Expiring Technologies Face to the Development of Generative AI: Programming Languages

Abstract

The rapid development of AI, and Generative AI in particular, offers incredible opportunities for all humanity. However, this development carries serious threats and dangers. The topic of job reduction and the obsolescence of some professions that were previously downright lucrative is often raised in the literature. Such a phenomenon of disappearance of certain professions or abandonment of old technologies has occurred many times, which was related to technological development or simply the development of civilization.Information and communication technologies are particularly susceptible to change. Virtually every IT issue has gone through an individual development path, resulting in a departure from the original solutions in favor of more modern, more flexible, more easily scalable, or simply more intuitive for humans. Meanwhile, there is a danger that the solutions proposed by GenAI may become dehumanized. The author delved into the topic of the potential phasing out of certain technologies due to the influence of GenAI, using the example of programming languages that have been used thus far. Their collection turns out to be quite extensive. Some of these languages fell into oblivion before the GenAI era, naturally replaced by other programming languages, or gradually became increasingly niche or redundant. The research question posed in this work is: Will GenAI lead to a departure from currently used programming languages, which were typically designed to be user-friendly (in the sense of being human-readable)? The aim of the work is to answer this question, as well as several smaller ones, such as: Are there any chances that programming languages will remain understandable to humans? The work employs literature analysis, critical analysis of selected technologies, and the case study method.