AI Will Not Be Taking Away Code Jobs Anytime Soon

No, but combine cloud APIs, AI, and market consolidation and you will indeed see a reduction in the demand for code. I write much less code than I did ten years ago. I spend more time integrating others' code now than I do writing my own.

In ten years most industrial coders will probably be down to a hundred or so lines of new production code a year...it will be the DATA arcitects who are calling the architecture shots as it becomes clear that data architecture trmps code architecture

I don't believe this to be true. We've seen quite a few technologies, which promised to "let anyone code", without any real success, whereas to "let AI code" is even harder than letting your boss. At the very least, I expect we'd need another 2 or 3 major, paradigm-shifting, breakthroughs to get computers sophisticated enough to program themselves, which is still 50-60 years away.

I mean, that's my gut feeling; we'll see how it plays out, but for now I'm still not really worried about my job disappearing.

This is silly. We already have automatic code generation tools. We have for decades. They are called compilers, interpreters, standard libraries. These do not reduce the need for programmers. No AI can decide _what_ to build nor can they solve pragmatic tradeoffs between competing goals that real programmers have to deal with all the time. Some human has to be making the decisions about what the computer is going to do. And they'll need a means by which to inform the computer what it is to be doing. And that means is what we now call a programming language. Smarter compilers, code analysis tools, or library finders aren't going to remove the need to define the specification.

Anyway, it's not like there's a limited amount of programming to be done, and if we could only be more productive, we'd finish it all up sooner and go to the lake. No, the demand for more and better software will only increase to consume any productivity increases we achieve. Think about the software you use every day. Could it be made better? Of course! Most of it is terrible. There's an infinite amount of work to be done.

Fact is though that instead of coding up an object detector, the machine is doing it now. This job is now being controlled by ML personnel, not (yet) your standard programmer. What is left is glue code and architecture, at least for some time.

I personally believe we will see artificial general intelligence demos in 2018 or 2019. They will be general but not initially have anywhere near the same level of capacity as animals or humans so people may deny they are intelligent. But by 2020 or 2021 most will not deny it. Within a few years of training, high level tasks like human equivalent AI programmers will be possible.

This is speculation obviously. Let me try to explain why I think it is so close.

The limitations and problems of neural networks, deep learning, etc. for creating AGI have been well documented. However, for each of these problems, there are successful projects addressing them. Things like capsule networks (Hinton), distributed training on shared experience (Deep Mind), fast online learning with time-based animal-like networks (Ogma).

At the same time, the advanced neural network researchers have become familiar with the existing body of AGI work. They are building their networks into virtually embodied or real-bodied robots that have fully general inputs and outputs and training them in varied environments.

Some generality has already been demonstrated. Based on the progress made so far it seems likely abstraction, depth of cognitive ability etc. will be increased as there are more innovations and integration of existing ones.

The reason the timeframe is relatively short is because of the exciting progress so far, the number of actual geniuses working on it, massive investments, improvements in hardware, and social expectation. The world now believes again this is possible which means there is an explosion of people working on it and ultimately those are two of the biggest factors pushing this into reality.

If tools are not released by researchers within a few years then I expect someone to release a tool or game online or on Steam etc. with powerful built-in AGI.