There Are No Programmers in Star Trek (www.i-programmer.info)

Mike James argues that programming as we know it is a transitory profession — a point illustrated by science fiction like Star Trek, where crew members simply speak to intelligent systems rather than writing code. The piece contrasts scenes of casual natural-language interaction (Picard ordering tea) with historical sci‑fi like Asimov, where “techies” become robo‑psychologists who diagnose and coax behavior from intelligent machines. Star Trek’s Daystrom Institute is invoked as a stand‑in for today’s neural‑network research labs, and characters like Data expose lingering questions about substrate and what counts as “general AI.” For the AI/ML community this framing is provocative but practical: the technical emphasis shifts from hand‑coding algorithms to designing, training, interpreting and governing large, generalist models — think prompt engineering, model architecture, data curation, alignment, interpretability and safety work rather than routine app development. The article equates a future “universal AI” to a Universal Turing Machine: it could fulfill user intents without explicit programs, but it still requires expert stewardship. In short, while classical programming tasks may shrink, deep technical skills will remain essential — reframed around building, understanding, and aligning powerful models rather than writing functions.