@ryanlpeterman: Martin Odersky (creator of Scala, @odersky) on why types will become the contract between humans and AI-written code: I…

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Summary

Martin Odersky, creator of Scala, argues that types will become the contract between humans and AI-generated code, helping humans maintain control as AI writes and exploits vulnerabilities in code at scale.

Martin Odersky (creator of Scala, @odersky) on why types will become the contract between humans and AI-written code: I think right now we're sort of in an existential crisis. We have AI generating the code, but humans being asked impossible tasks, like to review all these mountains of code, which will never work. And at the same time, AI has also gotten extremely good at exploiting vulnerabilities in code. Like we all heard of Fable and things like that, that you can't use it anymore because it's too dangerous. It will exploit things. So we are at a moment where it's very dangerous that we lose control as humans of what actually happens here. And that's a challenge that I think programming languages can help meet. Definitely not only programming languages, that's no silver bullet, but they definitely can help. If the code is AI-generated, then the focus has to go elsewhere. And I think the focus will go to the interfaces and to the types. I expect types will become a lot stronger and more precise than what we had, because types are the handle that we can make a contract between the human and the AI, that the human can understand, that's concise enough to be reviewed, and that the AI can keep to. We have to level our game quite a lot, because right now, let's face it, type systems are mostly recommendations. They're mostly things that mostly hold, but not always. There are no guarantees, because you can always have a cast, or use some dirty memory. There are a lot of techniques to undermine the type systems.
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Martin Odersky (creator of Scala, @odersky) on why types will become the contract between humans and AI-written code:

I think right now we’re sort of in an existential crisis. We have AI generating the code, but humans being asked impossible tasks, like to review all these mountains of code, which will never work.

And at the same time, AI has also gotten extremely good at exploiting vulnerabilities in code. Like we all heard of Fable and things like that, that you can’t use it anymore because it’s too dangerous. It will exploit things.

So we are at a moment where it’s very dangerous that we lose control as humans of what actually happens here. And that’s a challenge that I think programming languages can help meet. Definitely not only programming languages, that’s no silver bullet, but they definitely can help.

If the code is AI-generated, then the focus has to go elsewhere. And I think the focus will go to the interfaces and to the types. I expect types will become a lot stronger and more precise than what we had, because types are the handle that we can make a contract between the human and the AI, that the human can understand, that’s concise enough to be reviewed, and that the AI can keep to.

We have to level our game quite a lot, because right now, let’s face it, type systems are mostly recommendations. They’re mostly things that mostly hold, but not always. There are no guarantees, because you can always have a cast, or use some dirty memory. There are a lot of techniques to undermine the type systems.

Ryan Peterman (@ryanlpeterman): Martin Odersky (@odersky) is the creator of Scala and I interviewed him to compare different languages designs (Rust vs Zig vs Python vs Scala) and how AI will impact programming languages.

In this episode:

• Comparing Rust, Zig, Python, and Scala designs • Why its hard to

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