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The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the End of Code

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Re: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the End of Code

#11

Post by narrator »

paulsutter wrote: post #2

AI techniques don't require acres of developers writing acres of if/thens (traditional software development is just that). The Deepmind Atari player is only 1500 lines of code.

I think that software developers are going to become one of the few professions left and will be massively productive because they just have to hook up the AI training and they're basically done. Anyone who can hack this stuff is going to be able to be on the other end of the wealth divide real quick.

Transfer learning is a beautiful awesome thing. You can download ImageNet models trained on huge amounts of data by GPU farms and suddenly you've got a world class image recognizer running on your very own GPU.

Reinforcement learning is totally off the hook. You can make a bot for a random board game that you barely know how to play.

Re: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the End of Code

#12

Post by hiuhsdf »

carapace wrote: post #7

If you have been following the recent advances in AI (and are not clueless) then it should be getting really REALLY obvious that most coding and design tasks will be automated within three to five years. AI will eat your career.

Not really, AI is still absolute shit at most tasks, and programming requires many different skills. AlphaGo, for example does a fairly simple task (relative to programming), which was trained on tons of existing and very simple data. If you are automating coding and design tasks that means you are adding new tools, that people on both ends on the automated process will need to learn and understand, this adds extra cost and complexity. I agree that many programming tasks can be automated, but I don't think it will have a significant impact in the next 50 years. I think automation will hit most other sectors a lot faster and harder than it will IT, and the new automation will require more engineers to manage it.

Re: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the End of Code

#13

Post by swagtricker »

carapace wrote: post #7

If you have been following the recent advances in AI (and are not clueless) then it should be getting really REALLY obvious that most coding and design tasks will be automated within three to five years. AI will eat your career.

Sorry, but no. No decent religion sets a date for the apocalypse. Try again, great AI worshiper! ;)

Re: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the End of Code

#14

Post by pedalpete »

wrong_variable wrote: post #3

Dogs can be made to learn things - doesn't mean we allow them do surgery. Whoever wrote this article has negative knowledge about the state of AI. edit: Its also slightly insulting that this person thinks that the modern programmer spends all their time writing if/else/then statement.

I'm going to take the other side of this argument and suggest that we didn't create the dog and the limitations in the dogs abilities.

I suspect that this will be difficult for the HN community to hear, but we must face the upcoming realities.

Though I think the article may be assigning more abilities to AI than is actually feasible in our lifetimes, let us not forget that most back-end developers are doing basic I/O and data manipulation tasks. Put something into a database, get something out of a database. Front-enders are doing layout, animation, sizing and colouring.

The average modern programmer doesn't spend their time writing if/else/then statements, I believe the average programmer spends their time writing GET/SET/EDIT/DELETE flows.

I believe in the next 10 years, artificial intelligence will be able to model and create these basic systems based on human input. UX and possibly even UI can also be trained. A/B testing can certainly be trained.

Those who think programmers can't be replaced begin to sound like the Luddites who felt the loom could not match the quality of their craft.

Note: I am a full-stack developer, I believe 90% of my day job will be replaced by AI in the coming years. That final 10% often deciding what to do or the best how, will likely be the main task.

Re: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the End of Code

#17

Post by PeCaN »

b34r wrote: post #8
carapace wrote: post #7

If you have been following the recent advances in AI (and are not clueless) then it should be getting really REALLY obvious that most coding and design tasks will be automated within three to five years. AI will eat your career.

Front end engineer here, practically zero chance of that happening. At least on my side of the fence.

AIs can stay up all night reading blogs about the latest and greatest JS framework though. You better look out.

Re: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the End of Code

#19

Post by thoughtsimple »

carapace wrote: post #7

If you have been following the recent advances in AI (and are not clueless) then it should be getting really REALLY obvious that most coding and design tasks will be automated within three to five years. AI will eat your career.

I must be clueless.

Please cite an example where a software design task has been done by machine learning. Something where you start with a specification or description and the automation produces a usable design.

Coding could possibly be replaced by something in a decade or so but I wouldn't hold my breath. We are just getting to compilers and JIT systems that do better than smart developers working at a lower level.

Re: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the End of Code

#20

Post by tryitnow »

wrong_variable wrote: post #3

Dogs can be made to learn things - doesn't mean we allow them do surgery. Whoever wrote this article has negative knowledge about the state of AI. edit: Its also slightly insulting that this person thinks that the modern programmer spends all their time writing if/else/then statement.

As someone else already pointed out we actually do have robots doing surgery. AIs are not dogs - that's a bad analogy.

Right now development costs per head are sky high. If there's any way to cut that spend, you better believe executives will be all over it. A lot of businesses don't care so much about quality and craftsmanship - as long as their customers are stuck with them they're perfectly willing to ship the most minimal product they can get away with.

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