Stefan Woltran from TU Wien invites to the next event of the DigHum Lecture Series:

Tuesday, Septemper 9, 2025 at 5:00 p.m. (17:00) Central European Summer Time (UTC+2)

Topic: “Why GenAI Won’t Replace Software Engineers”
(scroll down for abstract and CV)

Speaker: Alexander Pretschner (TUM & bidt, Germany)
Moderator: Carlo Ghezzi (Politecnico di Milano, Italy)

To participate in the talks via Zoom go to: https://tuwien.zoom.us/j/96389928143?pwd=UU5YRkNuRmdoWHV4MFBwMWRCcUErdz09
(Password: 0dzqxqiy)

The talk will be live streamed and recorded on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/digitalhumanism

For further announcements and information about the speakers in the Lecture Series, see https://dighum.org/#latest-news. Please note that you can access the slides and recordings of our past events via that link.

In case you missed the last lecture by Marleen Huysman you can watch the recording of “AI reshaping work practices”.

Next events:
08.-12.09 4th ACM Europe Digital Humanism Summer School
07.10.25 DigHum Lecture Mathieu Guillermin: New Humanism in the Time of Neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence (NHNAI)
20.-21.11 Digital Humanism – Interdisciplinary Science and Research Conference

ABSTRACT “Why GenAI Won’t Replace Software Engineers ”:

Generating code with LLMs is surprisingly and increasingly powerful, prompting the question if we can expect humans to be out of the loop anytime soon. My answer is no to replacement for professional software engineers (and trivially yes to assistance). The argument is twofold and relies on two necessary distinctions: that software engineering is not just programming; and that software engineering ranges from writing scripts over implementing websites to building complex interconnected cyber-physical systems. The main argument is that software is a design artifact that embodies many architectural and technical decisions – traditionally taken (hopefully explicitly!) by engineers who understand and design the trade-offs. That is, some human needs to say what they want and which option they prefer – and this is not the realm of machines. Secondly, and once again depending on the context, software development projects often fail because it is outright impossible to state the requirements upfront. Agile software development processes embody that observation into an incremental process where what one wants is fully understood only while the system is built. And again, humans want the system to be built, not machines. A discussion of the influence of risk classes and productivity gains rounds off the argument.

Short Bio of Alexander Pretschner:

Alexander Pretschner is a professor of software and systems engineering at TUM; a founding director of bidt, the interdisciplinary Bavarian research institute for digital transformation; and the scientific director of fortiss, Bavaria’s research and transfer institute for software-intensive systems. Research interests include all aspects of software engineering, with a current focus on testing and accountability. Prior appointments include those of a professor at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, of a group manager at Fraunhofer IESE and an adjunct associate professor in Kaiserslautern, and of a senior researcher at ETH Zurich. PhD from TUM, MS degrees in computer science from RWTH Aachen University and the University of Kansas.

Short Bio of Carlo Ghezzi:

Carlo Ghezzi is an Emeritus Professor at Politecnico di Milano, where he has been teaching and doing research for over 40 years. He is an ACM Fellow, IEEE Fellow, member of Academia Europaea, and member of the Italian Academy of Sciences (Istituto Lombardo). He received the ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award. He has been President of Informatics Europe. He has done research on programming languages and software engineering. He has published over 200 papers in international journals and conferences and co-authored 6 books. He is interested in the ethical implications of research in computer science. He is currently chairing the Ethics Committee at Politecnico di Milano.