Why DevOps means the end of the world as we know it

We have a rule in our house. We’re not allowed to talk about the Technological Singularity. It’s a somewhat arbitrary rule my wife made up because she finds the idea ridiculous–or maybe she’s just really freaked out about the day our robot overlords take over.

It’s irrelevant, though, because we have a house full of people who love technology and science and appreciate speculating about the intricate possibilities of the day when technology will eventually be smarter and more capable than mankind.

I wrote a blog post about why DevOps ensures that day will come sooner rather than later:

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.”

Girmonsky added, “How can we expect the Singularity to come anytime soon with these clunky, error-prone, human-driven deployment processes?”

Check out the full story on DevOps: DevOps will bring about the end of the human race.