DevOps is the end of the world as we know it

It’s the end of the world as we know it–or maybe it’s just the end of the world. If the climate change, the ice age, or the catastrophic earthquake don’t get us DevOps will help connect artificial intelligence with mechanical robots to accelerate the advent of the Technological Singularity and the end of the human race.

I wrote about the DevOps apocalypse in this blog post:

DevOps will mean the end of mankind.

Sure, it seems great now. Organizations can operate more efficiently. Routine tasks are automated. Development, deployment, integration, monitoring, and testing are all happening in continuously continuous harmony, freeing people up to focus on larger, more important things and continue to grow the business. What’s not to love about DevOps?

Well, all of that seems fine at face value—but eventually it could be the catalyst that brings about SkyNet from the movie The Terminator and enslaves the human race to our Matrix overlords. DevOps is the missing piece that will enable technology to take over the world.

Wikipedia defines the Technological Singularity as:

“The technological singularity is the hypothetical advent of artificial general intelligence (also known as “strong AI”). Such a computer, computer network, or robot would theoretically be capable of recursive self-improvement (redesigning itself), or of designing and building computers or robots better than itself. Repetitions of this cycle would likely result in a runaway effect — an intelligence explosion — where smart machines design successive generations of increasingly powerful machines, creating intelligence far exceeding human intellectual capacity and control. Because the capabilities of such a superintelligence may be impossible for a human to comprehend, the technological singularity is an occurrence beyond which events may become unpredictable, unfavorable, or even unfathomable.”

We already have robots and drones capable of physical movement / action, and we have machine intelligence approaching full artificial intelligence. DevOps—with its continuous monitoring, continuous deployment, continuous integration, etc, all automated to essentially self-diagnose and self-heal—will be the glue that connects the artificial intelligence with the robot technologies. If the machines can plan and organize on their own, and have the connectivity to communicate with and control physical objects, and can automate most of the grunt-work through DevOps tools and practices the humans end up just being in the way.

“Let’s face it. Humans are complicated. And human-driven release processes even more so. We find too many bugs in production code, performance is unacceptably sluggish, and breakages from manual handoffs are always holding us back. We need to let the machines handle these things so we can deploy production software that’s error-free and lightning-fast,” explained Alon Girmonsky, Founder & CEO, BlazeMeter. “With the full automation provided by Continuous Delivery and Deployment, we can finally achieve properly efficient operations.”

You can read about how DevOps will bring about the end of life on Earth at DevOps.com: DevOps will bring about the end of the human race.