Can AI help solve the COBOL code crisis

What happened

What do the IRS, banks, airlines, and government infrastructure around the world have in common? They’re all running on systems propped up by antique computer code that nobody dares touch, lest everything come crashing down.

Where the sources line up

OpenAI thinks it may have a solution. On October 19th, the company touted “substantial improvements” in its latest AI models’ ability to migrate aging software written in older programming languages into modern code, which it claims could help organizations with “maintaining and modernizing older systems.

Practical impact for readers

That’s a potentially massive deal. COBOL, one of the languages highlighted by OpenAI, remains stubbornly embedded in vast portions of the world’s critical infrastructure. And despite decades of efforts to banish it to history, the language has limped on, simply refusing to die.

Who should pay attention now

It is hard to overstate COBOL’s ubiquity. Short for “common business-oriented language,” COBOL came into being in 1959. Nearly seven decades later, it is still everywhere. According to IBM , COBOL is the foundation for more than 40 percent of online banking systems, supports 80 percent of in-person credit card transactions, and handles 95 percent of ATM transactions. It also underpins many government systems, from Social Security to the IRS to services run by most states . One rough estimate puts the annual cost of COBOL’s inefficiencies to the US GDP at around $105 billion.

What is still unclear

But replacing COBOL is fiendishly difficult. The same goes for other legacy programming languages, like Fortran, still in use today for everything from scientific computing and weather forecasting to atmospheric and ocean studies and codes critical to nuclear security . These systems are often too important to risk breaking, and many of the programmers who understand them have long since retired or died.

Source notes

The Verge