Ask HN: Will AI put programmers our of work?

I just thought it was interesting to post because:

chatGTP has been featuring quite a lot on HN

I had literally just asked the same question to chatGTP

and it's asking an interesting/relevant question to chatGTP

I do get your point about spam though

> Programmer would be the last job to go

Nope. Experience has shown that tasks that require peak intellectual abilities in humans are actually very easy for computers to do. Computers were outperforming humans at calculation 80 years ago, and have been crushing grandmasters at chess since the 90s.

Meanwhile, controlling a robot to move efficiently, or reliably distinguishing everyday objects like cats and dogs, is still extremely challenging for current AIs, which require more data than any human could see in a thousand lifetimes to perform at a remotely adequate level.

It's "menial" jobs that will be the last to go. Because those rely on innate abilities grown over hundreds of millions of years of evolution. A task like programming that was only invented three generations ago is trivial by comparison.

> Did the shovel make it less likely you would employ someone to dig?

That's a limited analogy.

If you replace shovel with robotic excavator, it gets closer to what we have with current AI. It's not replacing jobs _yet_, but as soon as those excavators become fully automated, a single worker will be able to do the job of dozens, at a fraction of the time and cost.

And, yes, AI-powered excavators are a thing[1].

A closer analogy would be the trucking industry. Truckers are losing jobs _today_ as self-driving technology improves.

The same will eventually happen with software. Programmers will still be needed to drive the AI, but the productivity of one will be greatly increased, and human teams will be much smaller. Programmers won't be needed for simple tasks at first, until eventually only "prompt engineers" are left.

So I wouldn't say this is an existential risk yet, but our field will radically change within the next decade.

[1]: https://asirobots.com/mining/excavator/

In another life, I designed workflows that could be picked up by offshore teams to execute the actual work.

My observation was that a lot of my colleagues had no appetite for reasoning about processes, much less thinking through various edge cases to make sure the work was done correctly and covered enough cases to be a useful workflow with low incidents.

Colour me skeptical but I'm not convinced we will see an AGI that can solve business problems without killing the proverbial cat without lots of baby sitting.

So is programming the business of copy pasting from stackoverflow or is it the business of solving problems?

I think in this context, there exists a much more significant uncanny valley than any we know of right now. The usual example from visualization completely pales in comparison. There is no "almost" solution for any non-trivial task. And on this opposite side of the valley only humans can act.