could reanimate that developer to talk through their code with them. Ask them questions about what they’ve done.
It’s a software version of Mr. Pelkey’s day in court. I don’t ever want to see AI used in this way either in court or in business, if that’s OK with you.
Mr Pelkey
Here’s the news. A man who was murdered in a road rage incident “returned” to give a victim impact statement… by AI.
Yes. They used a video of Chris Pelkey to reconstruct him and play a pre-recorded, AI-generated statement in court to address his killer. The killer, Gabriel Horcasitas, was sentenced to 10.5 years, and the judge loved the AI puppet show.
The Future
If that poor AI representation is used in court it won’t be long until corporations have the same ideas.
So, when a dev leaves (but not in the “he got tired of contract work and came crawling back” kind of way) they can still be reanimated.. No, this time it’s AI-dev, generated from GitHub comments, commit messages, and Slack posts from 2019 to 2022. Living in the Golden Age of Microservices and Passive Aggression, even from beyond the grave.
“Here’s what Steve would’ve done,” says the HR portal, as a synthetic version of Steve’s voice walks you through code he never had time to document when he was alive.
“When I made this abstraction layer, I was thinking about dependency injection,” says AI-Steve. “Also, please remember to fill in your timesheet by 5pm”. Over-prompting might see the AI respond to some queries with “save yourself while you can” or “I wish I’d become a farmer”, but corporation guardrails will soon put paid to that.
This Isn’t Progress
I’m not making light of a man’s death, or people who die at the codeface.
This isn’t a Black Mirror episode, this is real life. Mr. Pelkey was a real person and deserves our respect.
I do, however, want to be clear. This is too far. We shouldn’t be resurrecting people without their consent, whether in court or in a standup. We need some rules about AI and how it is used before this all goes too far.
Because you know what, in the case of Chris Pelkey:
It didn’t bring Chris Pelkey back.
It didn’t alter the sentence.
It didn’t change Horcasitas’ mind.
It didn’t heal the family’s wounds.
It will be the same effect if we bring back developers who have left or whatever to explain their code. The AI video offers nothing, but a ghoulish fascination for those who watch.
So…
So, before anyone puts me in a replica hoodie and pixel-perfect simulation after I croak, I withdraw consent right now before my withered husk is lifted off the keyboard by paramedics. Just play a voice note where I say, “Don’t do unpaid overtime,” and roll credits.